Bustling streets and overcrowded homes, tentmakers and working wives—an accessible introduction to the real lives of the first Christians in the Roman Empire circa 35 to 120 AD

Combining carefully researched material with acute analysis and presented in an engaging popular style for a non-academic readership, this guide explores how the Roman world formed the essential social and cultural backdrop to the emergence of the Christian movement and how that has in turn deeply influenced the world we live in today. The guide explores the early Christians' day-to-day activities—such as where they lived, what they ate, the kind of work they did, and how they spent their time off—as well as their social relationships to the world, themselves, and the gods. Through this exploration, it explains how a marginalized, oppressed Jewish renewal group became one of the fastest-growing urban movements of the first century and became the dominant social, intellectual, and cultural influence throughout the Roman Empire within 300 years.