This monograph has two aims: to consider Epiphanius as a figure of interest to scholars in his own right, and not merely as a retailer of more original speculations; and to temper (if not to refute) the perennial charges of mendacity, malevolence and wilful misperception. A scholar who is familiar with the works of this indefatigable gadfly will congratulate Kim on the first of these aims and wish him good luck with the second. As the first chapter admits, there are few reliable materials for a biography, once we discount the bilious and fanciful Life of Epiphanius. From Socrates we learn that Epiphanius was born in Palestine and studied in Egypt: the dates remain uncertain and Jerome's statement that he was a pupil of Hilarion, whose very existence is questionable, should have been treated by Kim with more reserve (p. 21). Kim notes that, on the evidence of the Panarion, the ascetics whom Epiphanius encountered in Egypt will have included both Origenists and Hieracites, who seemed to him deficient in their understanding of the resurrection (pp. 22–31). He may also have been acquainted with Melitian accounts of the estrangement of this sect from the recognised patriarchs Alexander and Athanasius (p. 32), the latter of whom was his intellectual lodestar. The one event in his life that he commemorates, however, is his rejection of the enticements of a dissolute group of Gnostics (p. 35–7). Kim argues that, rather than questioning his veracity, we should try to discover his purpose in recounting this adventure, which turns out, platitudinously enough, to be the demonstration of his own expertise (p. 39). Kim appears to suspend his scepticism on p. 43 when he asserts that this near-seduction ‘must have been a shock’ to the adolescent saint.

Among the more interesting, if least felicitous, of the eccentricities of the Panarion is the identification of the first four heresies (there are eighty in all) as barbarism, Scythianism, Hellenism and Judaism. Kim observes that precedents for ‘reimagined’ history can be found in the Book of Jubilees, Julius Africanus and Eusebius; the source for this taxonomy however, is Colossians iii.11 (pp. 45, 59). The ‘lack of reference’ to the role of demons in the fall (p. 58) might seem less remarkable to Kim if his list of forerunners had included Athanasius. On the other hand, the unprecedented ignorance of the chapters on Greek philosophy – what is ‘the egg-cosmography of Epicurus?’ – is mildly punished by the epithet ‘shallow’ (p. 74), and the ‘criticisms of Epiphanius's inconsistency’ with regard to the Samaritans cannot be silenced merely by smiling that ‘the discrepancy has not gone unnoticed’ (p. 78). In chapter iii, where Palestine is the field of labour, Kim attempts to date the conversation of Epiphanius with Joseph of Tiberias (pp. 85–7), his exposure of Eutaktos the Archontic (p. 92) and his collision with Peter the Hermit (pp. 93–5). As ever, one does not know how much allowance to make for retrospective fabling, and want of data obliges Kim to devote the second half of this chapter to the ‘re-imagining of the Holy land’ by other authors, whose fantasies are paradoxically said to make up ‘the world in which Epiphanius began his monastic ministry’ (p. 103). By contrast, documentation for the fourth chapter, on the development of Epiphanius as a theologian, is abundant, and Kim is able, after a deft review of the Arian controversy and differing evaluations of it in modern scholarship, to show that the assertion of ‘one hypostasis’ in the Ancoratus is not a blunder but a fair epitome of the position taken by the Athanasian party in the mid-fourth century. Epiphanius shifts in the Panarion to a doctrine of three hypostases in one ousia; this act, however, scarcely explodes the common perception of him as a ‘rigid dogmatist’ (p. 136), for it is possible to hold two positions at different times with equally rigid and dogmatic zeal.

Indeed we read on p. 144 that ‘for Epiphanius there was no place where an orthodox and a heretic could commingle’. This was the reason, as Kim surmises in chapter v, for his failure to obtain a bishopric in Palestine, for Caesarea was occupied by the heterodox Acacius, Eleutheropolis could not be secured without his patronage and even Jerusalem ceased to be an asylum of orthodoxy after the consecration of Cyril (pp. 143–51). I would question the utility of dwelling on alternative scenarios when the true course of events is barely known to us, and I welcome the return to ascertainable facts when Kim proceeds to recount the elevation of Epiphanius to the bishopric of Salamis in Cyprus, his alienation from Apollinarius and his interrogation of the latter's supporters on the island (pp. 159–69). The statements in the Life of Epiphanius on the prevalence of heresy in Cyprus (p. 157) ought in my view to be treated with the scepticism that Kim reserves for the hagiographic account of his consecration (p. 155). The subject of chapter vi is the Panarion, and while Kim regularly exaggerates the rhetorical talents of Epiphanius (whose prose is an object lesson in the difference between education and wit), he is right to commend the ingenuity of his herpetological metaphors. Chapter vii, on the other hand, appears to give up the case for the defence: no one reading of his provocations to John of Jerusalem and John Chrysostom, carried out in defiance of charity and with little first-hand knowledge of the opinions entertained by his antagonists, can acquit the roving bishop of intemperance, misanthropy and calculated intrigue. His malediction on the patient Chrysostom (‘may you not die a bishop’) is strangely attenuated on pp. 234–5 to ‘I hope that you do not die a bishop’, and Sozomen's ‘suspect’ story of his repentance when he finally met the men whom he had calumniated is placed seductively at the end of the book. It has not been proved, for all Kim's excellent scholarship, that Epiphanius was a ‘giant’ (p. 236), let alone that he ‘was late antiquity’ (p. 1).