Early Christian martyrdom is a crowded field, so that it is a challenge to contribute a new perspective, especially in a synthetic study such as this. Heyman's project is to explain why early Christians chose to die rather than participate in standard Roman religious life, and his particular angle is the overlapping rhetoric of sacrifice, which he approaches through discourse theory. The first chapter presents an overview of Roman religion with particular reference to its traditions of sacrifice, though also with information on the priestly colleges in order to establish the interconnections of religion and power. Chapter 2 proceeds to consider the impact on religion of the political transition from republic to principate to urge the centrality in the new order of the sacrificial cult associated with the emperor. Chapter 3 turns to the Christian angle and reviews how Christ's problematic death as a common criminal was presented as a self-sacrifice for humanity that fulfilled important Old Testament predictions. Finally, in chapter 4 we reach the central topic of martyrdom where the rhetoric of martyrdom is investigated from different perspectives—classical, Jewish, and Christian—to demonstrate how Christians from the mid-second century on used the powerful rhetoric of their bodily destruction to confront the apparently superior might of Rome.

Balance is one obvious concern: only a quarter of the text relates to the main thesis, with the rest providing diverse background material. But the space allocated for such massive topics as Roman religious practice or the imperial cult is too limited, so that Heyman can only offer a general overview of issues. In these circumstances it might have been better simply to have stated certain key points, for example that sacrifice played a central role in classical religion and the worship of rulers was a standard way of smoothing the imbalances of power between king and subjects, thereby leaving more space for martyrs. This approach would also have saved Heyman from some embarrassments, since various minor errors reveal that Heyman is not an ancient historian, for example, the chronology of Cicero and Clodius (48–49) or of Sulla and Pompey (58). Of greater significance is the attitude to the complex ancient sources, with Cicero, Livy, and Ovid being presented as a sort of Capitoline Triad of authorities for religious developments, with no thought for the different agendas of these authors or the differences among, say, particular works of Cicero.

All this can perhaps be tolerated, since the material relates to the pagan background. But, with regard to martyrs, the use of source material is also problematic. One notable absentee is Pliny the Younger, though it is his exchange of letters with Emperor Trajan in 112, when his governorship of Bithynia brought him into contact with the Christian “problem” (10.96–97), that provides us with our earliest direct evidence for official Roman concerns about the new religion. Heyman should have considered how Pliny's evidence, in particular the lack of reference to the imperial cult and the instruction from Trajan that Christians are not to be specially sought out, is compatible with his own thesis: there is no suggestion here that it was a display of power by the Christians that the empire perceived as a threat (162). This silence might be explained by Heyman's decision to restrict the appellation of martyr to those who died after Polycarp in the 150s (174), on the grounds that this is the earliest attestation of the term. However, few ancient historians would automatically assume that the first usage of a term necessarily marks the point at which the word was first applied to a phenomenon, and the fact that the proto-martyr Stephen was actually referred to as a martus in Acts (22.20) meant that he offered a model for description as well as action.

G. E. M. de Ste. Croix's classic study, “Why were the Early Christians Persecuted?” (Past & Present 26 [November 1963]: 6–38) is briefly dismissed (161, 163 n. 3), but there is no engagement with the various reasons that Ste. Croix extracted from the ancient evidence for persecution at different times and places, merely the complaint that he had not attached sufficient importance to emperor worship. One relevant issue is that a number of persecutions were driven by popular feeling rather than governmental fear, with superstition about Christian practices being a more potent factor for concern among the masses than the proper fulfillment of the imperial cult: their fears related to the non-performance of standard cult acts as well as to the stories of Christian abominations, both of which might bring divine vengeance down on the whole community. Another relevant issue is that a significant number of martyrdoms, as well as the libelli from the Decian persecution, refer to the need for Christians to conform to Roman rites or sacrifice to the gods, and thus to the broad complex of Roman ritual practices rather than just the imperial cult. Only a minority of martyrs secured a full rhetorical account of their ordeal, and there is a danger that Heyman has focused on a subset of the available evidence that is not fully representative.

The living sacrifice of the early martyrs was undoubtedly a powerful action, and the martyr acts unsurprisingly develop this as persuasively as possible. The phenomenon of volunteer martyrs also testifies to the attractions of martyrdom, but Heyman does not prove his case that it was a clash of sacrificing modes that lay at the heart of Roman persecution. Even in those texts where the cult or genius of the emperor plays a role, we cannot be certain that this was partly because the Christian author wanted to stress the clash of church and state whereas the Roman authorities may not have seen matters in such a light.