The Refutation of All Heresies (henceforth Refutation) has suffered from uneven attention. Five manuscripts preserve book 1 and attribute it to Origen. A single manuscript, discovered at Mount Athos in 1841, preserves books 4–10 without any authorial attribution; books 2 and 3 remain lost. Since the rediscovery, scholarly interest in the Refutation has focused especially on authorship, often linking the work to the shadowy figure of Hippolytus of Rome. Most scholars now accept that the author cannot be identified, but debates on this point have detracted from study of the work itself, which offers much unique evidence concerning groups and books deemed heretical by the anonymous author. The influence of the author’s editorial hand on the material he presents has also typically been dismissed or diminished.

Sebastian Hanstein’s monograph seeks to restore balance to study of the Refutation. He mostly sets aside issues of authorship, content simply to propose that the anonymus was a Christian teacher active in Rome, rather than someone who presented himself as a bishop of the city, as has often been suggested. Hanstein also focuses attention on the genre of the Refutation, arguing that the label of heresiography is insufficient to describe its contents and purpose. Instead, the Refutation should be read as a work of protreptic, with its contents divided into three parts: 1.1–10.29 on the pagan or heretical views to be rejected, 10.30–33 an exposition of the true doctrine, and 10.34 an invitation to the audience to make their own decisions about the truth or falsehood of the material presented (chapter 2).

Hanstein’s biggest interest, however, is with establishing the editorial control exerted by the author over the material that he presented from heretical Christian groups. The great majority of the monograph amounts to running commentaries on extended sections of the Refutation. Chapter 3 focuses on the Refutation’s coverage of the Naassenes, the Sethians, Justin the Gnostic, Simon Magus, the Valentinians, the Basilidians, the Docetics, and Monoïmos the Arab. Chapter 4 concerns the Refutation’s treatment of the Peratics, paying special attention to this group because they have been the subject of relatively little study.

From these investigations, Hanstein concludes that the author of the Refutation was not interested in providing a reliable reproduction of the literature and teaching of the groups. Rather, the author’s treatments followed a uniform structure intended to further the larger thesis of the Refutation, namely that Christian heresies took inspiration from a long list of non-Christian sources ranging from philosophy to astrology and magic. Hanstein’s most ambitious conclusion is that the author of the Refutation attempted to create heretical groups based only on books that he had read. In the case of the Peratics, Hanstein argues that the books connected by the author to this group were selected almost at random with little concern even for the coherence of the beliefs and interests attributed to them.

The monograph is based on philological precision and a mostly thorough, polyglot bibliography. Hanstein has many sensible things to say, particularly in chapter 4, concerning the more cavalier emendations proposed by Miroslav Marcovich in his problematic critical edition of the Refutation. The monograph, however, still displays its origins as a dissertation, with extended reviews of previous scholarship. I was disappointed that the bibliography was updated very little after the dissertation was completed in 2020.

Hanstein’s arguments are substantial but sometimes narrow in their scope and inconsistent in their methods. For a monograph that treats the claims of the Refutation with so much skepticism, I was surprised to see that the presentation of other early Christian literature and history was positivistic in its outlook, accepting tendentious claims by Eusebius and other authors at face value. The identification, meanwhile, of the Refutation as a work of protreptic was intriguing but not fully convincing. Hanstein never acknowledges that the great bulk of the Refutation is a doxographical catalogue, like other works of heresiology. I would find more convincing the suggestion that book 10 of the Refutation could function as a standalone work of protreptic, given that the first twenty-nine chapters of it provide a summary of the first nine books before proceeding to the other two elements in Hanstein’s tripartite scheme for the work.

A certain amount of tunnel vision also characterizes the book’s arguments about the editorial control of the author. With respect to the Peratics, Hanstein never mentions evidence from Origen and Clement of Alexandria about the group, offering the misleading impression that the Refutation is the only source for them. In the end, I came away from Hanstein’s monograph with a more optimistic impression of the evidence provided by the Refutation. Hanstein establishes that the unknown author had access to a substantial set of books. When the books that the author used are still extant, as is the case for Sextus Empiricus, Irenaeus, and several others, Hanstein demonstrates that the author was reproducing their content with a reasonable amount of accuracy, despite his editorial tendencies. For me, this confirms that the author preserves unique and valuable evidence of books available to him in the early third century. Whether these books can be reliably assigned to identifiable heretical groups is, from my perspective, a secondary concern, though I am sympathetic to Hanstein’s skepticism on this point.

Overall, I recommend Hanstein’s book to specialists of early Christianity. Scholars interested in the Refutation itself and the Hippolytus question will benefit especially from chapter 2. Chapters 3 and 4 should also be required reading for anyone seeking to use the Refutation in treatments of the heretical groups covered. Anglophone readers will find the concluding English Summary a helpful guide to the monograph’s main arguments. Hanstein offers substantial reasons for using the Refutation with caution in attempts to reconstruct the views of the Peratics and other heretical groups.