Book Reviews: [Introduction]

JECS readers will want to know that Trinity Press International offers an English translation and paperback edition of Riemer Roukema's Gnosis and Faith in Early Christianity (212 pp., ISBN 1-56338-299-7, $23.00), a convenient and useful introduction to the topic. The Dutch original was published in 1998. Similarly Liturgical Press has an American paperback edition of Paul Bradshaw's Early Christian Worship (96 pp., ISBN 0-8146-2429-4, $14.95). Subtitled "A Basic Introduction to Ideas and Practice," it is just that. The South African original was published in 1995. David Frankfurter's Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance was originally published by Princeton UP in 1998 and is now available in paperback (314 pp., ISBN 0-691-07054-7, $16.95). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. has brought out the second volume (in paperback) of Henri de Lubac's magisterial Medieval Exegesis (439 pp., ISBN 0-8028-4146-5, $45.00). Far more than the first volume, this one deals with patristic figures, specifically, Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory, Jerome; and especially, Origen. De Lubac wrote at a time when Origen was still suspect in some reactionary circles, and he labors to show how widely accepted the Alexandrian was in the medieval West. The result is a brief history of Origen in the Western tradition of exegesis.

Westminster John Knox Press has published The Sacred in Music by Albert Blackwell (255 pp., ISBN 0-664-22171-8, $29.95), an introduction which highlights Early Christian contributions, especially Augustine's, to the topic. John T. Carroll's The Return of Jesus in Early Christianity (Hendrickson Publishers, 236 pp., ISBN 1-56563-341-5, $24.95) concentrates on the NT evidence, but Jeffery Siker has an essay on "The Parousia of Jesus in Second- and Third-Century Christianity" (pp. 147-67). G. R. Evans has edited The Medieval Theologians for Blackwell Publishers (383 pp., ISBN 0-631-21203-5, $39.95). This paperback collection of essays includes treatments of patristic figures, but whereas John Rist gets twenty-one pages to discuss Augustine, Charles Kannengiesser must cover Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Gregory the Great in thirteen pages. There is also an eight-page essay by Paul Rorem on "Augustine, the Medieval Theologians, and the Reformation."

Joseph F. Kelly

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