One of the delights of reading the lectures contained in Guy Stroumsa's famous The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity (Susan Emanuel, trans. [University of Chicago Press, 2005]) is the sense that one is seeing only the tips of icebergs—that below the surface of his concise, provocative arguments lies a long engagement with a stunning range of texts and traditions from the late ancient world. How much had to be left out of those sixty-minute talks? The present volume, The Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity, offers a tour of at least some of that hidden “dazzling complexity” of “texts, oral traditions and behavioral patterns stemming from varied religious and cultural backgrounds in the Mediterranean and Near East” (9). Stroumsa's explicit central claim is that “more than any other single factor, the conversion of the Roman world”—which included the eclipse of blood sacrifice as essential to religion—“may be traced to the codex” (3).

Here the reader might recognize that Stroumsa has been developing this argument for several years, albeit without staking so much on the codex in particular. As he notes, Scriptural Universe is something of a sequel to The End of Sacrifice, which argued that the Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple, combined with the Christian appropriation of Jewish and pagan literature, gave rise to a new Christian concept of the holy book, which in turn—thanks to its portability and translatability—transformed non-Christian literary culture as well. Indeed, the present work is largely an expansion of that earlier volume's second chapter (“The Rise of Religions of the Book”) with some additional material based off of chapters 1 and 3 (“A New Care of the Self” and “Transformations of Ritual”). And like “sacrifice” in The End of Sacrifice, “scripture” here is a synecdoche for all early Christian literary output and its effects: faith, knowledge, fashioning of the self, hermeneutics, paideia, culture—in short, a universe. (To call Christianity a religion of the book is, after all, to say that its totality is derivative of a text. Whether this is properly a theological or a historical claim, or both, is an open question.) Readers looking for a detailed account of the rise of the codex as the dominant Christian book technology will not find it here, for Scriptural Universe dwells only briefly, in chapter 5, on the codex itself. The present volume, like its predecessor, has a more ambitious scope: to narrate a grand shift in the religious world of late antiquity, from the paradigm of sacrificial cult to the paradigm of cultic book. The codex is an occasion for meditating on this shift.

Scriptural Universe comprises nine short chapters whose topics are rich enough that they could each be the theme of a conference session: (1) “A Scriptural Galaxy,” (2) “A Divine Palimpsest,” (3) “Religious Revolution and Cultural Change,” (4) “Scripture and Culture,” (5) “The New Self and Reading Practices,” (6) “Communities of Knowledge,” (7) “Eastern Wisdoms,” (8) “A World Full of Letters,” and (9) “Scriptural and Personal Authority.” The chapters do not develop sequentially so much as they each explore a different aspect of how Christianity, as a bookish religion, interacted with its peers and predecessors. The palimpsest, combined with a bit of Freud, Whitehouse, and Halbwachs on memory, becomes a fruitful metaphor for Christianity's simultaneous preservation and erasure of pagan and Israelite thought. Late antique monasticism is considered for its production of a new, interior, textualized self. Monotheism is shown to ironically give rise to a polyphony of competing texts. If the world of late ancient Christianity is a web, plucking the “codex” strand reveals an entanglement with the other, ostensibly distant parts of that web.

Classic, broad scholarly formulations appear throughout Scriptural Universe’s narrative: that ancient Christianity was a synthesis of Judaism and Hellenism; that the codex facilitated cross-referencing and gave rise to a distinct Christian hermeneutic; that Christianity transmitted but also transformed, and was transformed by, Greco-Roman paideia. These traditional elements, along with the immense explanatory power given to the codex, may give some readers pause. How would one go about disproving any of these claims? If they are true, what exactly do they change? But Stroumsa's ability to construct a bold, deceptively simple narrative of vast chronological and geographic scope and then to concentrate it on a particular object or two is precisely what gives the present volume its rhetorical punch. Reading Scriptural Universe feels like walking through a large museum with an expert curator who is eager to show how each object connects to each other object, and for this reason it will be most profitably read by those who are already familiar with the objects and with Stroumsa's work. Newcomers may wish to read the introduction, chapter 9, and the conclusion before diving into the “whirlpool” (9) of material covered by this expansive, thought-provoking study.