The New Testament in its social environment

Summarizing the results of a growing body of significant modern scholarship, this book is concerned with the social realities of the early Christian communities. It places the New Testament, the people who wrote it, and the people who appear in it within the world of the first century. Further, it discusses the political, religious, economic, and social features of Palestine and of the cities of the Roman empire. The authors are a classicist and a New Testament specialist. Their book is rooted in the New Testament, but the New Testament as viewed from within the broad context of the Greco-Roman civilization in which the early Christians lived. This civilization, with its patterns of thought and social organization, influenced both how Christians looked at the surrounding world and how the world looked at Christians. -- Jacket flap.