The result is certainly interesting. We certainly get a sense of the public, vigorous and somewhat misogynist sexuality of the Romans. The account of the ascetiscism of the Dead Sea Scrolls Sect is certainly interesting. Hopkins' discussion of Christianity emphasizes the potential alternatives to the central doctrines that became Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. He then goes into considerable details about the world-views of Manicheanism and Gnosticism, with its own elaborate geneologies and cosmologies. Hopkins also emphasizes the strong tendencies towards acesticism within Christianity. "It is ideal that we should feel no desire," says one Christian intellectual. Hopkins goes into considerable detail about the Acts of Thomas, with its miracles and its emphasis on newly converted Christian wives refusing their pagan husbands. The book also benefits from plates of thirty illustrations which are well chosen. One important fact that Hopkins properly reminds us is that the early Church did not emphasize the Gospels. ("It seems amazing now that the New Testament was not recognized as a single set of privileged Christian scriptures before the end of the second century.") Their major polemical tool was trying to find prophecies of Jesus in the Old Testament. (The most famous of these is the classic mistranslation of Isaiah, in which the Hebrew, "A young woman shall conceive," was mangled into the Greek "A virgin shall conceive.") And so we get fascinating details about the topes of Christian martyrdom literture, about brother-sister marriages in Egypt, and pagan accusations of ritual murder against Christians.
At the same time one might want something more. The book is well researched but the contrast with Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians is striking. There Lane Fox patiently sifted through the whole range of somewhat scarce evidence to give a picture of surprising Pagan vitality on the eve of Constantine's conversion. By contrast Hopkins account is somewhat sketchier. Hopkins gives the most recent figures on the growth of Christianity, with perhaps 0.3% of the population of the Empire around 200 and maybe 10% by 300. But the reasons for this growth are not given in much detail. Hopkins suggests that Christianity offered a sense of community and structure (especially in charity) that allowed it to grow until Constantine's patronage ensured its triumph. It is not clear, however, from Hopkins' account, why only Christianity possessed these traits that allowed it to grow and why the Roman elite would look upon it as a new state religion. One wonders whether the emphasis on Gnosticism and Manicheanism really represent their importance at the time, though given the lack of evidence it is not surprising that Hopkins cannot tell us more. All in all, this is an interesting, somewhat eccentric book, which could use more sociology.
