The World of the Early Church

"To many students of the New Testament the environment into which the Christian gospel was born is an unknown world. They read it only in the light of their own time and interpret it by their own experience. In reality, its several books were written for a culture that has long since passed out of existence and for modes of thought that are not remembered or understood by the modern world, except for professional scholars. That culture, however, bears a remarkable parallelism to our own in many