This book opens with the execution of Charles i, the battle between monarch and parliament, and the corresponding dispute between Episcopalians and Presbyterians who argued over the writings of Ignatius of Antioch. The letters of Ignatius, born of a controversy which sent their author to his own execution in Rome, have often since been at the centre of debates over church order. And Ignatius' peculiar understanding of the subject continues to spawn attempts to redate the letters or to prove that they are forgeries. Allen Brent's book is both a handy guide to the history of the ‘Ignatian problem’ and a readable summary of his solution, which is argued for in greater detail in other, more technical, publications. Ignatius, ‘not the sort of bishop with whom people would be comfortable at a Buckingham Palace garden party’, is, among other things, ‘creative though perhaps highly disturbed’, and a ‘spin-doctor’. Ignatius' controversial position during the debacle at Antioch which led to his arrest became his legacy: the primacy of a single bishop-presbyter among the other bishop-presbyters and the effective separation of the titles. Brent sketches a scenario for Ignatius' forcible removal from Antioch as a scapegoat sacrifice that relieved the tension between those who supported him and those who opposed him, who ‘never meant things to go this far’. Brent believes that Ignatius portrayed his journey to Rome under guard as a sacrificial procession of the sort familiar to residents of Asia Minor from pagan mystery rites and particularly from the sacrificial processions associated with the making of treaties between cities. Ignatius resembles and calls to mind the priest at the head of the procession who bore on his wreathed brow or in his hands images, tupoi, of the gods. Just so, Ignatius calls himself theophoros, and his companions are christophoroi, etc. ‘[Ignatius'] procession was like a pagan sunthusia or joint sacrifice celebrating the end of rivalry in a homonoia treaty. But in his, Christian, case the fine print of the treaty was the acceptance of his hierarchy focused on a single bishop at its apex' (p. 56). Brent cites just enough of the literary and inscriptional evidence to make his case explicable and plausible to the general reader for whom he writes. Chapter v helpfully walks the reader through recent attacks on the authenticity of the middle recension of the letters by Weijenborg, Rius-Camps, Joly, Lechner, Hübner and Vinzent. If these letters had been forged or highly interpolated, Brent argues, they would look very different from how they do look. Ignatius, for instance, ‘has no doctrine of bishops as successors to the apostles’. Apart from some leeway Brent is willing to grant on the date, the Lightfoot-Zahn consensus still stands. Inevitably, Brent must engage in a good deal of imaginative reconstruction, but he is to be congratulated for delivering an accessible, enjoyable and generally persuasive introduction to the letters of Ignatius.