ABSTRACT
This book has covered a very wide range of topics: it has ranged from the religious experience of St Paul before his conversion to the life of Edessa in the fifth century ad. It has also used a correspondingly wide range of approaches and techniques to discuss its topics; this is not a matter of choice but of necessity, caused by the fragmentary and diverse character of the information available to us about the life of the Jewish communities in the Roman Empire, especially those of the Diaspora. Given the character of the tradition, no approach is possible except to use whatever clues may come to hand and to use them by whatever methods seem to advance understanding. The justification for the range of methodology lies in the nature of the problematic of the book.
