Following a broadly Weberian scheme of reading the history of early Christianity as one in which spiritual charisma was progressively replaced by a deadening ecclesiastical hierarchy, Rudolph Hirzel concludes that the rise of Christianity entailed the virtual demise of the ancient dialogue. Implicit in this stance is an adherence to an influential and long-standing intellectual scheme that regards societies that value open dialogues as categorically better than the ones that do not. Classical Athenian society receives frequent praise for its intellectual openness even as the Greek ‘invention’ of the ancient dialogue form is itself regarded as one of the signal achievements of western culture that most deserves admiration and emulation. When the turn came for subsequent societies to be judged in accordance with their degree of openness to dialogue, the putative Athens of Socrates and Plato came to be accepted as the benchmark against which all other societies would be measured. Given the prevalence of such an underlying intellectual framework, the question of whether early Christians ‘dialogued’ in a significant manner entails not only the tasks of identifying sources and analysing them appropriately but also that of undertaking a frank appraisal of our own starting assumptions.