There has been a tendency in the study of early Christian history, including that of the second century, to isolate Christians, in particular the so-called apologists, from their wider cultural and material setting. As Laura Salah Nasrallah writes in this fascinating and innovative book, ‘Because Christian texts are often sequestered from “classics”, historians of early Christianity have too rarely recognized that our authors participate … in the so-called Second Sophistic, a cultural surge of interest in ancient Greek philosophy, rhetoric, images, and paideia, which extends roughly from the first to the third centuries’ (p. 8). It is her aim, following in the footsteps of Werner Jaeger and others, to show how Christians, in particular the apologists, were a clear and recognisable voice in a series of debates of wider significance in the world out of which they emerged.

After an introductory chapter in which she sets out in broad terms the aims of her book, Nasrallah moves in chapter i to a comparison between the rhetoric of the Christian apologists with that of a particular monument, the fountain of the supremely rich family of Herodes Atticus at Olympia. She notes that the term ‘apologists’ is not easy to define and may have emerged only as a general description of a body of second-century writers as a result of the taxonomic impulses of scholars in the seventeenth century. Whether we regard Christians as actually addressing the emperor (Justin and Athenagoras) or the Greeks (Tatian and Clement of Alexandria), it is clear that ‘the effect of inscribing such audiences is to place Christians on a larger ethnic-cultural map where their voices participate in Greek and Roman conventions’ (p. 28), or put another way, in the cultural wars of the time, as these related to ethnicity, religion and related matters. Making use of the imagery of the fountain at Olympia, Nasrallah shows that Christians were not the only people interested in addressing the Roman emperor in a way that would be attractive to those steeped in paideia, and seeks to explore how such a realisation might change customary ways of approaching Christian apologetic. Christians are intent not upon defining themselves over against others, such as Jews or pagans, but rather over against certain kinds of ethnic and religious practices.

In chapter ii Nasrallah shows how various forms of geographical thinking became prominent in the Second Sophistic with the efflorescence of writing about exotic places and map-making amongst other things. She then goes on to show how the ‘travellers’ Lucian, Tatian and Justin seek to represent that world. All are outsiders who, in differing ways, and despite a sense of the world's shared paideia in which they participate, represent themselves, precisely because of their barbarian origins, as what Nasrallah calls ‘vulnerable bodies’ in the world of which they are a part, a vulnerability that she sees manifested, amongst other things, in the Sebasteion at Aphrodisas, the monument with which Nasrallah seeks to compare the content of the three writers she is discussing, and whose depiction of the empire can, like those of the ‘barbarian’ writers, be seen as ambivalent.

In chapter iii Nasrallah embarks on an interpretation of the apologetics of the Acts of the Apostles. She argues that Luke presents Paul as an ambassador forming a league with distinctive religious practices, not dissimilar to the Panhellenion, a Roman-sponsored Greek-ethnic coalition which fostered diplomacy among Greek city-states, and through certain pious practices bound diverse cities to the Roman Empire and its imperial family (pp. 117–18). In the process Luke, picking up on the tendency, so Nasrallah argues, of members of the Panhellenion to invent genealogies for themselves in order to promote a sense of themselves as authentically Greek, fills Acts with speeches about Israel which traced its relations to God into the very distant past. Whether such a strategy on the part of Luke, in which Paul through his travels across the Roman oikoumene produces a Christian oikoumene, reveals anything about his attitude to the Roman Empire, is not clearly answered by Nasrallah, though she hints at a slightly negative proposal in her comments about Paul's famous speech to the Areopagus in Acts xvii.

Chapter iv discusses Justin's apologetic writing. Again Nasrallah interprets the ‘rhetoric’ of a piece of architectural evidence, Trajan's forum, and shows how its iconography, including the famous column, are ‘thick with power, piety, culture and justice’ (p. 14). She then goes on to show how Justin engages with these subjects, presenting a picture of the Roman Empire as dogged by a crisis of mimesis or imitation. Justin asserts that the emperors are not what they claim to be and that the justice that they seek to represent is a sham for which they will soon have to answer in the divine law court. Similar judgements apply to Roman ideas of piety, manifesting themselves as they do in religious statuary. Only Christianity can be truly foundational to what is pious or philosophical. In the process of his argument, however, Justin shores up his views by attacking Jews and artisans, the crude constructors of the images that he attacks so vehemently.

Chapter v constitutes an examination of Athenagoras's Embassy. Arguing strongly for the organised character of the work, and this against a number of scholars who see its structure as at best diffuse, Nasrallah sees its central concern as one of ‘representation’, both linguistic (here in particular over the subject of the persecution of the Christians on account of the name), and visual. In relation to the latter she concentrates in particular upon Athenagoras's strong denunciation of the idea, prevalent in the iconography of the empire (here particular attention is drawn to Commodus' representation of himself as Herakles), that humans and especially the emperors, are becoming gods, and that statuary can in any way represent this.

Chapters vi and vii look at texts which address the Greeks (chapters iv and v had looked at texts which addressed the emperors). Nasrallah begins chapter vi by examining pagan discourse about the origins of images, noting how some see this as lying in pedagogy and others in the need ‘to satisfy human longing and desire for the visibly absent human or divine’. She then turns to an examination of Tatian's Oration to the Greeks, showing how its author seeks to subvert Greek paideia and language with that of barbarian Christianity. In the process he discusses the matter of Greek statuary as he had viewed this in Rome, arguing that it is no more than monstrous and corrupting booty. While some regard Tatian's work as ‘fanatically bitter’, in line with the view, amongst other things, that Tatian was an Encratite, Nasrallah argues that it can be taken more easily as an informed critique of Roman connoisseurship.

