Citifying Jesus: The Making of an Urban Religion in the Roman Empire, Emiliano RubensUrciuoli, Tübingen, MohrSiebeck, 2024 (ISBN 9783161623714), x + 309 pp., Hb €139.00

Urciuoli's Citifying Jesus is a brilliant, generative book that deserves a wide readership among scholars of religion, history, critical geography and especially early Christianity. Born of a residency with the Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe on ‘Religion and Urbanity’ housed at the Max Weber Centre at the University of Erfurt, every chapter of the book has been heavily vetted by an internationally renowned cohort of scholars and bears the fruit of astute thinking and analysis. More scholars are finally beginning to acknowledge the necessity of attending to spatial phenomena in the study of religion, and Urciuoli's work is an excellent example of such careful attention. Those picking up Citifying Jesus who may not be deeply familiar with the ‘spatial turn’ in the study of religion and adjacent fields, or more specifically, the recent advances in the study of urban religion, may be forgiven for simply expecting an update to Wayne Meeks' influential The First Urban Christians. Urciuoli's text does not address the earliest period of the Jesus movement's shift to the cities as Meeks does, looking more closely to the second through fifth centuries of the common era for ‘citifying’ developments in ‘Christ religion’, but it provides far more than an update, or an extension of Meeks' work (p. 25). Concerned less with doctrinal developments and Christian theories of space or city (with the exception of Chapter 9 on Augustine's City of God), Citifying Jesus focuses most closely on the urban spatial practices evidenced by adherents to Christ religion and the shaping effects of city life and built environment on the characteristics of Christ religion itself. For scholars looking for a crash course on many aspects of the ‘spatial turn’ in Religious Studies and recent scholarship in the area of ‘urban religion’, Urciouli's dense introduction (pp. 1–42) is invaluable. But Citifying Jesus is far more than a useful ‘state of the field’ resource. What Urciouli has done is take careful notice of the reality of early Christ religion as an urban religion, and marshal a deep bench of urban theorists rarely considered in early Christian studies, for analysing and explicating Christ religion as a ‘citified’ religion. It is a rare thing to come across a book on the early Christian movement, drawing heavily upon critical theories not yet widely adopted in the field, which manages to do justice both to the spirit of the theory being appropriated and to the late antique texts and phenomena being analysed, but Urciuoli's Citifying Jesus is exactly such a book. What is particularly refreshing is the degree to which Urciuoli has digested the work of such a wide swath of critical theorists of space (among them Bourdieu, Debord, Harvey, Jacobs, Lefebvre and Simmel most prominently) and yet deployed a light touch in the use of their theory. He does not shoehorn theory into his analysis of late antique textual remains (including those of Augustine, Clement of Alexandria, Cyprian, Eusebius of Caesarea, Hermas, Justin and Tertullian) and phenomena (e.g., street poverty [Chapter 4], martyrdom [Chapter 6], and intellectual production). Where there is modest interpretive gain from the application of his method to the material in question, he does not press his case (e.g., resonances between Situationist tactics and the Martyrdom of Polycarp in Chapter 6). His care to ensure a contextually nuanced historiography is generally robust. As Edward Soja said in his influential Postmodern Geographies, ‘historians … continue to write some of the best geographies of the past’; Citifying Jesus is an excellent example. What Urciuoli's text also shares with Meeks's, and what is perhaps its greatest strength, is its potential to spur further excellent work and sharpen the methodological tools commonly deployed in the study of early Christianity. Urciuoli's appropriation of theory is eclectic: as Meeks wrote of his own approach in The First Urban Christians, it is ‘piecemeal, as needed, [and] where it fits’. And no doubt, like Meeks expected in the reception of his own work, ‘this … approach will be distasteful to the purist’. However, for those readers willing to consider new options, the banquet of possibilities Urciuoli sets is irresistible. Readers may quibble with an authorial choice here or there (e.g., how expansively should one construe characteristics of the ‘urban’? Are secrecy [Chapter 5 on the Epistle to Diognetus], or intellectual production [Chapter 7 on ‘Cyprian's Management of a Heterarchical Crisis’] inherently urban phenomena?) or may dispute details of Urciuoli's claims at times (e.g., doesn't Pliny's letter to Trajan [Epistulae X.96] provide early evidence of discernible effects of Christ religion on a city economy [pp. 99–100]? Doesn't the Acts of Paul and Thecla suggest that Paul was a ‘freelance Christian religious expert’ living with Onesiphorus in destitution ‘on the street’ [p. 111]?). And, no fault to the author, Mohr Siebeck is clearly not putting adequate energy into proofreading that prevents approximately an error per page. But the overall effect of the work stands with strength: Citifying Jesus shows that Christ religion in the second through fifth centuries was significantly shaped by (and itself also came to shape) the phenomena of city life in a wide variety of ways. Moreover, attention to these various shaping dynamics, and the theories that illuminate them, is necessary to achieve a more accurate understanding of the movement and its development. This is an erudite and creative book, not only for many of its insightful applications of urban theories in interpreting aspects of the textual and material remains of the early Christian movement (Chapter 3 ‘(Good) People Next Door: Christ Religion in the Neighborhood’ and Chapter 8 ‘Time to Build: Christians' “Right to the City” Between Dura and Tyre’ are particularly good), but for its generative and open-handed approach to further interpretive possibilities. Every chapter represents a foray in a new direction, deploying the work of additional theorists in a new context, but in almost every instance, rather than exhausting the possibilities in his analysis, Urciuoli opens the way for others either to mine further along the same vein, or to draw upon his method for further areas of inquiry. There are few books in this or adjacent fields, as well versed in critical theories of space, that open such a wide vista of possibilities for future work. Urciuoli gives a great gift to scholars of early Christianity in Citifying Jesus. It is one we would be wise not to squander.