The Christians as the Romans Saw Them

From Pliny the Younger (d. 113) to Julian the Apostate (d. 363): a well-written, well-organized, and generally helpful survey of what pagan critics said about Christianity. Wilken (History, Notre Dame) has no new material to offer--most anti-Christian propaganda has been lost or deliberately destroyed by the Church, and much of what survives is found in fragments quoted by Christian apologists--but he puts the work of major controversialists like Celsus and Porphyry into fresh and sometimes illuminating perspective. Instead of treating these polemical texts in the usual fashion, as footnotes to early Christian history, Wilken regards them as evidence of an important dialectical critique that was thoughtful (not mere scandal-mongering, or satire à la Lucian), measured (Galen acknowledged the moral seriousness of Christians even while deploring their irrational dogmatism), and often telling. (Porphyry's argument that the Book of Daniel contains images of Antiochus Epiphanes IV's persecution of the Jews, not prophecies of Jesus' coming, is now a commonplace of biblical exegesis.) Wilken shows how pagan reactions evolved over 2(apple) centuries: early writers such as Tacitus and Pliny