This is an impressive book and is in a series which is obviously going to be essential reading for anyone concerned with the so-called Abrahamic religions. Stroumsa gathers here already published articles from disparate places, so it is useful to have them all together, and they really hang together, since clearly he has been engaged on a fairly consistent quest for the cultural flavour of Late Antiquity.

This is very much part of a major modern project, to understand the nature of Late Antiquity and to use that understanding to know more about the environment in which Islam appeared and then developed. This has actually been a longstanding European project, and certainly not limited to understanding the prerequisites for Islam. Why any religion suddenly appears and flourishes, and indeed sometimes does the reverse, has for a long time interested people, and a variety of hypotheses are presented. It is difficult to say anything plausible about this for modern religions, where we know so much more about the historical context than is the case with the past, and so how we are expected to say anything sensible about the origins of much older religions defeats me. A lot of commentators tend to fall into a kind of Hegelianism where the idea is that a religion poses solutions to problems which then come up against new problems which call for new solutions, and so on. This sort of explanation of religious change is useful in understanding the links between religions but not very helpful when discussing religious change. Some of the thinkers discussed in the book seem to believe that people who live in the desert are likely to be monotheists, presumably because the desert is just one thing, while more clement environments are variegated and so encourage belief in polytheism. To call this an argument is laughable. For one thing, for those who live in deserts the desert is not one thing but an ever-changing landscape, one which they are able to understand because they perceive its variety and are able to work with it. Many of the other arguments are similarly implausible. The idea that the Middle East is the meeting place of Byzantine, Sassanian, Jewish and Christian ideas, plus lots of others, and that this proved to be fertile compost for the development of Islam, might convince a horticulturist but need not persuade us. After all some remarkable religious ideas seem to be have come from highly restricted environments, and many parts of the world are rich combinations of different cultures. This Bulletin is published in such a place, but I am not sure that we should take that to be an indication that a major religious development is about to take place. Stroumsa reports on these theories and it seems to me that there is scope here for being critical of many of them.

Where Stroumsa is more useful is when he does not speculate but describes the cultural conditions of Late Antiquity, whether Jewish, Christian or classical. Here he describes a range of arguments, ideas and theories that present a wide range of views on religion, and many of these find echoes eventually in the Quran. The theory is that rabbinic Judaism, patristic Christianity and early Islam are three aspects of what he calls the Abrahamic movement. Each side stresses some aspect of Abraham, and ignores others, and the aim is not so much to establish some doctrinal consensus as to defend one interpretation as the exclusive version. One cannot help wondering what this really has to do with Abraham, though, since a sort of imaginary patriarch seems to rear over these different theories, having very little to do with any scriptural source. There are many stories about Abraham which certainly appear in a variety of religions, but they often have a trajectory that has little to do with the particular religion in which they figure. This is hardly surprising, it was ever thus, yet I would appreciate an attempt being made not just to describe the differences and similarities but also to evaluate them. Obviously it is not possible to judge which are more accurate or otherwise, given what we can take objectively to be evidence. On the other hand we can ask what concept of Abraham works better at supporting the “constant ethical and spiritual renewal of religion” (p. 198) that Stroumsa sees as the point of the whole exercise. Or perhaps it makes no difference? For example, the Jewish Abraham both argues with God and also is prepared, apparently, to sacrifice his son to Him. Muslim prophets tend to be much more obedient than Jewish prophets, on the version of the scriptures we have of the latter. Is it better to have as a spiritual guide someone prepared to disagree with God occasionally, or someone never able to do this? What level of commitment to someone is involved in being a friend, as Abraham is said to be, and what is it to be a friend of God, as compared to a human being?

It may seem to a comparativist that asking these sorts of questions is to fail to study religion objectively, but surely that is not the case. It is rather a matter of treating the arguments that religious thinkers use seriously and not just a matter of personal view. The distance between Athens and Jerusalem does not only represent the gap between classical and religious thought, but also the division of logic and culture. It is because religious thinkers took themselves seriously as thinkers that logic was important to them, and it should be important to us when we consider their views.