As I came across a great answer here on this subreddit about how important the Church was to preserving the ancient world knowledge, a simple Google also had a New York Times book review about how early Christians were anti-intellectual.
I'm sure the matter is complex. I'm sure both has certain truth in them. I am mostly confused because one of my conductor friend, who would have studied history from music perspective, said she was mad to learn how much of the Greek music notes did not survive because of Catholic suppression and we will never know how they sounded.
So, how should we approach these opposing views?
Oh God, make it stop.
Seriously, I feel like dealing with this sort of stuff is like fighting the hydra, you cut off one head, and out come two more. I wrote about this here, /u/restricteddata did here, and so on. The fact that this book is getting breathlessly compared to Gibbon by journalists is a sign of the problem here. Nixey is a jounalist writing a polemic, not a historian writing history. The trotting out of a series of out of context narratives and extraordinarily dated historiography is evidence of that. The fact that Nixey repeatedly and uncritically cites Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman empire is alone disqualifying. It's practically an ancient text itself, useful only a reflection on Gibbon's own biases, not as any sort of serious scholarly work in a modern sense. Gibbon freely invents fun narrative details or draws on lurid sources from centuries afterwords to pepper his work with good stories, and Nixey seems to just tag along for the ride.
Almost every serious historian of the period who has looked at the thing has panned the work. He's not a professional, but I recommend this review, which, unlike Nixey, takes the time to engage meaningfully with modern scholarship. The fact of the matter is, these mass purges Nixey illustrates simply did not happen. There was conflict, certainly, but Christianity was not notably more or less violent or persecutory than other faiths. This was a violent and chaotic time, and both Christians and Pagans sometimes viewed their differences as a profound and dangerous conflict, and acted on those beliefs. Nor was Christianity notably anti-intellectual, as I and others have argued extensively here.
This is not a truth on both sides situation. This is a mediocre attempt at polemic that got traction because she's an engaging writer and a journalist with a platform. Medievalists have spent the past fifty plus years trying to crush this nonsense, and we've clearly failed. What Nixey perceives as whitewashing of Christian atrocities is actually the work of historians correcting the lurid anti-medieval bias of at least two centuries. As I said at the beginning, please, make it stop.