Maijastina Kahlos sets out to explore the discursive construction of Christian and pagan identities in early Christian polemical and apologetic literature. In the introduction, Kahlos discusses some classic interpretive problems posed by early Christian apologetics. Christian apologists argue against a highly contrived “paganism” that usually bears only a distorted relationship to the material realities of traditional religious practice. Apologetic literature (and particularly the post-Constantinian texts that are the focus of Kahlos's study), moreover, presents a triumphalist historical narrative of Christianization that influences modern understandings of the history of late ancient religions. Thus, by laying bare the strategies by which late ancients constructed pagan-Christian difference, Kahlos seeks to “attain a deeper wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein, a historical-effective consciousness of Christianity” (5). The book's second chapter, “Constructing and Deconstructing Dichotomies,” examines the various binary oppositions that Kahlos locates at the core of Christian apologetic discourse. Such dualistic thinking, the author points out, is not uniquely Christian, but is one example of “the basic antithetical structure of thinking” (11). Modern scholars must avoid reiterating the binary oppositions of early Christian discourse in their studies of late ancient religions, Kahlos continues, but to do so they must grapple with alternative terminologies that are often problematic in other ways, such as “polytheism,” “traditional cults,” and so forth.

Kahlos recognizes that discourses based on rigid dichotomies are inherently unstable. Drawing on Derridean insights into the différance characteristic of all discursive constructions, Kahlos points to the inherent instability of early Christian rhetorics of difference. Here Kahlos introduces the concept of “incerti,” “those unclassifiable and indefinable individuals who appear in the grey area between hard-line polytheism and hard-line Christianity . . . and who elude the rigid pagan-Christian dichotomy” (31). As subjects who deny and challenge the ostensible certainty of the pagan-Christian dichotomy, incerti catalyze rhetorics of anxiety on the part of Christians and “pagans.” It was the reality of incerti, Kahlos argues, that motivated rhetorics about apostates, false converts, and “crypto-pagans.”

The subsequent four chapters enumerate and discuss various rhetorical elements in late fourth and early fifth century Christian apologetics. Kahlos's main focus is on Latin apologists, especially Augustine, although some major Greek apologists (for example Justin, Origen, and Eusebius) are cited and discussed as well.

The book is somewhat under-theorized. Kahlos is clearly familiar with theories of discourse and methodologies of discourse analysis and ideology critique. The coinage of the category “incerti,” moreover, is intriguing, but one wonders what interpretive work this category can do that has not already been or could not be accomplished with existing vocabularies and theories of hybridity. Indeed, Kahlos notes the similarity between the concept of incerti and hybrids. The author may prefer the use of a Latin word to describe a phenomenon in Latin Christian literature to terminology used to theorize modern and postmodern (particularly postcolonial) subjectivities. But here the author misses an important opportunity to develop the wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein advocated in the introduction. What relationships might there be, for example, between modern discourse on hybrids and hybridity and late ancient rhetorics concerning incerti? Finally, it is not quite clear whether incerti are understood to be the rhetorical product of Christians' oppositional discourses, or whether fears and anxieties about apostates and crypto-pagans were prompted by “real,” historical hybrids. Throughout the book, it is unclear exactly how the author understands the relationship between Christian apologetic discourse and the production of Christian (and pagan) subjectivities.

Kahlos offers discourse analysis as a corrective to early and mid-twentieth century narratives of Christianization. Late twentieth-century applications of discourse analysis to early Christian literature, however, are sparsely represented in the notes and bibliography. It is surprising, for example, not to find at least a passing reference to a work like Averil Cameron's Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). The book also ignores a great deal of more recent scholarship on identity formation, subjectivity, and hybridity in early Christianity. Kahlos's theorization of incerti, for instance, could have benefited from Daniel Boyarin's well-known recent work on hybridity and mimicry in Christian and Jewish heresiological discourses (Borderlines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004]) or Judith Lieu's recent study of early Christian identity formation (Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004]).

The middle of the second chapter offers a good philological account of the Latin and Greek vocabularies of religious and cultural difference employed in early Christian apologetics, while the last four chapters of the book provide a survey or outline of rhetorical strategies in Latin apologetic literature and could serve as a useful reference.