Scholarship rushes to fill a lacuna, and the thickness of this volume is a measure of the paucity of our knowledge concerning Porphyry's putative treatise Against the Christians. Sebastian Morlet's introduction reviews competing attempts to ascertain its date and content (slightly misrepresenting my own position, which favours Berchman but not Beatrice); he appends a cluster of ‘new fragments’, most of which are merely echoes of those collected already by von Harnack. Von Harnack's reconstruction fails to satisfy Andre Laks or Ariane Magny, both of whom accuse him of ignoring the polemical colour of our Christian sources in his zeal to produce a monochromatic text. Oliver Munnich argues that the ‘Hellene’ of Macarius Magnes cites the Christian Scriptures with a verbosity that is foreign to the allusive manner of Porphyry as Jerome represents him; while this may be true, I do not see why Munnich takes erroneous transcription and clumsy suture as evidence of Christian adulteration. Richard Goulet opines that any borrowings from Porphyry in Macarius are unlikely to come from his treatise against the Christians, and sees evidence of Christian intervention in those passages which maintain that the exertion of God's power is limited only by his will. Marco Zambon, setting his face against the ingenuities of those scholars who have identified the Origen of Porphyry's Life of Plotinus with his Christian homonym, argues that it was Porphyry himself who first confused them; since, however, Porphyry knew by 262 as much as we know now of the pagan Origen, I cannot see any merit in this conjecture. Aaron Johnson, shrewdly observing that Greeks in Porphyry tend to be masters of sophistry rather than wisdom, concludes that the ‘Hellenism’ which he imputes to Origen is an aggravation rather than a mitigation of his apostasy to a ‘lawless’ sect. The law that Origen forsook, according to J. G. Cook, was the custom of sacrifice, which the philosopher, while eschewing it himself, believed to possess a symbolic value for the multitude. Luc Brisson compares Porphyry's animadversions on the prologue to the Fourth Gospel with those of Amelius; José Zamora finds that he makes frequent use of biblical and credal formulae in his lampoons on Christian arrogance, while Bernard Pouderon devotes an essay to the defence of polytheism in von Harnack's fragment 78. Volker Drecoll consider's Porphyry's influence on Gregory of Nyssa, and Isobel Bochet explodes all doubts, including those of Augustine himself, as to the provenance of the objections to Christianity which he answers in his letter 102. Gillian Clark reminds us, on the other hand, that Porphyry was not the only Platonist with whom Augustine had to contend; Claudio Zamagni urges that we need not seek a pagan source for every question that troubled Christian apologists of late antiquity. Porphyry's strictures on the Book of Daniel, as Jerome reports them, are studied by René Courtois; Jean Bouffartigue, bringing up the rear, finds Julian a more temperate controversialist than his predecessor, not least when he confesses that the Jew has a purer religion than the Greek.