Introduction

Any account of the religious history of the Roman Empire has to incorporate the victory of Christianity and the defeat of paganism, or - to put it in another way, which is perhaps only a little less one-sided - the conversion of the pagans. For the course of history, as for the contemporary victims of the conflict, it may well have been the outcome of the confrontation that mattered more than the details of its development. Meanwhile, scholars, both those writing from a theological perspective and those concerned with the study of ancient history, have tended to be satisfied, for their own different reasons, with this 'triumphalist' interpretation. As for the Jews, who were, of course, central to the beginning of the story and scarcely less so (as we shall show) later on, their viewpoint has tended to drop out of sight. A major purpose of this book is to look at the same story without the familiar preconceptions and with the Jewish role in mind, and to discover how different a pattern of development then emerges.