As the editor of this collection of seventeen essays notes, ‘Virtually everything is unclear about the work that is commonly known as the Pseudo-Clementines.’ What follows, best described as a rather general and often discrete set of studies, typifying in their variety of subject matter their origins in a conference, does little to contradict this observation.

Bremmer's introduction covers issues of text, place, date and authorship as these relate in particular to the so-called Grundschrift, the term coined by German scholars of over one hundred years ago to describe the writing upon which the Pseudo-Clementine homilies and Recognitions appear independently to be based. Also covered in the introduction is, possibly surprisingly, the subject of magic, the importance of which for the study of the Pseudo-Clementines, Bremmer seeks to emphasise. Of the studies that follow some address the question of the novelistic character of the Pseudo-Clementines (Czachesz, Horn and Vielberg). It is interesting that Czachesz, in contradistinction to his fellow contributors, explicitly questions the novelistic character of the work. Admitting that motifs from novels have in some way influenced the work, he claims that these have not done so to any considerable degree, arguing that such elements are better evidenced in the Christian Apocryphal Acts. Hogeterp, in one of two contributions to the volume, points up similarities and differences between the Pseudo-Clamentine homilies and the Acts of the Apostles (here, possibly unsurprisingly, the former appears more Jewish Christian than the latter, with the Hebrews much more than in Acts a subject of concern than the Hellenists). In a similarly source-oriented study, Tigchelaar looks at the relationship of the Pseudo-Clementines to the story of the giants, first found in Genesis vi but adapted in the Book of the Watchers in 1 Enoch, showing how it is unlikely that the Pseudo-Clementines are dependent upon the latter source, and how the author has himself adapted the story in quite specific ways. Bremmer presents a piece on the origins and depiction of the figures of Athenodorus, Annubion and Apion as these appear in the Homilies, especially Homilies iv–vi (they appear also in the Recognitions), emphasising the degree to which the author betrays good knowledge of the latter two (Athenodorus is a much more obscure figure). It is odd that Bremmer does not cite in any of his footnotes, or in the general bibliography which appears at the end of the volume, his own article on the very same subject in the Festschrift for P. Luttikhuizen, published in 2005 (although the relevant conferences out of which the volume emerges were held in 2003 and 2005, and Bremmer finished editing the book in 2009). C. Jedan writes an interesting piece on the presentation of Faustus, Clement's father, arguing against Heintze and others, that the description of Faustus as one who supports both astrological fatalism and Epicureanism, is not straightforwardly a contradiction, but is best explained by seeing the the application of the combination to Faustus as deriving from commonly held positions on divine providence. ‘In addition’, states Jedan, ‘the combination is an ingenious literary device to characterise Faustus as an exemplar of the ordinary citizens deluded by dangerous philosophical entrepreneurs’ (p. 156). In the same essay Jedan also shows how the belief that Faustus is being presented as a Stoic because of his fatalistic views, fails to take account of the subtleties of the Stoic position of causal determinism, which is not the same as fatalism, a point, along with others, that he develops in a second piece on the presentation of free will in the Pseudo-Clementines. F. Stanley Jones, a veteran of Pseudo-Clementine studies, and rightly hailed by the editor as having written the most significant account of the history of research into this multi-layered and rebarbatively complex set of texts, provides a short piece comparing, in tentative vein, the tradition found in the Mishnah Avot 1.3, the Avot de Rabbi Nathan, and Recognitions 1.54.2, which seems to attribute to the Sadducees the view that service to God should not be predicated upon a belief in the resurrection. Tentatively, Jones suggests that there may be evidence, primarily found in the Pseudo-Clementine version of the saying, that this was a genuine opinion of the Sadducees. Van Kooten's piece on the presentation of the Greek concept of philanthropia in the Pseudo-Clementines helpfully shows how such usage both reflects and differs from standard philosophical usage, and is often used in an anti-Gnostic context. Interestingly, he notes that the duality set up between philosophy and prophecy by reference to philanthropia should not be seen as straightforwardly anti-philosophical, but rather as directed against what he terms philosophical discussion of a sophistic kind. Other contributions include T. Adamik on figures of speech and reason in the Recognitions, and A. Hilhorst on the use of a chapter on Clement in the thirteenth-century Jacobus de Voragine's Golden legend.

This is a helpful collection of essays, reasonably well edited and equipped with a good bibliography at the end (though oddly one recent major study, Nicole Kelly's Knowledge and religious authority in the Pseudo-Clementines [Tübingen 2006], is not listed, strange in particular as Kelly's other works, including an article from 2008, are, though with the spelling ‘Kelley’). Particularly useful are those essays which seek to elucidate either the religious, social and philosophical context of the mooted Grundschrift or the Homilies or Recognitions, though there is less in this volume on the latter two than the former. It would seem to the present editor that a desideratum in present Pseudo-Clementine studies is a more systematic, but nevertheless, multi-authored project, in which the status quaestionis of study is addressed in its many component parts, and new avenues of research indicated. This volume, which in devoting itself to the discussion of this complex body of texts, is rare, makes plain, both directly and indirectly, why such a desideratum exists.