This book seeks to show how from perhaps the middle of the second century onwards some Christians came to portray their movement as a philosophy; what reactions such a move elicited, in particular from their opponents; why in general this was hostile; and how some educated Christians responded to such polemical attacks.

Pietzner begins by showing how the world into which Christians entered enthused about ‘paideia’, a translation of which is difficult to produce (‘Bildung’ is used by Pietzner and could be said to approximate to our ‘culture’). Philosophical schools often portrayed themselves as embodiments of this ideal, even if aspects of their lives, often conducted away from the normal structures of society, were thought problematic. Those like the Cynics, who broke with some of the assumed conventions of such schools, were heavily criticised by rival schools precisely because they laid the philosophical schools more generally open to criticism of a particular kind. As more educated people became Christians, so there developed movements within Christianity, often competing with each other, which sought to present themselves as philosophical schools, with a claim to be expositors of a ‘paideia’. Like the Cynics, however, their behaviour and the fact that they belonged to a movement which repelled some in the empire, not least conservative critics, like Celsus, led to criticism, which often emphasised the fact that Christians were uncultivated, in fact quite opposed to the principles of ‘paideia’. In engaging in such criticism, these writers were taking very seriously the fact that Christians could be construed as competitors, but ones who needed to be excluded from any association with philosophy.

Pietzner, in what is a very long and copiously footnoted book, shows how it was that the Christians were a different type of competitor in this world, appealing to a range of individuals, including women, the young and other non-elites, engaging in sometimes odd practices, and displaying striking levels of enthusiasm (exemplified most rebarbatively in their willingness to die as martyrs). This, combined with the fact that they had the capacity to call upon a network of Christian communities throughout the empire to propagate their views, made them appear dangerous and obnoxious to a growing number of normally elite pagans.

In a detailed set of chapters Pietzner focuses upon the way in which critics like Minucius Felix's Caecilius and Celsus set about attacking Christians, in particular labelling them uncultivated and so unworthy of any claim to be a member of the culture of ‘paideia’, and how Christians like Minucius and Origen responded. Both of these men, as was no doubt the case with other Christians, were acutely aware of the apparent effectiveness of the charge that Christians were uncultivated and somehow foolish. Minucius seeks in a quite conventional way to refute such claims, while Origen is more comprehensive in his defence, making a virtue out of the majority presence of uneducated, socially inferior people in the Christian movement, arguing inter alia that such individuals experienced a transformation of their moral life when they became Christians, and arguing strongly for the concealed and profound wisdom of Jesus, Paul and other New Testament authors.

Pietzner's study is in part an attempt to show up both the way in which educated Christians sought to be a part of a growing ‘paideutic’ culture in antiquity and the way in which, through their practices, and their criticisms of prevailing societal ideas, they challenged that culture (here her detailed and helpful comparisons between Origen's school in Caesarea and Plotinus' in Rome are very instructive) and so were always in an ambivalent relationship with it. The criticism that they provoked, which in part picked up on an established polemical rhetoric, was understandable, and they sought to oppose it, not by discarding their claims to be exemplars of ‘paideia’, but by redefining it by emphasising in particular their way of life, which picked up on ancient views of philosophy as an ars vitae but did so in what one might term a distinctive way, which made a virtue out of the mixed and diverse membership of their movement.

Pietzner has written a thoughtful and impressively referenced work, which elucidates both the context in which Christian philosophical schools emerged, the extent to which they presented an alternative vision of a philosophy and the life associated with it and the extent to which that challenged prevailing ideals as well as reactions to this. What is interesting, of course, is that Christians sought to present themselves in such a way and to defend their right to being expositors of a new ‘paideia’, and that objections to the latter claim came not just from pagans but from Christians too (something Pietzner discusses as well). In choosing to write about this, Pietzner is taking up a subject which has attracted a great deal of attention in recent times as scholars, faced with the problem of trying to speak about a Christian movement which has come to be seen as ever more diverse and disparate, have sought out ways of explaining how Christians of various kinds came to develop a kind of shared discourse. In this context the discussion of the emergence of philosophical schools within Christianity has come to play a significant role and has contributed to the idea of second-century Christianity moving forwards as a type of laboratory of ideas. Pietzner is not concerned with this debate, at least directly, but her work does, in often interesting ways, shed light on evolving ideas of Christian identity in this period, admittedly through the eyes of very particular authors.