A World Full of Gods (review)

Abstract

In this book, Cambridge historian Keith Hopkins seems to write for a non-scholarly audience, perhaps the same audience that will meet him through his contribution to a BBC series on gladiators. He tackles a popular topic--the conflicts between paganism, Judaism, and Christianity in the first three centuries of the Common Era, and discusses sources that are not well known outside the scholarly community--from ancient erotic art to apocryphal gospels. Motivated perhaps both by intellectual conviction and by the need to capture the attention of his intended audience, Hopkins employs all the tools of the postmodern historian. A World Full of Gods combines fictional narrative, traditional objective history, and critiques of the book itself. The question is, does the book [End Page 474] work for the intended audience? Does it present the evidence accurately, in a stimulating way, and draw defensible conclusions? Does it simplify for a non-scholarly audience, but not oversimplify? The reviewer is at something of a disadvantage because Hopkins has anticipated criticism and, in effect, written his own reviews by including critical comments from fictional colleagues (see 44-45 for an example).