As the editors of this volume inform us in their introduction, ‘intellectual’, as a term that refers to a caste of people, or a self-conscious group, first appears in France at the end of the nineteenth century and has had a complex history subsequently. In broad terms, then, it is a modern concept, with all the difficulties which that potentially has for its application to a much earlier period, in the case of this volume, broadly the second century. And yet, with a necessary health warning, it can be heuristically useful when applied to a period when Christianity was beginning to attract to itself educated individuals, who sought to discuss the fundamental ideas of their movement within a set of known philosophical and cultural categories. In seeking to negotiate a place for Christianity within such a landscape, ‘intellectuals’ took up often complicated positions in relation to inherited ideas; and did so from a Christian setting where, as the editors indicate, membership of the community was not defined by academic achievement, ‘and as possessors of a truth revealed through the person of Jesus, early Christian intellectuals seem to have felt empowered both to engage ancient learning, and yet reject its pretensions where necessary’.

The volume consists of nine essays. Tobias Nicklas wonders whether it would be appropriate to call the author of Revelation an intellectual, arguing that it would on the basis of signs of his educated background, seen in his linguistic skills, his knowledge of Scripture (and even of Greek literature) and his complex use of intertextuality, but that he shows no interest in what Nicklas calls ‘intellectual discourse’. (In this respect he might seem like a typical apocalypticist, whose commitment to learning of sorts has been recognised by many scholars, including Gerhard von Rad.) Stephen Carlson discusses Papias's well-known preference for a ‘living and lasting voice’. He situates the term within ancient discussions about the value of speech when compared with written records, noting that oral tradition was valued because it could supplement and explain the written record. Matthew Crawford, in one of the most interesting contributions, shows how Tatian and the Celsus of Origen's Contra Celsum are involved in the same conversation about what one might term ‘cultural genealogies’ but reach diametrically opposed conclusions, in which Tatian affirms the truth of Barbarian Christian discourse over the demonically-inspired Hellenic culture, and Celsus affirms the superiority of Greek culture, while decrying the derivative and paltry nature of Christianity. While Crawford eschews taking any position on literary dependence, he helps illuminate the shared intellectual topography of two apparently very different writers. Three essays then follow on Clement of Alexandria, to some Christianity's first intellectual, and certainly a man whose range of literary and philosophical reference seems distinctive in relation to Christian thinkers who preceded him. Matyáš Havdra shows how Clement and his successor, Origen, both affirm Christianity as presenting a set of doctrines for the intellectually less advanced, and as a means for the intellectual to advance to something akin to independent thought. Matyáš shows how this kind of discourse has its parallels in thoughts about learning in the medical tradition, as represented by Galen. Benjamin Edsall, in an essay on Clement and the Catechumenate, both shows how the latter has no obvious parallel in pagan or Jewish institutions or organisations, and how Clement, who entered a Church of which the Catechumenate was a part, integrated ideas associated with it as these concerned the dissemination of a basic Christian faith with ideas related to a philosophical account of the Christian life. In an interesting discussion of Clement's view of the Christian Gnostic, Edsall shows how a simpler (associated with the Catechumenate) and a more complex faith remain organically related to each other. Gretchen Reydam-Schils addresses Clement's understanding of the relationship between Stoicism and Platonism in his exploration of the concept of ‘becoming like God’. She shows how it is difficult to differentiate between Platonism and Stoicism in Clement's thinking on this matter, in part because such differentiation was not in evidence in the wider culture of which he was a part, and Clement's own Christian project, in spite of its heavily Platonic aspect, meant that cooption of Stoic ideas could be undertaken without a sense that these or Platonic ideas needed to be juxtaposed. Lewis Ayres's essay on Irenaeus’ use of the ‘Rule of faith/truth’ both describes its continuities with language about Christian boundaries but also shows how such a concept reflects actual pagan philosophical debates. Against this background, and contrary to the usual emphasis of discussion of this subject, Ayres argues that the rule of truth should not be conceived as a fixed verbal formulation but rather ‘as a way of marking boundaries of belief and establishing an epistemological foundation for movement from the catechetical faith toward “appropriate” non-Gnostic intellectual speculation’. In such a view of matters Gnostic thinkers are seen as quite influential upon the development of some Christian intellectuals. Azzan Yadin-Israel's contribution shows how a decline in the importance among Christians of ideas of prophecy and oral tradition reflect similar phenomena both in rabbinic literature and the wider pagan intellectual world, though Papias's interest in oral tradition approximates to a similar concern among the Tannaim. In the final essay of the collection, Francesca Schironi shows how Eusebius’ so-called Gospel problems reflects, in a skilful and sophisticated way, well-known hermeneutical rules from the Alexandrian tradition of ‘Questions and Answers’.

Inevitably, a volume of this kind is somewhat of a medley. The term ‘intellectual’, which is problematised both by Christoph Markschies in his brief preface, and by the editors in their introduction, never in fact receives an agreed upon definition and is barely discussed as a concept by any of the contributors. Exceptions in this regard are Tobias Nicklas and Azzan Yadin-Israel. Both broadly endorse the view that, to quote the latter, here quoting Stefan Collini, an intellectual is a person of advanced learning. That seems to be, to some extent at least, the working definition of most of the contributors; and no one really engages with any of the difficulties highlighted by Christoph Markschies in his prefatory comments, where Weber's ultimately negative views on early Christianity's relationship to the intellectual are discussed. Related to this matter of definition, it might have been helpful in this context to have had one essay dedicated to a discussion of some of the categories in the ancient world which could be thought to approximate to our term intellectual, such as the ‘pepaideumenos’, so important for the so-called Second Sophistic, or, perhaps more controversially, the ‘sophistēs’. Such an essay could have been agenda-setting in some way and given the volume more shape than it in fact possesses, and allowed matters of Christian intellectual self-presentation, insofar as there was such a thing, to have been addressed in the way they are not in this volume. That said, certain themes do recur within the book, some of which reflect current trends in the broader study of late antique Christianity. In particular virtually every essay, in interestingly different ways, portrays the Christian intellectuals they discuss as reflective of trends within a wider pagan and sometimes Jewish world. Here, answering a question posed by the editors in their introduction, Christianity can look more like a movement within the Hellenic tradition than one which simply draws upon it (a distinction which some might see as overly simplistic), and this might be thought to be true even in a case like Tatian's, where Christians are seen as barbarians superior to the demon-inspired world of the Greeks. But some might think that this takes insufficient account of the distinctively Christian adaptations of such a tradition, however these are conceived. In this context it might have been useful if the editors had provided an afterword in which the question of whether there was such an entity in antiquity as ‘the Christian intellectual’, here conceived not simply in terms of a Christian who happened to be an intellectual, but an intellectual tradition which was somehow distinctively Christian, had been addressed.