Chapter 4 turns to Cyril’s response to Julian in Against Julian. It provides an extensive overview of the narrative structure behind Cyril’s arguments against Julian. After surveying the setting, characters, and plot that frame Cyril’s arguments, it examines two leitmotifs that are crucial to Cyril’s reasoning and then provides examples of “narrative moments” in Against Julian. In broad outlines, the chapter reviews the well-known contours of emerging orthodoxy in the early church. But as a focused analysis of Against Julian, it also provides broad coverage of a text that has been understudied to date and further illustrates how a “narrative structure” lies implicit in something like a polemical treatise. It shows, finally, that despite Cyril’s exemplary status with most Christian communities he still had unique and idiosyncratic perspectives, some of which play noteworthy roles in Against Julian.

This second chapter on Julian’s Against the Galileans traces the second movement of Julian’s strategy of narrative subsumption: charting the apostasies that cascaded from, first, the Hellenic and, then, the Hebrew traditions, culminating in the Christian sect. Having pointed out the basic compatibility between Hebrew and Hellenic doctrine, Julian emphasizes next the most significant difference between the two: the glaring inferiority of the Hebrew to the Hellenic tradition. This basic framework makes sense of Julian’s claim that Christians are double apostates: Christians started out as Hellenes, and their first mistake was of degree rather than kind: they opted for the lesser Hebrew tradition, rather than the Hellenic one. They latched onto a deviation within the Hebrew tradition, however, which became the grounds for their second apostasy, now away from the Hebrews, to create a new sect.

Juliette J. Day explores the profound meaning that texts have for liturgy. It is crucial, however, that texts are not considered as a narrow or equivocal category. To the contrary, texts provide an extraordinarily rich palette of genres, languages, and discourses, each of which deserves respect in its own right and which, moreover, has always to be seen in context.

The relevance of Christian liturgy can hardly be underestimated. Christians are present in most of the world’s cultures and societies today. Sometimes they are only tiny minorities. Sometimes these minorities are well respected, but the opposite can be equally true. Sometimes they are suppressed and even persecuted. In other cases Christians occupy a majority position, which enables them to celebrate and live their faith in the public realm. This position, which can but may not necessarily go back several centuries, also allows them to be in power and to staff the decision-making bodies at many levels of socio-economic and political life. Still other historical circumstances cause Christians to look back on an influential past and a lost impact. This often results in a fragmented situation with an uncertain outcome, which obviously comes with many challenges, not least for Christians themselves. This scenario is particularly the case in so-called secular cultures, characterized by sometimes dramatically rapid processes of pluralization and detraditionalization.

The Shepherd does not merely depict believers as enslaved persons, rather the very writtenness of the Shepherd itself – its composition, transmission, and readership – is inflected by the discourse of enslavement. I explore the Shepherd’s portrayal of Hermas as an enslaved person expected to copy the book given to him by the Church, to write and disseminate the Shepherd’s commandments to God’s enslaved persons, and to read aloud the visions and revelations he experienced to others. I put the Shepherd in conversation with Cicero and Pliny the Younger, who exemplify the use of enslaved persons for literary labor and the production of a “creative genius” or “sole author” through the labor of others. I note how the Shepherd, in line with other Christian revelatory literature like Revelation, is more explicit about the use of enslaved literary labor than many Roman texts and provides a rare avenue for exploring how ancient writers conceptualized and portrayed enslaved scribes. The Shepherd’s own composition and dissemination by Hermas is, I argue, inflected by its participation in the ancient Mediterranean discourse and logics of enslavement.

Bridget Nichols shows how important the bodily dimension of the liturgy is, especially because it is steadily associated with mental and cognitive activities. In this context, she pays particular attention to the role of the senses, which impacts greatly how not only big celebrations and ceremonies but also small gestures are experienced.

Joris Geldhof covers important elements of the liturgy’s evolution in the European Middle Ages, arguing that this concept itself is misleading with respect to what really happened. Both the liturgical rites and their theological and spiritual interpretations went through fascinating developments.

Chapter 1 begins with a selective history of Christian–Hellenic intellectual engagement (including a detailed introduction to Julian and Cyril) in order to show simultaneously (1) the historical uniqueness (thus significance) of Julian’s and Cyril’s polemical projects and (2) the fitness of Alasdair MacIntyre’s insights for making sense of their engagement. The second half of the chapter presents MacIntyre’s analysis of the dynamics when “two large-scale systems of thought and practice are in radical disagreement,” with Julian and Cyril in mind. What I call “narrative conflict” is only one part of the theory that emerges from his argument, the complete scope of which pushes us also to consider whether traditions so engaged might have non-intersecting forms of reasoning. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of what Julian’s and Cyril’s “narrative conflict” might contribute to how we think about religious and philosophical argument in late antiquity.

The book concludes by pointing out two major shifts that my reading of the Shepherd produces: one focused on how the centrality of slavery in the Shepherd that complicates earlier treatments of the text as most invested in baptism and/or repentance, and the other focused on the ethical and historical anxieties that emerge from the enslaved–enslaver relationship being so deeply embedded in early Christian literature, ethics, and subject formation. Additionally, I point to how my findings reveal why the Shepherd would be appealing to late ancient Christians: its visionary, dialogical, parabolic, and ethical content are aimed toward crafting obedient enslaved believers who were unified in their ecclesiastical vision. The work of feminist, womanist, Africana, and slavery studies scholars offer an intellectual and ethical scaffolding upon which I contend with the centrality in early Christian thought of God as an enslaver and believers as enslaved persons, as well as the continuations and challenges of the embeddedness of slavery in Christian vocabulary into the twenty-first century.