Stowers’s Christian Beginnings : A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion presents a large-scale reframing of early Christian origins by situating them within a comparative, non-confessional analysis of ancient Mediterranean religion. Rather than treating Christianity or Judaism as exceptional, Stowers develops a four-part analytic framework for understanding religion as a set of interacting social practices. His central aim is to correct what he regards as modern scholarly distortions, especially the overemphasis on elite texts and ‘theology’, by foregrounding the lived religious worlds of ordinary people. The book consists of a new introduction as well as eleven articles and book chapters previously published between 2010 and 2023. Since the field has not changed greatly over the past fifteen years, the earlier articles are still relevant, especially for those wishing to have the convenience of these within one volume. The introduction by the author gives a history of the field going back to the 1960s, presented with a biographical slant; this highlights some of the main themes of the collection. Stowers gives a brief introduction to three of the four parts of the volume, with the section ‘Discontinuity then Continuity after Paul’ (pp. 24–8) serving as an introduction to Part 3.

Among the book’s most innovative contributions is Stowers’s integration of cognitive psychology, cognitive science of religion and practice theory developed especially in the 1990s but applied more systematically in work from the 2010s to the 2020s He emphasises that cultural transmission is error-prone and imaginative rather than uniform. This theoretical synthesis underpins his reconceptualisation of sacrifice, imagination and group formation. The book’s overarching argument is that Christianity began not as a doctrinal religion but rather as one competitive expert movement among many, deeply shaped by everyday religious practices, civic structures and the intellectual field of the early Roman empire. It offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary and theoretically updated model for rethinking Christian origins within the broader religious ecology of the ancient Mediterranean.

Stowers constructs a typology of four overlapping modes of ancient religion (pp. 58–9):

1. 1. Religion of Everyday Social Exchange (RESE): a system of reciprocity with gods and non-everyday beings. People made offerings, sought divination and asked for practical benefits. This was local, household-based, embodied and shared across most strata of society, including women and enslaved people.

2. 2. Civic Religion: public sacrifice, festivals and temple worship controlled by elite actors, redistributing wealth and reinforcing social hierarchy. Rather than symbolic speculation, civic sacrifice was an economic and political act embedded in city life.

3. 3. Literate Religious Experts: a tiny minority (probably less than 2%) (p. 42), including philosophers, Judean intellectuals and Christian teachers, who reinterpreted traditional practices using texts, argumentation and universalising claims. They often critiqued everyday religion while relying on it for audience and authority.

4. 4. Literate Experts with Political Power: elite agents who institutionalised doctrine, created legal frameworks and mediated between popular religion and imperial/royal systems.

This model allows Stowers to show that ancient religion was neither a unified ‘belief system’ nor easily separated into discrete traditions like ‘Judaism’ or ‘Christianity’. It also works against what he called the normative project of reconstructing Christian theology that was dominant for most of the twentieth century, especially in United States’ divinity schools.

A major argument of the book is that scholars have misread ancient religion through Christianised concepts of belief, doctrine and exclusive identity. Ancient Mediterranean religion was fundamentally about ritual action, exchange and social bonds, not about belief systems or universal truths. This is especially clear in Stowers’s critique of symbolic and theological readings of sacrifice. Sacrifice, he argues, was primarily a material and social exchange with the gods, not an expression of metaphysical meaning. While Stowers’s emphasis on sacrifice may obscure other aspects of Christianity that can be illuminated by a focus on everyday practice over doctrine, it sheds light on the similarities and differences between ancient Judaism, Hellenistic Judaism, Judaeo-Christianity and late antique Christianity.

Associations – household, craft, neighbourhood, ethnic and cultic – are presented as one of the most important yet understudied social forms. They extended RESE into collective life, created trust networks and mixed religious, economic and convivial activities. Stowers uses them to destabilise the idea of a ‘church’ as a unique or exceptional social formation (‘Locating the Religion of Associations’ [2019]). He is also concerned to move the Roman house church later than those who see it as present behind the scenes in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Rather, the presence of Christians as a recognisable group in Rome cannot be established until well beyond the turn of the first century, Stowers argues (pp. 146–50).

