Where there is more than one letter sent to the same addressee,
or where a number of letters are ascribed to the one author, I have
used the following format: 1 Corinthiansrefers to Paul’s First
Letter to the Corinthians, and 1 Peterrefers to The First Epistle
of Peter.
Non-literary sources, such as inscriptions and papyri,
present particular problems of citation. Inscriptions have been
cited by their number in particular collections: this is highlighted
by the abbreviation ‘no.’ in the citation. For example, Smallwood
1967: no. 376 means inscription number 376 in E. M. Smallwood
(1967)Documents Illustrating the Principates of Caius, Claudius,
and Nero, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. I have not
cited many papyrus texts or similar materials, such as texts on
leather, except for those from the Dead Sea Scrolls (chapter 3)
and the Nag Hammadi library (chapter 5). Explanations of their
systems of citation will be found in standard translations of them:
for the Dead Sea Scrolls, see Vermes 1997; for Nag Hammadi
see Robinson 1988.Dates
I feel that beginners will require some explanation of the dating
conventions I have used. The early Christians who are the subject
of this book did not know the system of dating that allows us (or
many of us at any rate) to fix ourselves at the beginning of the
third millennium. On the contrary, they would have used a variety
of dating techniques, defining the year (amongst other methods)
according to who were the consuls (chief magistrates) in the city
of Rome, how long an emperor had been in power, when the year
fell in the taxation cycle, or how long it had been since the foun-
dation of their local major city. Our system of dating owes its
origins to the endeavours of the sixth-century monk Dionysius
Exiguus, whose scheme originated as an offshoot of his efforts
to regularize the date for the church’s Easter celebrations. As
part of his computations, Dionysius devised a system of dating
years according to a sequence beginning with the birth of JesusHOW TO USE THIS BOOK
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