Vermes's rapid survey is impressive but a bit too neat. It isn't really possible to do justice to theologians as varied as the great Tertullian — perhaps Augustine's only rival in both eloquence and vehemence — or the astonishing Origen, with his vision of "universal restoration", in so compressed a compass. That his account is both highly readable and very persuasive will be no surprise to his admirers. His accomplishments, as one of the leading interpreters and translators of the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as a major historian of early Christianity, have been abetted by privileged insight: though born a Jew, in 1924, in the small Hungarian town of Makó, he later converted to Catholicism and became a priest, serving for over ten years before rediscovering his Jewish faith and leaving the priesthood in 1957. He thus has an insider's vantage point on both faiths and their traditions.

In the disciples' response to Jesus's saying on the rich man and the camel — "then, who can be saved?" — there is a tacit assumption; the disciples don't ask whether, say, a poor man can be saved but whether anyone at all can be saved. Why should the exclusion of the rich man imply the exclusion of "anyone"? The disciples' amazement may reflect certain attitudes prevalent in Roman society which Peter Brown explores in compelling detail in his new book. For, as he shows, "the poor", as a social category, simply did not occupy the attention of Romans in late antiquity; for them the crucial distinction was between Roman citizens, rich or poor, and non-citizens. Only citizens were entitled to receive the annona civica, the seasonal distribution of grain. The emphasis Jesus puts on the poor as an identifiable group of people regardless of citizenship appears to be something new and radical. But it would take some two centuries and the pressure as well as the machinations of Christian bishops and theologians, chief among whom was Ambrose of Milan, to establish this permanently within the society of Late Antiquity.  The change came slowly but it was momentous and much of what makes Brown's account of this process so enthralling is that he follows it in vivid and meticulous detail without ever once losing sight of the larger vista, the delicate interconnections that bound Romans together, whether Christian or not.

To call Through the Eye of a Needle Peter Brown's magnum opus seems something of an understatement; all his works, from his classic 1967 biography Augustine of Hippo through a dozen other books along with scores of articles and reviews, have partaken of the quality of magna opera. He has been foremost among the scholars who have over the past 50 years laid bare the contours of the period now universally acknowledged as that of Late Antiquity. (The success of this endeavour was confirmed by the publication in 1999 of Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World which Brown co-edited with Glen Bowersock and Oleg Grabar.) Nevertheless, to pay tribute to Brown's scholarly achievement alone — hardly possible anyway in a brief review — is to risk missing something obvious but unusual about his new work. First of all, this is a very big book: 530 pages of text are followed by 107 pages of notes and a further 76 pages of works cited in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, as well as Greek and Latin — though Brown notes, with a deft bibliographic twinkle, that "this is not a comprehensive bibliography of all the sources cited in this book". This should be daunting but it is not; for while the book is heavy to lift, it is even harder to put down. It makes utterly compelling reading.