According to this rethinking of Paul and the earliest Christian groups, Paul appears not as a founder of a religion but as a freelance expert competing in the broader world of ancient intellectuals. His letters reveal struggles for authority, complex negotiations with local ritual life and attempts to reshape group identity through expert discourse. What later becomes ‘Christianity’ is shown to arise from these competitive dynamics of expert knowledge, not from a seamless doctrinal tradition.

In Chapter 3, ‘Why “Common Judaism” Does Not Look Like Mediterranean Religion’ (2018), Stowers dismantles essentialist constructions such as ‘Common Judaism’ and ‘Polis Religion’, arguing that they erase diversity and rely on elite, often apologetic texts. Everyday Jews, like other Mediterraneans, engaged in reciprocity with multiple divine beings, even if experts promoted monotheistic ideologies. Similarly, the model of ‘Polis Religion’ oversimplifies variation and ignores non-civic ritual life. These critiques draw heavily on cognitive science, which shows that religious knowledge is uneven, local and clustered around experts, not evenly distributed across populations.

In the last three chapters, published between 2010 and 2017, Stowers argues that modern historians privilege literate elites – Philo, Josephus, Christian Fathers – who represent only a tiny sliver of ancient experience. He calls for a historiography that begins with practice, not texts, and includes the non-literate majority.

The RESE model and Stowers’s understanding of what gods and people know is the basis for his analysis of one of the most important religious practices in Graeco-Roman culture, across the Mediterranean and in West Asia: oath-taking. He writes: ‘Oaths called on particular deities or general categories of non-evident beings (“non-evident being” is often an excellent translation for the Greek word, daemon) to punish either of the parties who cheated and broke the oath’ (p. 268).

In Ancient Christians and the Power of Curses . Magic, Aesthetics, and Justice Nasrallah adopts a similar model to approach the study of curses in the ancient world and early Christianity. Like Stowers’s collected studies, Nasrallah’s book lies at the nexus of ancient history, classical studies, history of religion and studies of religion. She uses twentieth- and twenty-first-century art – particularly the poetry, paintings and sculpture of contemporary Black artists – as theoretical frameworks for understanding ritual objects and practices from the ancient Mediterranean world. Using the primary sources of amulets, curse tablets (defixiones), texts about speaking in tongues and scriptures used to curse, Nasrallah understands these rituals and ritual objects as attempts to seek justice, but also as aesthetic interventions within the theorising of matter and language in antiquity. Nasrallah used a similar methodology in her last book, Archaeology and the Letters of Paul (2019), to focus on reconstructing the social, economic and religious contexts of those to whom Paul wrote. She argues there for a clear methodology in the use of archaeology in biblical studies of the first century ce, best understood within the framework of Graeco-Roman religion. This new volume draws on her work on Pauline letters, namely Paul’s and Sosthenes’s first surviving letter to the Corinthian community (known as ‘First Corinthians’). The Christians of Corinth were probably typical of the Greek and other residents of the Roman city in the mid-first century in seeking to access divine power through such methods of verbal binding and loosing, inscribed on material objects.

The volume addresses similar themes of slavery, injustice, travel, grief, poverty and abundance, and focuses on the expression of those themes in curse texts and their associated objects. These were often produced by early Christian individuals of lower status and show how many people had to resort to magic for any hope of justice within the Roman imperial system. Women and slaves were well represented among those who appealed to this alternative strategy for justice.

The cover of the book, an artwork entitled Mourning for Maurice, a wooden African or African-American head embedded with nails, each of which may hold a curse against persons unknown, will challenge many readers, as will the introduction of modern cult objects, mostly from Afro-American contexts, as material support for the author’s theory of the relationship between religion, curses and aesthetics. These include nkisi n’kondi (‘power figures’) from the Kongo, fetish objects made of monkey hair, nails, beads and shells, Cypriot curse tablets and art assemblages by contemporary African American artists. Introducing such material, often produced as art forms to be displayed in elite contexts, from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, alongside ancient curse tablets, inscribed gem amulets and papyri bearing curses, is an original approach, and one that raises as many questions as it answers. However, it is valuable to contrast the material evidence for religious practices like cursing from one culture with that of a much later one, if only to show that the human desperation for justice from the gods did not evaporate with the end of late antiquity. As Nasrallah notes, the material turn led to the creation of a new canon of secondary literature, including texts that were formerly dismissed as merely ‘magical’. Her early work on the project was positioned within the Beyond Canon project based at Regensburg. Her aim is to write ‘a more ethical history that would seek to reconstruct the wide material and sonic world of ancient Christians … one that focuses on a few ancient curses and discloses the ways in which they help us to understand ritual, justice-seeking, and aesthetics in the early Christian period’ (p. 3).

