I am writing this book as someone trained and employed as
a Roman historian, with interests primarily in social and cultural
history. For the period between Christ and Constantine this means
that I am concerned with the society of the Roman empire which,
for most of that time, stretched from Britain in the north to the
Sahara desert in the south, from the Atlantic coast of Spain and
Portugal in the west to Syria and Jordan in the east. At the heart
of this enormous expanse of territory lay the Mediterranean Sea
which, for many Greeks and Romans, was viewed as the centre
of the inhabited world. As a Roman historian approaching the
topic of early Christianity, it is the Mediterranean and the lands
bordering it that will form the focus of my study. From this
perspective, early Christianity was a phenomenon that was born
in the Middle East, that spread out from there through the eastern
Mediterranean to Asia Minor and Greece, and which from there
made its way to the west, to Africa, Gaul, and, at the centre of
the empire, to Italy and Rome itself. Of course, this perspective
is not the only one possible. A classicist who works on philos-
ophy rather than social history, for example, would take a very
different view of what is important in the study of early Chris-
tianity (e.g. Jaeger 1962; Pelikan 1993). Similarly, Christianity
did not only spread from the Middle East to the west, but in other
directions too: east to Armenia and central Asia, and south to
Ethiopia, Arabia, and beyond. This last topic, however important
it certainly is, lies outside the interests of most scholars working
on early Christianity from the perspective of the classical world,
and so is not considered here. Let us return, therefore, to the
Mediterranean.
It is only fair to advise readers that I consider the Mediter-
ranean background crucial to understanding the evolution of
early Christianity. This is hardly an original insight; attempts have
been made, for example, to appraise the career of Jesus as that
of ‘a Mediterranean Jewish peasant’ (Crossan 1991). But not
everyone who studies the ancient Mediterranean interprets it in
the same way, and what they mean by ‘the Mediterranean back-
ground’ will depend on the criteria they use to define it. Some,WHAT IS EARLY CHRISTIANITY?
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