The Christian message, first preached in the villages of Galilee and Judea, then in the temple city of Jerusalem, spread during the period when the books of the New Testament were being composed throughout the Greco-Roman world. In this book we discuss the political, religious, economic, and social features of Palestine and of the cities of the Roman empire and synthesize the results of recent scholarly work, to help the reader understand the relationship between the earliest Christians and the world around them. They lived in that Roman world, and they shared many of its perceptions. They rejected some its traditions, but is was a conscious rejection of only certain aspects of the world in which they had grown up.