Four case studies explore the production of such texts and ritual objects in poetics, song and incantation, and the ethically ambiguous contexts of those who initiated such curses and those who wrote invective against their use. Chapter 1 presents early Christian concerns over justice, juxtaposing elite tracts by Justin Martyr, an early Greek apologist for Christianity, with a curse from ancient Cyprus commissioned by Soterianos. Soterianos’ curse on Ariston is one of a group of defixiones or nailed curse tablets called the Amouthous curses, which are unusual in naming the petitioner and the accursed. She places these curses in the context of the interstices of Roman imperial law, where a petitioner could theoretically seek redress for injustice with a legal petition. In practice such petitions were limited to those with power, literacy or the means to have such petitions made and affixed in public. Curses tablets addressed to the daemones (‘spirits’) were a cheap alternative for those with few other options.

Chapter 2, ‘Substance and Story: A Greengrocer and the Pharaoh at Antioch’, presents four Babylas curses from Antioch, unearthed in excavations of 1934–35. These curse tablets or defixiones have a nail hole at their core, a way of fixing divine power in the lead sheets bearing the curse. They all deliver curses against a greengrocer named Babylas, fruit of the ‘polluted womb Dionysia’ (p. 106). One of them invokes the legend of the drowning of the Egyptian Pharaoh’s chariot, harking back to an ancient Jewish story of justice for oppressed peoples.

Chapter 3, ‘Tongues, Breath, Stutter’, on glossolalia or speaking in tongues is perhaps not as convincing as the other three case studies. Paul’s reference to those who ‘speak in the tongues of mortals and angels’ (1 Cor 13.1) could have meant many things. The participation of slaves and women in this practice is also unclear from the Pauline text, as Nasrallah acknowledges. A question mark lies over her association of glossolalia with voces magicae (lit. ‘magical words’) found in so-called magical texts from Corinth. These were sequences of Greek letters that make no literal sense. The voces magicae are significant subjects of study in their own right. Some voces magicae are found in the eighteen curses from Acrocorinth’s sanctuary of Demeter and Kore, and another group of more than 30 from the larger region of Corinth. Among those found at the Demeter and Kore sanctuary there were two curses inscribed on thin lead tablets against Karpime Babba, a flower-seller and woman of low status. In one the female petitioner prays to Hermes of the Underworld, Ananke goddess of Necessity and the Fates that she be made fertile, while they ‘destroy Karpime Babba, weaver of garlands, from her head to her footprints with monthly destruction’ (pp. 1, 192–8). In the other she asks for Karpime Babba to be completely destroyed, in ‘her soul and heart and her mind and the wits’ (p. 193). The very intimate concern of a woman about her own fertility is evident, as is the depth of her longing to constrain the fertility of another, possibly a rival in love or the domestic sphere or someone who has used similar curses against the petitioner. The personal plea is striking and enables these curse tablets to speak across centuries with the voices of the afflicted, those who have run out of options seeking justice in the court of divine powers.

Chapter 4 takes as its starting point a fourth-century curse of the woman Kyrilla against one Iennys, so that he cannot ‘speak and exact opposition’ to her, which Nasrallah reads as referring to a court of law (p. 204). This chapter focuses on the sonic aspects of incantations, including the changing of holy names and Greek voces magicae.

While the combination of textual, visual and sonic elements produces an unusual study of heterogeneous sources, or what the author calls ‘a bit of an odd book’ (p. xi), it is a volume that challenges the generic boundaries of writing the religious history of the Mediterranean world of the first to fourth centuries. It will spark every open-minded reader’s imagination and provoke them to reconsider their assumptions about texts that count and those that are usually dismissed because they are radically unfamiliar or ethically challenging. The more modern works of art adduced help to bridge that gap, assisting readers overcome past failures of the imagination.

Both volumes develop arguments of interest to scholars and students of biblical studies, classical studies and the material turn in late antiquity; and they present their theoretical and evidentiary material in an engaging manner. Each will probably appeal to different audiences; but, taken together, they present lines of approach to the complex, cultural and religious histories of early Christianity in late antiquity that are complementary and inherently valuable.