In chapter vii Nasrallah turns to the Protreptikos of Clement of Alexandria, and in particular Clement's attitude to the proliferation of images in the literature and sculpture of the time. As a backcloth to her discussion she describes at some length the differing representations of and ways of viewing the famous statue of the Aphrodite of Knidos, referred to directly by Clement and indirectly by Tatian.

Clement's discussion, in part emerging in a discussion of this very statue, shows how images distract not only from the philosophical and theological differences between matter and the divine, ‘but also from attempts at self-control’. Such images ‘not only justify wrongdoing; looking at them also knocks down the divinity’. But while Clement attacks the proliferating statuary of his time, he also makes use of the image of the statue in his discussion of the human being transformed by the Logos. In Clement's description, put in the mouth of the Logos, Christians are ‘the image of God, but they have lost their resemblance to the model. They need to be restored and anointed, as statues of divinity so often were in ancient ritual, and then they shall rise to God in their naked form’ (p. 293). But in her discussion of this aspect of the Protreptikos, Nasrallah notes that the presentation of the advance of the human towards his optimum state, seen, daringly, in a form of theosis, ‘is forged within … and mirrors elite male philosophical practices and ideas of the time’, a sentence which gives the reader a sense of the feminist commitments of this book where the often hostile use of female imagery by Christians, comes under critical scrutiny.

This is a notably stimulating and thoughtful book at whose sophistication and erudition this review has only been able to hint. Nasrallah shows herself to have a commanding control of the relevant primary and secondary sources and, in relation to the latter, a compendious knowledge of work written by classicists – it is part of the aim of her book, as she states, to challenge the balkanisation of classical and ancient church historical studies. Moreover, with so much labour having been expended in classical faculties on the Second Sophistic, and the complex manner in which Greek and Roman interacted and thought of each other during this period, as well as the related subject of the multiple uses to which the idea of paideia was put, the time is ripe for a book like Nasrallah's. Her insistence on the need to view Christian apologists as not so much defining Christianity over against paganism or Judaism but rather ‘to show these Christian voices within a controversy on the nature of true religion’ (p. 7), and as participants in a set of topical discussions, rather than simply as isolated polemists, or controversial types of assimilationists, or simply a quarry of developing theological ideas is refreshing; and she is surely right to elucidate aspects of the way in which this discussion was articulated by reference to ‘the built environment’ of the world in which they moved and the ‘persuasive messages’ which emerged from its lay-out and iconography.

It is important to note that Nasrallah's insistence on reading Christian texts ‘alongside’ pagan texts and artefacts, does not simply lead to the exploration of subjects of an exclusively intellectual kind as these relate to such complicated ideas as paideia, mimesis and the like. Given certain ideological commitments, she is keen also to show how in some of the arguments Christians formulate against statuary in particular, they appear in their harsh comments about the feminine, the artisan classes who crafted the sculptures, and the Jews, to reflect the prejudices of their time.

Nasrallah's insistence upon seeing Christians as participants in a wider discussion about central issues in the culture of which they were a part might to some run the risk of making them appear too similar to their surrounding environment, and she is aware of this point. However, one does not emerge from reading her book with that kind of a view. Tatian, Athenagoras, Justin, Clement of Alexandria and the author of Acts are seen as distinctive voices, admittedly in different ways, and their distinctiveness often emerges precisely from those points at which they appear most similar to the world that they inhabit. So Justin might talk about his conversion to Christianity as a movement through the philosophical schools, associating the traditions of paideia with that process, but he could also note that it was his viewing of a Christian martyrdom that also caused his conversion. The juxtaposition of the two are suggestively jarring in the different implications that they carry for Christian self-understanding in the world of the Second Sophistic.

Inevitably one emerges from this innovative piece of scholarship, which develops in a distinctive way the observations of previous scholars who have been interested in the Christian relationship to classical culture, with some questions. Could Nasrallah not have made more than she does of the Christian insistence on the excellence of the Old Testament (both Justin and Tatian, after all, claim to have been converted to Christianity because of that text's fine sentiments), and the Christian view, surely of considerable importance in a world so keen on ‘repeating’ or seeking to represent the heroic past of classical Greece, that their message was the fulfillment of ancient Scriptures whose truth claims trumped those of any of the great classical authors and authorities. Nasrallah discusses this on occasion, but rarely in relation to the specifics of Christian interpretation of Scripture, and the effect such interpretation would have had upon its possibly pagan auditors. Related to this point is the complex manner in which Christians sought to represent their difference from such a revelation, or their attempts to espouse what was new in their message, with all the risks that word carried with it in the world they moved. While Nasrallah is keen to assert the distinctive element of Christian participation in the debates she outlines, she never ventures to determine which aspects of the Christian message contributed to this distinctiveness, or put another way, what was it about Christianity that made it a singular voice in the culture wars of the time? Were Christians different in this regard from Jews, for instance, though given our lack of evidence for Judaism in the second century, this is not an easy question to answer? Such questions in many ways relate to the ongoing debate about Christian identity in the ancient world which has been the subject of so much discussion in recent times. We might also ask how it was that the Christian contribution to the ‘culture wars’ of the Second Sophistic might have appealed to pagan participants in such combat? After all, most would agree that Clement's Protreptikos is a proselytic work, which sought to persuade its audience to turn to the Christian religion. The absence of any discussion of Theophilus of Antioch is striking but Nasrallah may turn to his work in subsequent publications.

But we should end our review of Nasrallah's work with a real sense of gratitude for a work of intriguingly suggestive and thoughtful scholarship.