The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul

xiv, 303 pp. Map of the Eastern Mediterranean in the first century precedes text. Includes new introduction, bibliographies and indexes follow text. In this classic work, Wayne A. Meeks analyzes the earliest extant documents of Christianity―the letters of Paul―to describe the tensions and the texture of life of the first urban Christians. In a new introduction, he describes the evolution of the field of New Testament scholarship over the past twenty years, including new developments in fields such as archaeology and social history.