This book is no easy read – and not just because the font size shrinks to almost nothing on a regular basis. It is clearly not meant as an accessible study with the general reader or undergraduate in view. It is exactly what its title claims it to be, a critical review in the first instance of how certain scholars in the last thirty years, many of them German, have reconstructed the history of Christianity in the first two centuries after the birth of Christ, looking above all at the account these scholars give of communities behind the New Testament texts. After the brief introduction chapters are devoted to ‘conventional’ studies, studies ‘from the perspective of feminist theology’, studies on social history, on Christianity in particular cities (Rome, Antioch, Philippi, Thessalonica, and Ephesus), and on particular topics within Early Church History. Within each chapter Lüdemann proceeds book by book providing abstracts and often trenchant, astringent, comments. Theissen, Meeks, Schüssler Fiorenza, are each examined and faulted (the latter, for example, for the thesis that ‘the first testimony to the resurrection came from women’, which Lüdemann sees as dependent on relatively late strands in the New Testament texts that cannot be held as historically reliable (p. 92).
Two substantial appendices (pp. 147–62, 163–77) deal with pre-Christian Gnosticism and with Theissen's A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion; these are in fact the best parts of the book. In the second, amongst much else, Theissen's view of the New Testament canon as ‘a confession of plurality’ is roundly rejected. Lüdemann aids teachers and scholars who wish to keep abreast of contemporary research, and take the measure of its variable worth, but that aid is strictly limited by the absence of any ‘maps’ of the local terrain; there is no guiding narrative of scholarly investigation and dispute; nor is there a subject index. Very few other than the odd reviewer would try to read this book from cover to cover, but in a world where people may be bewildered by the variety of books on contested subjects, and where theological pre-suppositions can unduly influence views of history, some will be grateful for the opportunity to consult this work to see what one highly learned scholar makes of studies by others in his field.
