I think that Professor Tim Whitmarsh of Cambridge University description of the book is fitting: “a finely crafted, invigorating polemic against the resilient popular myth that presents the Christianisation of Rome as the triumph of a kinder, gentler politics.”
Christianity had its ISIS and Taliban phase in the fourth and fifth century, which is also upheld by other books on the subject. There is a tendency in the book to tell the story in personalised narratives, revealing her intentions to show up the fact that the Greeks and Romans were not just ruthless vandals, but were working at developing a society in which debate is open and ideas were being exchanged. The idolatry that Christians took offence to was tradition in their minds, that had withstood the test of centuries and the general feeling was that many gods meant that everyone could find their own devotion.
Of course, if one comes and demands that there is only one jealous God, who demands that people believe the doctrine of the church to be saved, then the idols were a problem. What seems to be apparent is that there was also a great deal of hysteria. The zealousness of the martyrs is well documented and would be considered very strange by today’s standards.
“… most of us would find Christians truly cast in the New Testament mold fairly obnoxious: civically reprobate, ideologically unsound, economically destructive, politically irresponsible, socially discreditable, and really just a bit indecent.”
“… one thing in remarkably short supply in the New Testament is common sense. The Gospels, the epistles, Acts, Revelation—all of them are relentless torrents of exorbitance and extremism: commands to become as perfect as God in his heaven and to live as insouciantly as lilies in their field; condemnations of a roving eye as equivalent to adultery and of evil thoughts toward another as equivalent to murder; injunctions to sell all one’s possessions and to give the proceeds to the poor, and demands that one hate one’s parents for the Kingdom’s sake and leave the dead to bury the dead. This extremism is not merely an occasional hyperbolic presence in the texts; it is their entire cultural and spiritual atmosphere.”
The First Christians Were Not Like Us, By David Bentley Hart Christ’s Rabble | Commonweal Magazine
David Bentley Hart is an American Orthodox theologian and philosopher. His areas of specialisation are philosophical theology, religious studies, Christian metaphysics, Asian religions, patristics and aesthetics. He writes further in the essay: “The New Testament emerges from a cosmos ruled by malign celestial principalities (conquered by Christ but powerful to the end) and torn between spirit and flesh (the one, according to Paul, longing for God, the other opposing him utterly). There are no comfortable medians in these latitudes, no areas of shade. Everything is cast in the harsh light of final judgment, and that judgment is absolute. In regard to all these texts, the qualified, moderate, common-sense interpretation is always false.”
I think it is quite in harmony with these words that Nixey portrays the Christians of the day. It also explains why the scenes she so aptly describes go against what we would like to believe. I would agree that the book does tend to only mention the cruelty of the Romans as an aside, but she takes it as already well proven.