Sabrina Inowlocki, "Ancient Apologetics and the Bibliographic Imagination" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity, presented by Ancient G Review. Hi, Mike Motia, and today we're talking with Sabrina Inovsky about ancient apologetics and the bibliographic imagination. Politics kinda has a bad reputation among historian. It it conjures images of I don't know, overconfident men making overconfident statements to people who want reasons to believe what they already believe. It it sounds more like No, doctrines in search of defenses, then evidence leading to understanding.

But one thing scholars of religion know is that groups almost never really like win theological arguments by presenting the most rational interpretation of shared evidence. What it takes to to really win, to to change common sense is to Convince people. that your texts and your evidence and your facts are the ones that really matter. The real fight is often not about how to interpret the data. It's about what data counts and who gets to say what counts as a good interpretation.

And once students get used to seeing theological controversies like this, whole social worlds can start to appear in what seem like obscure pointless arguments. Like the correctness of a translation. Starts to look less about like questions about verbs and more about questions like, you know, whose history is worth remembering.

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