Wilken offers a fascinating look at the early Christians from an outsider's perspective. Usually, histories of the early church focus on the church and its members, taking their point of view. Wilken instead looks at contemporary Roman impressions of the new cult instead. What I found especially interesting were the number of similarities the Romans saw between the early Christians and other groups at the time, including other cults imported from the Middle East (such as that of Mithras) and fraternal organizations. This is a good corrective to the "inevitable" view of history, where because something - in this case a religion - eventually "won," we reason backwards that it must have looked exceptional from the beginning.

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