Stanley Stowers has long stood out among scholars of early Christianity by his insistence on understanding Christianity in the wider context of ancient Mediterranean religion and by his careful attention to and deep knowledge of theoretical models. Although not unique in either respect, he has pursued these interests with a distinctive commitment and level of skill, publishing a number of papers that have opened up new perspectives on familiar texts and issues; many of them have recently been republished, with a valuable introduction, in Christian Beginnings: A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion (Edinburgh Studies in Religion in Antiquity, Edinburgh University Press, 2024). The monograph under review is in many ways the culmination of Stowers’ long-term research program.

The book consists of ten chapters organized into three main parts. The first chapter introduces the main issues by discussing current developments in the study of ancient Mediterranean religion. Part One, “Religion as a Social Kind,” consists of three chapters. In Chapter 2, “Realism and Anti-Realism about Religion,” Stowers critiques the trend to dismiss religion as a construct existing only in the mind of the beholder and argues instead that it is a social kind, something that has an objective existence in human society. In Chapter 3, “Theorizing Social Kinds,” he discusses what he means by social kinds, especially in comparison to natural kinds, including species such as dogs. He makes the case that religion “can exist as a relatively stable, self-replicating cluster of social and psychological properties without being recognized or named” (82–83), that is, it exists independently of the observer.

Chapter 4, “Toward Theorizing Religion as a Social Kind,” is in some ways the heart of the book. In it Stowers outlines his theory of religion in the ancient Mediterranean, which he argues took the form of four distinct subkinds: the religion of everyday social exchange (abbreviated RESE), which underlies the other three and which he sees as a cross-cultural phenomenon; civic religion, which is the RESE as modulated by socio-economic elites; the religion of semi-autonomous literate experts, who critique the intuitive underpinnings of the RESE and offer instead their own reinterpretations of established practices; and the religion of literate experts with social power. In his view, one of the key failures of much traditional scholarship has been to overemphasize the religion of literate experts and to neglect the RESE. The latter, he argues, is so pervasive and has such force because it arises from the interaction between basic intuitions about the way the world operates, namely, that human-like agents are active in the non-human sphere, and widespread forms of socio-economic behaviors characteristic of agricultural societies.

The relatively short Part Two, “Religion and Social Theory,” comprising Chapters 5 and 6, provides further grounding of his theory of religion in dialogue with other theorists working in such fields as the cognitive science of religion and the philosophy of social formation. Readers of this journal are likely to be more interested in Part Three, “Christian Formation in the Ancient Mediterranean as a Test Case,” in which Stowers applies to ancient Christianity the theory developed in the first two parts. His chief interlocutor in Chapter 7, “Early Christianity as Evidence for Socially Superior Religion,” is Rodney Stark, whose model of religious competition he critiques as anachronistic. The RESE and civic religion did not allow for the sort of competition that Stark envisions: “the individuals who grew up in a Judaean, Greek, or Roman household certainly made constant religious choices…, but they did not choose religions” (221). It was rather the activities of literate experts that created the sort of religious competition characteristic of contemporary North America. He develops this hypothesis further in Chapter 8, “The Formation of Christianity.” Drawing on the work of Kendra Eshleman, he elaborates the idea of a field of literate experts, including sophists and philosophers, as the matrix within which early Christianity developed. In Chapter 9, “Exploring the Evidence of Ancient Christian Formation,” he tests his theory of religion as a social kind by applying it to four historical topics: the role of non-expert (lay) Christians, Jewish and Christian monotheism, the growth of early Christianity, and the uniqueness of early Christian almsgiving. In all these cases, he argues, his theory allows us to understand these issues within the broader context of ancient Mediterranean religion and to avoid the presumption of Christian exceptionalism. The final chapter, “Concluding Arguments: Does Kinds Theory Aid Social Ontological Analysis?,” builds on that argument and addresses one final issue: the tools that his theory offers for analyzing how the Christian church could remain the same social entity while undergoing dramatic change over time.

Those not as conversant as Stowers with recent work in philosophy and cognitive science (and his learning in those areas seems formidable) will find much in the first two parts to be tough going. I must confess that there were sections where I was frankly unable to make much headway. Those who, like myself, are interested chiefly in the religious history of the ancient Mediterranean might be well advised to begin with Chapter 4 and then move on to Part Three. But to neglect the first two parts would be to fundamentally misunderstand Stowers’ project in this book. His purpose is not merely to provide a new theoretical model for analyzing ancient Mediterranean religion (in itself an ambitious enough goal), but to give that model a rigorous grounding in a well-informed understanding of human cognition and social formation. In my view, he has achieved his purpose with an impressive degree of success. Some familiarity with this book will be vital for those interested not only in early Christianity and ancient Mediterranean religion more broadly, but also in the academic study of religion as a discipline.