In this slim, clearly written book, Caroline Johnson Hodge sets out to describe everyday religiosity among Christ-followers in the pre-Constantinian period. As Johnson Hodge immediately makes clear, the title’s “domestic” refers in fact to the whole range of routine practices that dealt with ordinary people’s ordinary concerns. Drawing on the work of Stanley Stowers, Johnson Hodge delineates her subject as “‘the religion of everyday social exchange.’” By that term, she means intuitive practices bound up with “the basic activities of eating, drinking, working, and socializing” and expressive of “reciprocal relationships with the divine” (6). Such practices remain fundamentally continuous across notional group divides, and can be distinguished from “‘the religion of the literate cultural producer’” (8, quoting Stowers again; Johnson Hodge will routinely refer to the literate specialist). In the Christian setting, this second religious mode includes the normative, bounded forms of interrelated orthodoxy and orthopraxy advanced by writers from Paul onward.

What results is therefore not a narrow study of cultic praxis within households, but a broad survey, always consciously selective, of key elements of everyday activity directed toward God, spirits, and the dead. A brief first chapter surveys non-Christian religious customs, through case-studies on Karanis in Egypt, Ephesos (so spelled), Pompeii, and Sepphoris. The aim, in keeping with the concept of a shared “religion of everyday social exchange,” is to show the universality of shared modes of practice, “a common vocabulary for interacting with gods” (26). However, despite the discovery of images of non-Jewish gods and other shared motifs, the prominence of stepped pools and incense shovels still seems to make Sepphoris a cultic outlier.

The second chapter surveys known Christian practices, some documented by papyri, some best evidenced, inevitably, from texts by Johnson Hodge’s “literate specialists.” These include prayer and associated postures, the making of holy signs (especially of the cross), ritual insufflation and handling of saliva (subject of particularly interesting non-Christian parallels), and the use of Eucharistic bread, gospel amulets, rings, and lamps. If this chapter has shown repeated continuity, despite tensions, between “everyday” and self-consciously orthodox, reflective religiosities, the third chapter delves into a signal area of discontinuity: the making and use of amulets. Johnson Hodge discusses several examples, but dwells at length on the famous bloodstone gem (British Museum, BM 1986,0501.1, illustrated in full-color photographs) that depicts a crucified Jesus along with a “magical” formula. The chapter therefore offers a provocative consideration of meanings the crucifixion may have held for the third-century people.

The next two chapters deal with direct engagement between Christians and potential holders of authority. Chapter four attempts to flesh out religious practices enacted by wives and slaves in families dominated by a male householder. The discussion of 1 Corinthians, 1 Peter, and Tertullian’s Ad uxorem rapidly draws out key differences between those works, but the chapter tends toward the speculative, and relies on theory (Foucault, Schüssler Fiorenza, Butler, and others) where the evidence runs out. The Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, subject of a massive secondary literature, could have offered further illumination; but it would also have tended to break down the notional distinction between everyday and literate pieties. The fifth chapter, finally, samples a well-documented branch of cult: Christian involvement in rites for the dead. Focusing especially on the period after 250, Johnson Hodge finds a productive interplay between her two modes of religiosity, with “a variety of power brokers” getting involved in “the cult of the dead as a means to shore up or legitimize their own claims” (121).

Johnson Hodge has written a multidisciplinary study and calibrated it well for a multidisciplinary audience. The copious endnotes routinely cite both the edition and the translation used, which will help many readers; they will wish, however, to draw consistently from the best modern editions (e.g., consulting Cyprian in the Corpus Christianorum over Hartel’s Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 3 or Patrologia Latina 4, all of which appear here). Despite the subtitle, the distribution of extant material often compels Johnson Hodge to range into the fourth century and sometimes even later. The focus is therefore less tightly pre-Constantinian than readers may expect, but this flexibility suits the book’s general breadth, and Johnson Hodge is wise not to imply a rigorous divide between pre- and post-Constantinian Christianity.

The book does tend, by contrast, to imply too schematic a divide between ordinary and learned forms of piety. The cause, perhaps, is the same, otherwise admirable concision that leads Johnson Hodge to imply, too quickly (110–112), that Rome still lacked an institutional, centralized church as late as 260 (i.e., after the episcopacy of Stephen, champion of Rome’s episcopal primacy). It is not obvious that we should draw a clean bifurcation, within early Christian communities, between “everyday,” intuitive and “literate specialist,” reflective forms of religiosity. The earliest Christian writers had already given instructions on prayer, quoted apparently hymnic formulae, and militated against involvement in “idolatry,” including at meals in others’ homes. Not everyone listened to Paul or the other New Testament writers, yet later clergy transmitted earlier teachers’ ideas and their own interpretations not just through literate writing, but by oral mechanisms: reading scriptural books, praying aloud, communal singing, and preaching. For anyone, even the illiterate, who attended Christian communal meetings, everyday religion could also become reflective. Thus, though Johnson Hodge stresses continuity across notional group-boundaries, chapter 2, to my reading, shows that Christian practices tended to draw only on parts of the wider cultural complex of everyday religion. Offerings and statues play very little role, as we would expect after concerted polemic, and the Christians come out looking at least as distinctive as the Jews of Sepphoris did in chapter 1.

In sum, then, the book offers a concise, readable, and wide-ranging survey of key texts, practices, and artefacts, on which a substantial scholarship has drawn in seeking to reconstruct routine Christian devotion from the bottom up. A good deal more will have to be done, however, before we can grant that “the cult of Christ” spread by joining itself to the “adaptable and inclusive” practices of everyday religion (126).