“In this book,” Laura Nasrallah writes at the beginning of her impressively erudite study, “I bring together literary texts and archaeological remains to help us to understand how religious discourse emerges not in some abstract zone, but in lived experiences and practices in the spaces of the world” (1). She explores within a deep context of Greek and Roman art and architecture what was at stake in second-century Christian self-representations.

Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture is not a broad art-historical study; it focuses on a small number of Christian writers best known for their vitriolic addresses to the emperors. As such, it is surely needed; scholarship on the apologists generally falls short, caught up in explaining or justifying their vituperative rhetoric against the bullying cultural hegemony of imperial Rome. Nasrallah approaches her texts with a deft hand, and she is sympathetic to the apologists, insisting that they be understood not in isolation but in relation to broader cultural currents. This much is not new; it was (as she duly notes) already present in the work of, for instance, Werner Jaeger and Rebecca Lyman. However, Nasrallah’s emplacement of the apologists in the midst of vigorous “culture wars” includes, for the first time, considering how these Christians negotiated space and place, especially crafted images and the built environment. She accomplishes this with the provocative juxtaposition of one set of Christian texts or figures with one building, statue, or classical work of art.

Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture is divided into three parts. The two chapters in part 1 investigate particular ways that Roman Christians framed their world conceptually. In the first chapter, Nasrallah reads apologies in light of the Second Sophistic. To disrupt the misperception of an apology as a) exclusively Christian, and b) exclusively literary, Nasrallah argues that, like Justin Martyr’s apologies, a fountain dedicated by Regilla, wife of Herodes Atticus, “constitutes a form of address to the Roman imperial family, articulated in Greek idiom” (23). Chapter 2 focuses on “geographical thinking” (53). Here, Nasrallah places together the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias with Lucian, Tatian, and Justin as “traveling men” who draw on the topos of the itinerant philosopher wandering through a souk of religious and philosophical options. She invokes Vitruvius’s account of a shipwrecked traveler who requires only paideia to fit into a foreign household or country, thus redefining Lucian, Tatian, and Justin as Vitruvian men engaged, as outsiders, with the task of “passing” as Roman citizens. With that, she invokes postcolonial and feminist theory: “The Sebasteion at Aphrodisias,” she writes, “engages geographical thinking and helps to make sense of second-century provincial traveling men’s rhetoric of the vulnerability—the feminization—of their bodies within the inhabited world. Even more, it highlights the vulnerability of female and enslaved bodies, and how the use and abuse of those bodies was sanctioned by extant systems of domination and their claims to piety” (83). Justin, Tatian, and Lucian are vulnerable, Nasrallah argues, “because of their proximity to or embracing of barbarian identity” (83).

In part 2, Nasrallah focuses on cities. Chapter 3 continues exploring “geographical thinking” to investigate how some early Christian communities imagined the space of the oikoumene, the inhabited Empire. Nasrallah reads the Book of Acts in light of the Panhellenion, the league of Greek cities established by Hadrian. The work of Susan Alcock and the concept of space as a “memory theater” (Susan Alcock, Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscape, Monuments, and Memory, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011) prompts Nasrallah to see Luke-Acts as doing similar conceptual work as did the Romanization of the Athenian agora; invoking the language of the Septuagint and monumental traditions regarding the earliest Jesus movement, the book retells the “epic of the people of Israel, reconfiguring its literary spaces for a new (Christian) Israel” (117).

In chapter 4, Nasrallah uses mimesis as a guiding theme, bringing together the Forum of Trajan and Justin as two “roughly contemporaneous ‘texts’ that shed light on each other because both participate in a similar discourse, manifest in words and images, of justice, religion, culture, and power in the spaces of the Roman Empire” (123). Mimesis is not merely image-making in the limited sense of the word; it is the desire (and concomitant failure) to replicate the realm of the gods on earth, which sets the stage for the Christian critique of the insufficiencies of that representation. Postcolonialism, again, provides a dominant conceptual frame, in her utilization of concepts such as hybridity and interpellation.

