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Reviewed by:
  • Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity by Luke Timothy Johnson
  • Peter Van Nuffelen
Luke Timothy Johnson, Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 461 pp.

The starting point of this book comes as a slight surprise to the scholar of ancient religion. Early Christian texts are full of polemic against paganism—that is, Greco-Roman religion—thus suggesting that Athens had little to do with Jerusalem. L. T. Johnson argues that the Patristic rejection of Greco-Roman religion as idolatry shapes scholarship to this day and has led to distorted accounts of Christianity’s position in the ancient world and, indeed, to harmfully aggressive ways of looking at nonmonotheistic religions in the modern world. This argument seems rather unfair to generations of classical scholars seeking to integrate Christianity into accounts of ancient religion and, equally, to New Testament scholars integrating the pagan Umwelt into their work. Johnson’s topic, then, is perennial rather than new but handled in a novel way. He distinguishes four ways [End Page 389] of being religious in the Greco-Roman world: participating in divine benefits, being morally transformed, transcending the world, and stabilizing the world. He argues that the first two are available in Christianity from its very origins but that the latter two only appear from the second century onward. The analysis takes us through a vast landscape of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian texts. The resulting image is definitely more complex than some earlier assertions that, for instance, Christian practice x derives from Greco-Roman practice y. But, as often, the complexity also introduces some haziness. The four ways of being religious seem fairly universal and not specific to Greco-Roman religion. On that understanding, Johnson has argued no more (but also no less) than that ancient Christianity was a religion—which may, in some quarters, be a useful reminder.

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