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I was simply delighted to find this book but once I read it I regretted buying it.  It is misleading in quite a few places and outright wrong in others. Sometimes I felt like the authors were simply lying to their audience.  I learned more about Roman paganism by reading the biography of Cicero by Anthony Everitt and I learned more about Persian and Babylonian paganism in the first sixty pages of Persian Fire by Tom Holland.  The section on Rome seems to imply that we do not and can not know very much about Ancient Roman religious practice, when the opposite is true, then in the bibliography of the section only two volumes are listed!  The sections of Israel and Christianity were full of erroneous information, so much so I felt like it was a purposeful propaganda campaign design to discredit Christianity and Judaism.  The most valuable reason for reading the book is to find out what the latest attacks are against the Church.  The allegation of “magic” in Christianity and Judaism, for example, shows a complete lack of understanding of religious practice in both religions.

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