It is the opinion of the New Testament scholar, Larry Hurtado, that there has been an understandable tendency in scholarship to emphasise the similarities of earliest Christianity to its surrounding environment rather than its differences. The book under review is a short and pronounced effort to rectify that situation, as Hurtado sees it, by playing up its distinctiveness.

Hurtado begins by claiming that his thesis is one that would have been appreciated by the earliest pagan writers on Christianity, men like Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny, Galen, Lucian and especially Celsus. They were clear, Hurtado contends, that Christians were different from other religious groups, and for some dangerously different. This difference is the subject of the next four chapters.

Hurtado's book is a fluently written, accessible volume, and he writes for a broader audience than that for the scholarly monograph. This means that much of what he has to say about Christian distinctiveness is probably well known to specialists: Christian religious exclusivism is played up, as is the non-ethnic character of Christian affiliation (it is an important claim of Hurtado that Christians broke the well-attested tie between religion and what he terms ‘national’ identity, something which Jews, who shared so much with Christians, broadly endorsed: ‘Jewish religious identity was always connected in some way or other with the Jewish people, who were thought of in the ancient setting as a “nation”’). Reflecting his own interest in the study of the text of the New Testament and early Christian manuscripts more generally, Hurtado also emphasises the extent to which Christians were a strangely bookish group, generating a mass of literature from early on, some of which was itself distinctive in form. Significant, too, in this respect was their adoption of the codex rather than the scroll as the usual form in which they would present their works. This was a means, Hurtado maintains, of marking themselves out from others, and cannot be explained, as it often is, on purely practical grounds. Hurtado's concluding chapter is devoted to a discussion of Christian ethics. In a time when ‘religion’ comprised the enactment of particular rituals rather than the teaching of moral obligation, Christian insistence upon the latter was another distinctive marker. Distinctiveness was also found in aspects of Christian ethics – objections to child exposure, and customary sexual behavior (pederasty and prostitution), among other things. He is clear, however, that in many of the things that Christians said and did, they were not necessarily that distinctive (some philosophers would have agreed with large parts of their ethical emphasis, as seems to have been the case with Galen; as did many Jews). Where Hurtado in particular locates their distinctiveness is in their desire to take such teaching to the streets and disseminate it among all in society, what some have referred to as Christian proselytism. Elements of this distinctive identity meant that there could be a considerable cost to becoming a Christian, a cost which Hurtado also marks out as a distinctive element of Christianity of the first three centuries ce. Hurtado concludes by noting that many things which we would now associate with religion arise from distinctive elements of early Christianity, a point which Hurtado, in an apologetic concluding paragraph, thinks worth remembering.

Hurtado's thesis is clearly presented in an uncluttered and easily digestible text (discussion of finer points of detail as well as discussion of the secondary literature is reserved to more than seventy pages of endnotes). Succinctly and without pretension, he presents a clear case for the distinctiveness of Christianity within the Roman Empire.

Inevitably questions arise. One is historiographic. To what extent is it the case that historians have a tendency to exaggerate the similarities which Christianity shared with the environment of which it was a part? Hurtado in an appendix makes reference, amongst others, to representatives of the ‘religionsgeschichliche Schule’, and it is true that these scholars were keen to point up features that Christianity shared with, for instance, the mystery religions. But a strong exceptionalist school has always existed among writers of the history of early Christianity, though their exceptionalism, as with Hurtado's anti-exceptionalism, has not been absolute. Interestingly, Hurtado does not refer to work being done by classicists, where the kind of case he is questioning tends to be more the norm. Greg Woolf, John North and others, for instance, have argued that Christianity reflects in particular ways developments in the Roman empire, which favoured the formation of competing, transethnic religions as populations were either moved or chose to move to other cities as a result of the consequences of empire. Hurtado mentions this point but does not engage with its more recent expositors.

Hurtado is keen throughout his book to discuss Christianity's relationship to Judaism. While Jews and Christians shared numbers of ‘distinctive’ elements with each other, they differed both in their understanding of God (Christian emphasis on a dyadic God, in which Jesus is worshipped together with God, is not witnessed in Judaism), in the emphasis Christians placed upon a transethnic identity rather than one bound up with nationhood, and in Christian proselytic activity. These are defensible positions but not ones that all would accept. Moreover, Hurtado, in part because of his own view of the effects of Christological belief on non-Christian Jewish opinion, assumes a model of relatively swift separation between Christian and Jew, which enables him to speak easily of a Christian identity. Again this is a defensible position but one meriting more discussion in a book of this kind, I would suggest. In fact precisely because Jews and Christians shared so much in common, they could be said to share many ‘distinctives’, a point Celsus was the first to exploit in ways both helpful and not so helpful to Hurtado. Comparison with them is a key to the case that he is making. Given this, it would in my opinion have been good to have devoted a separate chapter to this complex and much-disputed subject.

Hurtado's book does not aim at comprehensiveness, and even though the claim is made that its subject is the first three centuries of Christian history, there is a heavy emphasis, understandable given Hurtado's own specialism, on the New Testament. Hurtado's claim about Christianity's distinctiveness is based upon a view that very early on there was a Christian identity about which one could speak, to which Hurtado gives the well-worn name ‘proto-orthodoxy’, and which he assumes is broadly represented in the pages of the New Testament (this latter assumption enables him to concentrate upon the New Testament as it becomes, consciously or unconsciously, the representative of mooted ‘proto-orthodoxy’ in the second and third centuries). Like all attempts at a discussion of this kind, the reader is to some extent reliant upon Hurtado's reconstructed entity (proto-orthodoxy) if he or she is to accept his thesis about distinctiveness. Those keener on a less precise understanding of Christian identity in this early period might argue that that makes his case too difficult to swallow. They would claim that at best we might want to talk about the distinctiveness of different Christian groups of which there were a large number, some of which, in the form of so-called Jewish-Christians, appeared less transethnic than the Christians whose distinctiveness Hurtado emphasises. And other groups, with different profiles to Hurtado's, could also be mentioned.

More could be said, not just by way of criticism but also of praise of this simulating volume. Hurtado's instinctive search for the essence of Christian distinctiveness is not the first such quest and will not be the last. Some may question the appropriateness of the question at all – does it not predispose us to a particular approach to the evidence predicated upon a number of questionable assumptions? Others will say that Christianity's survival, and eventual take-over of the empire, as well as its continuing existence, make it a perennial and necessary one.