ABSTRACT
This book is intended in part as background, and in part as a protest. As background, it has the modest aim of setting out the contexts
(historical, social, political and cultural) within which the activities of Paul of Tarsus and other figures in the earliest history of Christianity outside Palestine are to be seen. Christianity is, of course, a historical religion, in that its appearance at a particular time and in a particular place is not just incidental, but is intrinsic to the way it is to be understood. However we wish to approach it (historically, theologically or spiritually) it is relevant that it sprang from first-century Judaism, that it first developed as a separate, new religion within the hellenised communities of the eastern Mediterranean, and that the whole process took place within the Roman Empire.
