According to David Wheeler-Reed in this engaging and ambitious book, Michel Foucault “was essentially right” (xv). The author is referring not to Foucault’s influential History of Sexuality, but to a remark he made in a lecture in New York in 1980: “so called Christian morality is nothing more than a piece of pagan ethics inserted into Christianity” (xiv). This claim reverberates through both the modern and ancient sections of the present book, echoing its central argument: that when modern institutions boast of their ‘Judeo- Christian values’ and accompanying notions of ‘traditional marriage’, they are actually referring to historical contingencies that look a lot more like Augustus’ marriage legislation than anything recognisably biblical or early Christian. In fact, what the Pauline New Testament did for the ancient world was to “normalize singleness and celibacy” (xviii), instituting a cultural trend that would dominate in the early Christian world down to the fourth century CE. This way of thinking might not surprise the scholar of early Christianity, but the author is quite right to suggest it is a view of history that has proven far less enduring in the modern imagination, even among those institutions that lay claim to biblical and historical expertise.