Part 3 places in dialogue individual images with literary texts. Chapter 5 examines Athenagoras’s account of euhemerized gods (Leg. 28–30) with Commodus’s self-presentation as Herakles in a provocative bust now at Rome’s Capitoline Museum. Chapter 6 moves to the Syrian apologist Tatian’s catalogue of images in his Oratio ad Graecos (33–34). In the seventh and final chapter, the Knidian Aphrodite takes center stage in Greco-Roman accounts of the love affair between Aphrodite and Ares, particularly in Clement of Alexandria’s cautions on the dangers of statues of the gods. The book concludes with an epilogue, bibliography, and indices.

Nasrallah exhibits an astonishing mastery of the relevant bibliography, including detailed footnotes on virtually every page. She also writes eloquently. As part of a new movement in scholarship that does not demarcate Christian rhetoric from other pagan writers in the Second Sophistic, Nasrallah refuses to draw a line in the sand between Christians and non-Christians; she herself admits, “I am trying to shift the scholarly map” (84) that sequesters apologists such as Justin and Tatian from the broader cultural conversations of their day. Rather than a simpler paradigm of Christian versus pagan, Nasrallah sees second-century “culture wars” articulated through social class, gender, use of language, and the use of representational art. These lines of fission run deeply through the topography of empire, and in Nasrallah’s vision even the dozens of statues in public spaces contend with each other and with living bodies for recognition or reverence. Nasrallah sees the Christian apologists as not so much engaged in a debate that served to distinguish themselves from pagans and Jews as from the religious behaviors of the poor, on the one hand, and the very rich, on the other. Here, she is surely correct. Highlighting the use of images in these religious behaviors—the interpretive slippage between an image of a god and an image of an emperor, for example—is Nasrallah’s particular gift to the reader.

Nasrallah keeps to a relatively restricted canon of Christian authors—Justin, Tatian, Athenagoras, and Clement of Alexandria. I would have liked to have seen how an educated Christian intellectual such as Valentinus would have factored into her arguments, since indeed Valentinus’s surviving fragments betray a thinker who drew deeply from the wellspring of artistic metaphor. Did he negotiate this territory differently from Justin? And does Nasrallah’s resolute disruption of a single Christian attitude to empire—by steadfastly including side-by-side those non-Christians like Lucian, Aelius Aristides, or Cassius Dio who similarly engaged in anti-imperial rhetoric—remove the exclusivity of vision which the apologists themselves so vigorously asserted?

A second critical question: Is there enough art history here to engage art historians? Despite her deployment of broad terms—city, geography, body, space, reception—Nasrallah comes across as vaguely timid when engaging images and space directly. For example, her focus in chapter 5 on the image of Commodus/Herakles as a statue of a god/man of the type that bothered Athenagoras is provocative, but nonetheless the linkage between apologist and art is not directly felt. Although it is clear from the footnotes that Nasrallah knows her scholarship on viewing practices in Roman art, she seems reluctant to move onto more speculative ground, making more concrete the tenuous links between things written and things seen/space experienced.

This is, overall, a careful book, and Nasrallah’s concern for the material, her sense of responsibility for her scholarship, is meticulous. She never forces an interpretation, particularly an ungenerous reading. The apologists are an unpopular bunch in modern scholarship, because all too often their cantankerous rants are taken too seriously. Nasrallah lovingly rehabilitates them, allowing scholars to evaluate their belligerence in a new light. What the apologists did not like—which, frankly, was most things about Roman culture—becomes the result of their own internalized experience of vulnerability in a postcolonial frame, or the contempt for imperial power (not for paganism per se) that comes from a subaltern like Justin’s defiant conviction that the cross he venerates is a secret archetypal stamp of which the emperor, in his shoddy attempt to depict himself like a god, remains entirely oblivious.

One final minor quibble: the book’s title is wordy and difficult to remember; the subtitle probably would have worked better. But there, the phrase “the second-century Church” assumes the very sort of monolithic Christianity against which Nasrallah rightfully contends in the course of the book itself. It also misleads the reader into thinking that the focus of the book is the second century, whereas there is a great deal to offer here for those interested in the development of Christianity in the late first century. It is a shame to exclude that particular audience, who has a great deal to learn from this elegant and thought-provoking volume. For art historians, those most interested in viewing and the viewer’s experience of the built environment in ancient Rome are most likely to be engaged by this book’s unique and brilliantly conceived approach.