Glen Bowersock writes:

Martin Goodman’s book, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Civilisations, turns Tertullian’s problem on its head. The Christian sophist, as T.D. Barnes called him, posed his question about Jerusalem in Rome’s own language. But Goodman is not really trying to explore Christian origins, although early Christianity contributes inevitably to the story of the contact between Rome and the Jews. What Goodman does is describe Jewish-Roman relations before the calamitous war that led to the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70; he then suggests what caused this and what happened in its wake. It is in his final section that those renegade Jews who became Christians begin to complicate the relations of Rome with the Jews as a whole, and Goodman gives a searching account of the deterioration of Roman-Jewish relations.

(LRB 22 February 2007)

Allen Lane | hardback 638 pp. |ISBN: 9780713994476