From Peter's prayer that ends the ill-fated flight of an Icarus-esque Simon Magus to Paul's severed head talking back to his executioner, E.'s contribution to the SBL's Writings from the Greco-Roman World series seeks to open up to a fresh audience little-studied sources for the martyrdoms of the two foundational apostles of Christianity. As he efficiently demonstrates in his opening pages, scholarship has for the most part focused on only two accounts, the so-called Acts of Peter and Acts of Paul, neglecting a rich array of other material. E. gathers those and twelve other accounts of these apostles' deaths (three of Peter, four of Paul and five of both together) – translating some into modern languages for the first time – as well as over 40 references in Christian literature from 1 Clement to Gregory of Tours' On the Glory of the Martyrs. Of course, correcting one scholarly complacency risks indirectly enforcing others. Many of these martyrdom accounts are excerpted from longer, more wide-ranging texts; recent scholarly interest in martyrdom risks obscuring its interplay with other Christian traditions. Moreover, the brief nuggets from patristic authors are here mined without any of the contextual information essential to proper interpretation.

The volume is well suited to its professed aim of increasing access to neglected material. Original texts in Greek, Latin and Syriac face readable, accurate translations (informed by recent scholarship on problematic terminology) to make this a valuable resource for neophyte and initiated alike. And the reasonable price should broaden access, though the quality of production has perhaps suffered as a consequence – the Greek font is not user-friendly; the Syriac needlessly compressed (and the low quality of the cover photo, for example, surely avoidable).

Questions of interpretation can be little treated in a functional volume such as this; some of the material has been analysed in an earlier publication by E. (Paul the Martyr: the Cult of the Apostle in the Latin West [2011]), who also promises a follow-up monograph (see for now ‘Confused Traditions? Peter and Paul in the Apocryphal Acts’, in T. Burke and B.E. Landau [edd.], Forbidden Texts on the Western Frontier: Christian Apocrypha in North American Perspectives [2015], pp. 245–69). The book's greatest value is arguably its visual demonstration of how these stories evolved as they were received and transmitted in different contexts from the first to seventh centuries. Yet frequent repetition of footnotes rather than cross-references suggests that the work is not designed to be read cover to cover, and some introductions lack the footnotes that would enable readers to grapple better with questions of context. The notes on the texts are in some cases limited to recording scriptural and other relevant parallels but elsewhere indulge in more detailed commentary; it is difficult to determine by what criteria comments are made here on such rich texts. In any case, by revealing the range of neglected material concerning even figures as well treated as Peter and Paul, E. has done the discipline a great service.