Nasrallah juxtaposes texts and artefacts to explore how Christian apologists responded to the Roman world and its claims of ethnic identity and religious piety. Part One begins by assessing the problems with the modern classification of ‘apology’ as an ancient genre that did not have such a characterization in antiquity. Here N. seeks to contextualize the Christian works within the broader political and cultural concerns that came out of the so-called Second Sophistic. She contends that, just as the apologists addressed emperors about issues of piety, so too did such Roman archaeological remains as the Fountain of Regilla and Herodes Atticus ‘speak’ about the value and acquisition of Greek paideia in high Roman society. N. does well to re-align the apologies not as works held in opposition to other religious traditions but as works involved in broader ‘cross-cultic and cross-ethnic conversations about the nature of true religion and right ritual’ (50). N. then looks at how the ‘truth-seeking’, ‘barbarian’ travellers Justin Martyr, Tatian, and Lucian (re)assessed Roman authority and the appropriation of Greek paideia in their movements through the Empire. The subservience (even feminization) of the natural world and nations (ethnē) to Rome on the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias are presented as a visual example of Roman claims to geographical, ethnical, and cultural authority over the oikoumenē gē (‘inhabited world’) in the second century a.d. Though N. offers an admirable discussion of how the ‘barbarian’ travellers, representing vulnerable, feminized bodies, questioned such claims of Rome as the cultural and ethnical epicentre of paideia in the Empire, her juxtaposition of texts and artefact feels somewhat disconnected.

Part Two moves into the cities and tackles the geographical attitude of Luke-Acts. N. proposes that Paul's travels to Greek cities are best understood in light of political and cultural discourses about ‘being Greek under Rome’ that characterized much of the imperial actions during the so-called Second Sophistic. N. goes to lengths to draw similarities between the formation of a pan-Christian league brought about by Paul's travels and the formation of the Panhellenion by Hadrian. But while Hadrian sought to reconfigure Greek identity and Greek paideia with Roman culture and ideologies, Luke's use of Paul's movement through the Greek landscape offered a Christian oikoumenē that spoke of a universal religious identity. Ch. 4 discusses Justin Martyr's Apologies as a second-century text produced during a crisis of representation, in which mimēsis or imitation, an accusation typically directed at Christianity, was used by Justin to illuminate the gap between true representations and deceptive mimicries. N. presents an interesting contrast to the claims about true piety, justice and power by the Roman imperial family as made on the Column of Trajan and Justin's reaction that such claims of self-representation served only to propagate the confused pagan imitation of true religion (Christianity). She explores how Justin used the purest form of Greek philosophical thought (Socrates) to show that Christians were not atheists, as wrongly named by the Roman judicial system, but ‘the new height of classical Greek courage, philosophical depth and integrity’ (146).

Part Three delves into the blurred boundaries between representations and their referents. N. begins with Athenagoras' concern in his Embassy with the potential for images to be usurped, thus opening the door for mimēsis or mis-representation. Though her juxtaposition of Embassy with a roughly contemporaneous work of art representing the emperor to whom Athenagoras addressed his treatise, the well-known Capitoline portrait of Commodus as Herakles, offers what seems to be the most direct discourse between text and image so far, this is a missed opportunity, with N.'s attention focused predominately on Athenagoras. She presents a comprehensive discussion of Athenagoras' use of Middle Platonic philosophy to highlight the gap between a name and its essence, and his assurance that unlike pagan élites, who rendered themselves as gods in stone, Christians would not be deluded into believing that material matter could embrace a divine essence. The last chapters are concerned with re-forming the eye towards a Christian vision. First, Tatian's To the Greeks, in which he blamed the misleading pedagogical lessons being offered to the public through the Roman acquisition of a Greek artistic heritage on ‘the connoisseurs of culture’ (247). Christian eyes must be wary of claims to a pure ‘Greekness’ and righteous paideia being made by what were essentially portrayals of the spoils of Greek culture. N. turns finally to Clement of Alexandria's Exhortation and its opposition to the prolific Aphrodite of Knidos. N. does a fine job of fleshing out Clement's desire to trace the social life of ‘divine’ objects so as not to induce confusion between true divinity and material matter, for mankind, being fashioned in God's image, and not insensate stone, is the true representation of God.

N. admits that there was no direct discourse between the images and texts under discussion, and one wonders throughout the extent of any actual dialogue between these literary and archaeological spheres in antiquity. Her interdisciplinary engagement of image and text is commendable but her obvious familiarity with the literary texts is unmatched in her treatment of the archaeological material. These criticisms are not to detract from the fresh and insightful contribution to early Christian studies N. offers, but serve to remind us of the inherent dilemmas when juxtaposing textual and visual ‘texts’.