The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas remains one of the most intriguingly enigmatic texts in early Christianity. In The fate of the dead in early third century north African Christianity (based on a 2013 Macquarie University PhD thesis), Eliezer Gonzalez explores one aspect of this most challenging of martyr narratives: its approach to the afterlife. Gonzalez's central thesis is that the Passion marks a key moment in a broader shift from a doctrine of eschatological resurrection to one of immediate post-mortem resurrection. He seeks to substantiate and develop this point by sketching out a series of possible contexts for and influences upon the text, including Jewish apocalyptic writings, ancient motifs of ascent and contemporary Christian burial practices. The book is at its most convincing when dealing with specific theological questions. Gonzalez carefully teases out the differences between contrasting early Christian views on the afterlife (chapter iii) and – most notably for scholars of Christianity in third-century Africa – between those expressed in the Passion and those articulated by Tertullian, a point which Gonzalez adduces against the view that the latter redacted the text (chapter v). Gonzalez's detailed discussion of the voluminous scholarship on the Passion similarly results in pleasingly nuanced positions on the text and on a number of critical issues in early Christian scholarship. Unfortunately, these nuances are lost both in the structural schema of the book and in its central argument. Any number of categories problematised at various points (‘orthodox’, ‘Gnostic’, ‘canonical’, ‘apocryphal’) are simply reinstated in the manner in which the texts cited as comparanda are organised, and thus filter back into the book's analysis and conclusions. The book's central thesis similarly rests on a distinction – repeatedly adduced, but never properly justified – between the ‘patristic’ or ‘ecclesiastical’ statements of Church Fathers and apologists and the ‘popular’ views ‘reflected’ by the Passion (for example pp. 99, 117, 119, 126, 163–9, 175; cf. pp. 8–10 where the considerations adduced refer to later dissemination). This dichotomy between the ‘official’ and the ‘popular’ – problematic in most historical periods – seems particularly dubious in an account of early third-century Christianity. A more persuasive account might have seen the Passion not as passively reflecting wider Christian views but rather seeking itself to shape them: a conclusion omnipresent in extensive recent research regarding the role of martyr literature in processes of Christian identity formation (and one implicitly taken on board by Gonzalez in an elegant discussion of the refrigerium as a vision of Christian community in chapter vi). The implications of such an approach will seemingly have to remain – like the eschatological resurrection preached by many first- and second-century Christian teachers and expertly analysed by Gonzalez – a hope for things to come.