Wayne Brindle

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Wayne Brindle is Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies, and author or editor of dozens of books, articles, poems, and anthologies. He taught for 35 years at the largest private university in Virginia, and was chairman of the Piedmont Literary Society.

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Najeeb T Haddad, Ph.D.

Notre Dame of Maryland University

University of Exeter

Durham University

University of St. Thomas, Minnesota

Mordechai aviam

Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee

Crispin Fletcher-Louis

University of Gloucestershire

Simcha Gross

University of Pennsylvania

Wayne Brindle

Liberty University

Christopher Harding

University of Edinburgh

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Destroyer of the gods. Early Christian distinctiveness in the Roman world. By Larry W. Hurtado. Pp. xiv + 290 incl. 1 map. Waco, Tx: Baylor University Press, 2016. $29.95. 978 1 4813 0473 3

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2017

It is the opinion of the New Testament scholar, Larry Hurtado, that there has been an understanda... more It is the opinion of the New Testament scholar, Larry Hurtado, that there has been an understandable tendency in scholarship to emphasise the similarities of earliest Christianity to its surrounding environment rather than its differences. The book under review is a short and pronounced effort to rectify that situation, as Hurtado sees it, by playing up its distinctiveness. Hurtado begins by claiming that his thesis is one that would have been appreciated by the earliest pagan writers on Christianity, men like Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny, Galen, Lucian and especially Celsus. They were clear, Hurtado contends, that Christians were different from other religious groups, and for some dangerously different. This difference is the subject of the next four chapters. Hurtado's book is a fluently written, accessible volume, and he writes for a broader audience than that for the scholarly monograph. This means that much of what he has to say about Christian distinctiveness is probably well known to specialists: Christian religious exclusivism is played up, as is the non-ethnic character of Christian affiliation (it is an important claim of Hurtado that Christians broke the well-attested tie between religion and what he terms 'national' identity, something which Jews, who shared so much with Christians, broadly endorsed: 'Jewish religious identity was always connected in some way or other with the Jewish people, who were thought of in the ancient setting as a "nation"'). Reflecting his own interest in the study of the text of the New Testament and early Christian manuscripts more generally, Hurtado also emphasises the extent to which Christians were a strangely bookish group, generating a mass of literature from early on, some of which was itself distinctive in form. Significant, too, in this respect was their adoption of the codex rather than the scroll as the usual form in which they would present their works. This was a means, Hurtado maintains, of marking themselves out from others, and cannot be explained, as it often is, on purely practical grounds. Hurtado's concluding chapter is devoted to a discussion of Christian ethics. In a time when 'religion' comprised the enactment of particular rituals rather than the teaching of moral obligation, Christian insistence upon the latter was another distinctive marker. Distinctiveness was also found in aspects of Christian ethicsobjections to child exposure, and customary sexual behavior (pederasty and prostitution), among other things. He is clear, however, that in many of the things that Christians said and did, they were not necessarily that distinctive (some philosophers would have agreed with large parts of their ethical emphasis, as seems to have been the case with Galen; as did many Jews). Where Hurtado in particular locates their distinctiveness is in their desire to take such teaching to the streets and disseminate it among all in society, what some have referred to as Christian proselytism. Elements of this distinctive identity meant that there could be a considerable cost to becoming a Christian, a cost which Hurtado also marks out as a distinctive element of Christianity of the first three centuries CE. Hurtado concludes by noting that many things which we would now associate with religion arise from distinctive

Wayne Brindle

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