Reviewed by: Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West, ca. 70 C.E. to the Iraq War by Philippe Buc Heather Barkman Philippe Buc, Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West, ca. 70 C.E. to the Iraq War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2015) viii + 448 pp. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, considerable ink has been spilled examining the broad connections between religion and violence. Philippe Buc’s Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence and the West is marks a significant contribution to this ever-growing scholarly corpus. Buc’s main goal is “to sketch out how a fairly systematic set of beliefs and conceptions, Christianity, has left an imprint on violence: in other words, to draw the contours of what is specific to Christian and post-Christian violence” [End Page 266] (2). He argues that Christianity’s rhetoric accounts for “quite idiosyncratic forms of violence” (2) that can be clearly traced across centuries and locations. Indeed, this dense work examines the rhetoric of violence over a truly impressive span of time and geography. The historical contexts that Buc considers include: the Jewish War (66–73 ce), Christian martyrdom in Late Antiquity, the post-Constantinian Era, the high medieval crusades, the early modern Wars of Religion, the French Revolution, colonial America, and the post-9/11 wars on terror. In light of the vast scholarship examining each of these individual categories, Buc demonstrates an incredible proficiency at maneuvering between time periods and drawing connections between rhetoric used centuries apart. It is not uncommon to see references to multiple time periods on the same page (as, for example, he quotes from the apostle Paul [ca. 62 ce], the Church Father Jerome [d. 420 ce], the American theologian Henry Boynton Smith [1853], and the canonist Gratian [12th century] on p. 73). Throughout the chapters, he continues to refer widely to an impressive diversity of sources. The introduction provides the foundations and justifications for the approach of the rest of the study. Buc anticipates several criticisms of his sweeping scope. For example, he recognizes that some may find his use of certain frameworks on disparate historical circumstances to be problematic since they “dehistoricize” the ways in which these ideas were originally intended. However, Buc successfully asserts that his approach allows for greater understanding of religion’s role as “a force” for motivating people’s actions across time periods and contexts (9–11). The introduction also provides a chronological overview of the historical contexts that he will discuss in the subsequent chapters, which proves to be a helpful guide for the reader in anticipation of the more intricate structure found throughout the remainder of the book. The first chapter situates American wars as being particular to Western Christianity and to Christian understandings of issues like freedom, martyrdom, purity, and universalism. Connecting rhetoric from the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the war on terror, Buc skillfully identifies several commonalities. For example, he establishes that Americans view their wars as having worldwide ramifications, and that “American causes are swiftly consecrated by the blood of ‘martyrs’ and ‘heroes’” (49). Throughout, these particular American examples are contextualized within other broader historical events—e.g., the American war martyrs are connected to sixteenth-century martyrs of the Protestant Reformation (60). Buc attentively explores the role of Christian exegesis on violence in his second chapter, noting, for example, the multiple binaries that are common in late antique and early Medieval Christian thought: war and peace, justice and mercy, the letter and the spirit, the Old and New Testaments, State and Church. Connecting the scriptures to the crusades, Buc argues that warfare can be viewed simultaneously as “literal, moral, and allegorical” (91). Buc himself uses these various viewpoints throughout his work and this allows him to successfully connect violent rhetoric with violent actions over the centuries. In the third chapter, Buc usefully examines the various historical and cultural factors that drive the characterization of martyrs (and terrorists) as mad or [End Page 267] mentally imbalanced. He adeptly argues for an ancient link to such conceptions, drawing on a variety of examples, including Josephus’s description of the Jewish rebels...