The obscurity of Cyprus in late antiquity has no doubt made it easy enough to define the scope of this volume; on the other hand, it entails that the essays on archaeological sites are desultory and parochial in interest. Charalambos Bamirtzis (‘Sea routes and Cape Drepanon’) finds evidence of traffic by sea between Alexandria and the quarries of Drepanon, but the spread of Christianity impinged on this trade only by substituting the basilica for the temple. We might have expected an efflorescence of Christian scenes in mosaics, but, as Henry Maguire explains (‘God, Christ and the emperor in the late antique art of Cyprus’), the same convention that forbade the depiction of the emperor in floor designs was extended to biblical figures, so that those who did not wish to limit themselves to the cross were apt to make use of pagan motifs. Demetrios Michaelides (‘Mosaic workshops in Cyprus from the fourth to the seventh centuries’) observes that Christians frequently preferred geometric floors and opus sectile to the mythological imagery of pagan buildings, although both were often furnished by the same workshops. Andrew T. Wilburn's study of ‘Ritual specialists and the curse tablets from Amathous’ reveals that Christians were no less likely than pagans or Jews to have maledictions produced for them in lead or selenite by experts who were not of their own religion; indeed they appear to have formed a class apart whose members were seldom employed in any neighbouring shrine. Under Christian rulers, faith was not forbidden to bear the sword, and Ioli Kalavrezou speculates, in ‘The Cyprus treasures since their discovery’, that the owner of two treasures from Lambrousa was a military aristocrat named Theodore with a partiality for the biblical story of David and Goliath.

The literature of early Christian Cyprus is more homogeneous, inasmuch as it is entirely hagiographic. In ‘Cyprus in the New Testament and beyond’, James Carleton Paget remarks on the many lacunae in Luke's narrative of the mission of Paul and Barnabas to Cyprus. In recounting the evangelisation of Paphos he makes no allusion to the celebrated cult of Aphrodite; he does not record any consequence of the momentous conversion of the Roman governor Sergius Paulus; he does not explain why the Apostle now became Paul instead of Saul; and he makes nothing of the Jewish patronymic (bar-Jesus) of Elymas the Sorcerer. Athanasius Papageorghiou and Nikolas Bakirtzis (‘Hagiographic narratives and archaeological realities’) find little evidence of the violent supersession of paganism that is attested in the acts of Tychon and of Barnabas: churches were not built upon the ruins of Cypriot temples, and their destruction may owe more to earthquakes than to human violence. Although Barnabas was the uncle of Mark the Evangelist, his Acts were composed at a time when Mark had already been overshadowed by Matthew, as Annemarie Luijendiijk shows in ‘The Gospel of Matthew in the Acts of Barnabas through the lens of a book's history’, a study of the three passages in this narrative which celebrate the thaumaturgic properties of the First Gospel.

Barnabas is not a more popular subject for hagiography than his compeers Lazarus and Andrew, than the hierarchs Epiphanius and Spyridion, or even than the deacon Athanasius Pentaschoinidis, according to Giorgos Philotheou and Marina Solomidou-Ieronymidou (‘The representation and memory of Saints Paul, Barnabas, Epiphanius and others in wall paintings’). It was not to his Acts that Cyprus owed its temporary celebrity as a centre of Christian literature in the second half if the fourth century, but to Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis, whose digest of eight heresies, the Panarion, is an indispensable source of information about the books that he wished to suppress. His contumacious behaviour to his episcopal superiors John of Jerusalem and John Chrysostom was probably, as Young Kim contends in ‘Cypriot autocephaly reconsidered’, the most important source of legitimation for the island's subsequent claim to autocephaly. The Acts of Barnabas figure in later attempts to cement this claim, but, as Stephanos Efthymiadis shows in ‘The cult of saints in late antique Cyprus’, the island's relations with the Apostle Paul were also reinforced by saints of questionable historicity. I hesitate to accept the hypothesis of Andrew Jacobs (‘Epiphanius’ library’) that Epiphanius knew the Refutation of all heresies attributed to Hippolytus, but omitted to name it because he possessed no copy: as Jacobs observes, he names other books which he plainly did not possess. Epiphanius, who was a Christian in all but spirit, raises a question which is approached by a different path in Laura Nasrallah's introduction to the volume: does the presence of recondite pagan texts in Christian literature tell us any more about the author's cultural, or even religious, allegiance – does it give us any more reason to use the language of hybridity, syncretism or dual belonging – than the absence or elusiveness of Christian motifs in a work of art?