Ever since the rediscovery of Nestorius’ Liber Heraclidis in 1889, scholars have largely accepted his rendition of the events surrounding the Christological controversy. Accordingly, many appraisals have regarded Nestorius as the victim of political scheming by Cyril of Alexandria, and a reassessment of Nestorius’ Liber, in light of the wealth of contemporary historical material available by which to judge it, is long overdue.

Bevan provides such a reassessment with this meticulously researched volume. Working from the many court documents and other historical writings from the fifth and sixth centuries, Bevan chronicles the turbulent years from the accession of Nestorius as patriarch of Constantinople in 428 to his death on the eve of Chalcedon in 450 or 451. Bevan deftly handles chronological and interpretive issues related to individual documents without letting the ambiguities obscure the main story itself. His historical reconstruction is always plausible and generally very convincing.

What emerges from Bevan's work is a Cyril who was far more cautious and politically tactful than twentieth-century scholarship had claimed. Bevan shows that Nestorius made numerous political blunders that hurt his cause, and he tried to cover up those blunders through the misleading “history” of the Liber. Emperor Theodosius II comes off plausibly as a supporter of Nestorius who must have felt betrayed by his patriarch and was ultimately forced by circumstances to hang him out to dry. Bevan's corrections of earlier scholarly appraisals of the main protagonists constitute the most important contribution the book makes to contemporary scholarship.

What is most dramatic, however, is that the book brings to light little-known claims by contemporary historians that after the death of Theodosius in 450, the new emperor, Marcian, recalled Nestorius from exile to appear before the ecumenical council, recant his earlier errors, and be received anew into the communion of the church. In Bevan's estimation, this recall was part of Marcian's strategy to obtain the victory of dyophysite Christology once and for all, a strategy that was thwarted by Nestorius's death on the way to the council. This tantalizing historical possibility is the greatest bombshell in the book (Bevan leads with it on pages 1–2 and returns to it in detail on 323–30), and it deserves to be taken seriously. While Bevan's book is too technical for most students, it should claim the attention of historians and should work its way into the story as told in future student-level textbooks.

My criticism of Bevan's book is that his desire to stay out of the theological weeds leads him to overplay the importance of imperial action. Most significantly, Bevan distills the essence of Antiochene teaching as “two natures,” and he phrases the central question of the controversy as the number of natures in Christ. He never considers the possibility that the word physis was being used in different ways, and that an astute theologian might accept the formula “two physeis” in some cases and reject it in other cases, based on his estimation of what was meant by physis in each case. Acknowledging this possibility and reinforcing it by transliterating physis rather than translating it as “nature” would have allowed other theological issues—such as the insistence that Christ was the same person as the eternal Logos—to assume their rightful place in the story as well. But without such an acknowledgment from Bevan, it appears to the reader that the controversy was actually being argued merely at the level of “one nature” and “two natures” slogans that even the emperors could understand.

Thus, while the decision to steer clear of theological minutiae seems reasonable in principle, the way Bevans has done so sets the reader up to see Chalcedon as ultimately a political event. He may be right that Marcian intended the triumph of two-natures Christology, but it is unlikely that Marcian's sway over the bishops assembled at Chalcedon was as great as Bevan claims. A discussion of the limits of political influence on what was primarily a theological controversy would have made an already excellent book even better.