As the author also of Jesus the exorcist and Jesus the miracle worker, Graham Twelftree is no stranger to the topic he investigates thoroughly in this companion study to those volumes. For those familiar with his other works on the topic (Christ triumphant: then and now), however, his conclusions may be a bit surprising since he, based on the witness of the New Testament canon as a whole, no longer asserts that the contemporary Church must become involved in exorcism in its confrontation with evil in the world (p. 293). Twelftree comes to this conclusion on the basis of a comparative anyalysis of the Synoptic Gospels and John, 1 Peter, Hebrews and James, and various Christian and pagan writers of the second century (most notably the Didache, Ignatius of Antioch, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Letter of Barnabas, Irenaeus and Justin Martyr). If there is an emphasis on exorcism and Jesus himself as an exorcist in the Synoptic Gospels, it is clear to Twelftree that this emphasis is not shared by the Gospel of John or by other New Testament writers, at least to the same degree. Similarly, while exorcism ‘in the name of God’ or ‘in the name of Jesus’ is known to the writers of the second century, it did not play the role among Christians and in the evangelisation of the ancient world that, pace Harnack in particular, has often been thought. And, nowhere does Jesus appear as the ‘model’ for the Church's ministry of exorcism (or really as the model of ministry in general) but as the agent by which exorcism takes place. Further, Twelftree's study brings into focus that there were several ways to confront the ‘demonic’ in these historical periods. If exorcism was one way, the very truth of the Gospel confronting evil in all its forms, including ignorance, was another, as was the incarnation itself (cf. Ignatius of Antioch, pp. 226–9). As a scholar of early liturgy I find particularly compelling Twelftree's challenge to the thesis of Elizabeth Leeper that exorcism in baptism was ‘a fundamental factor in the development of the church as an institution’ (p. 30). As Twelftree demonstrates, in the first two centuries there is no evidence of this at all; it only begins to come to the fore in the third, something that confirms the most recent scholarship on early baptismal rites. Solid scholarship, with pastoral sensitivity, I recommend this book for students and teachers of New Testament and early Christian studies.