J’s Reviews > The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity > Status Update

Brown is an incredibly gifted prose stylist. Chapter on Paul and the Corinthians is exegetically weak. No contemporary Jew OR Roman would recognize Brown's Paul, who seems to come as a bolt out of the blue. But the sections on Tertullian, Tatian, and the Encratites are all very well done. Connections drawn between sex and death and the melancholy of procreation are fascinating.