Following his books on St. Luke's Gospel and Acts accenting how early Christianity surprised pagan religionists, in this volume, Rowe treats early Christianity and philosophy as presumed rivals. Batting for the philosophers are Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. St. Paul, St. Luke and Luke's Paul, and Justin Martyr are the home team. Rowe dedicates six of his nine chapters to each of these figures in turn, processed through thematic grids promoting his intended comparisons, followed by a compare-and-contrast asserting the incommensurability of Stoicism and Christianity. Agreeing with scholars who reject the idea that Christians before the third century were Hellenized in any important way, Rowe appeals to modern philosophy to bolster that position. Rowe's thesis, its execution, and his conclusions, are all problematic.
For Rowe, Roman Stoicism and early Christianity were rival systems. But, while some early Christians specified their attitude to philosophy, the Roman Stoics did not see Christians as rivals. Epictetus (Discourses 4.7.1–6) and Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 11.3) noted Christians in passing, only to deride the martyrs as obstinate and irrational. Seneca did not mention Christianity at all. So, what Rowe claims was a mutual stand-off was purely a one-way Christian concern.
Rowe's treatment of Roman Stoicism is not impeccable and does particular injustice to Seneca. True, he is also confused on Marcus Aurelius; noting that Marcus was agnostic on whether the universe is governed by providence or atoms, he still opines that Marcus had a coherent cosmology. Rowe thinks that Seneca was both a pantheist and a dualist, who saw fortune as arbitrary, in uneasy alliance with the rational laws of nature equated with the deity. Seneca was a monist. Fortune is the way that natural laws impinge on us. Their effects may be inconvenient or distressing. But the sage, who accepted the laws of nature as the laws of his own being, judged them correctly as part of the big picture, and they did not disturb his equanimity. As well, Rowe mistakenly thinks that Stoics sought to extirpate the passions. The Stoics advocated both apatheia, the mastery of emotions judged irrational, and eupatheia, the cultivation of emotions judged compatible with reason. Seneca had much to say on this point, as on others that Rowe omits, for his account is confined to the Letters to Lucilius, written when Seneca was old, in poor health, and demoralized by the thankless task of serving Nero. Moreover, he adjusted his message to the needs of his addressee. Rowe's skewed emphasis yields a Seneca unlike the one encountered in his oeuvre as a whole.
Rowe's own agenda also conditions his characterization of early Christians. Unlike Rowe, early Christians neither distinguished the epistles now ascribed to St. Paul from other epistles redacted under his name, nor treated the former as more authoritative. Rowe's Paul is the Paul converted willy-nilly by grace, the Paul afflicted by the drama of the divided self, who found himself irrevocably enslaved by sin and unable to help himself. Worldly wisdom offered no assistance. While the biblical Paul did not assume that others shared his personal experience, Rowe reads early Christianity, the human dilemma, and the one true Christian life, as the soul of his chosen Paul writ large. This Paul also controls Paul's overall message. Anything countervailing that Paul said must be sidelined or relativized in its light.
Luke's Paul in Acts is subordinated to Rowe's Paul of the epistles. How should we understand the apostle to the Gentiles’ philosophically-inflected speech in Athens? For Rowe, martyrs are Luke's heroes in Acts. The Athenians were hostile to philosophy, regarding it as subversive. By preaching in Athens as he did, Paul was a provocateur, deliberately inviting his own martyrdom. But, as Acts 17:32–34 states, Paul's appeal to philosophy gained him some Athenian converts; it was not that appeal but the doctrine of the resurrection that other Athenians disliked, and it earned Paul not martyrdom but mockery.
Also problematic is Rowe's Justin. As with many convert-apologists, he was conversant with philosophy. He sided with the irreconcilables, except for ideas he thought the philosophers got from the Bible. At the other pole is Minucius Felix, who posited trouble-free connections between philosophy and Christianity. Most apologists are in between. Noting no-go areas, they applied selected philosophical ideas to the faith's defense. Justin is scarcely representative of his time and chosen genre. Nor is it clear that contemporaries took seriously Justin's attack on Christian philosophizing, or that Stoic ethics was his focus. Justin treated only a handful of doctrines, and all he had to say about the one true life was that Christians should be willing to die for it.
It comes as no surprise that Rowe's wrap-up presents these deliberately edited versions of early Christianity and Stoicism as mutually exclusive systems to which the only valid response was, and is, a complete either/or. Rowe recycles the well-worn argument that, commonplaces and rhetorical flourishes aside, Stoicism played no substantive role in early Christianity. He then adds arguments derived from Alasdair MacIntyre and Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosophers he exempts from Paul's strictures against alien wisdom. According to MacIntyre, there are three ways of dealing with past ideas: encyclopedia, genealogy, and tradition. Tradition is the most satisfactory. And traditions can be grasped and used most cogently by thinkers who are adherents of them. For Rowe, this means that Christians should not bother to grasp or use extra-Christian ideas. Rowe also appropriates Wittgenstein's idea that translation fails to go the distance, literally and figuratively. Languages are not mutually fungible. And so, himself excepted, Christians are doomed to misunderstand Stoicism. Rowe dismisses the application and repurposing of Stoic ideas by Christians over the centuries as pointless bricolage, despite his own willingness to apply and repurpose MacIntyre and Wittgenstein. This book is unlikely to convince intellectual historians or to deter Scripture scholars from locating the New Testament in its contemporary setting. Nor will it appeal to Christians who hold that whatever is of good report may well be embraced in one true life that is a harmony, not a monotone.
