visions he experienced. Hermas recounts how, in the days when
he was a rather lapsed Christian, he was travelling to Cumae on
the Bay of Naples when he had a vision of an old woman who
presented him with a book of mysterious prophecy. At first poor
Hermas failed to realize that the old woman was a personifica-
tion of the church, and that the books she had given him were
full of teachings about Christian virtues. Instead, he thought that
the woman was the Sibyl, a pagan prophetess, and that the books
were full of pagan prophecy (The Shepherd of Hermas, vision
2.1.3–4; 2.4.1). It is hard to blame him for interpreting his
vision this way: after all, in antiquity Cumae was reputed to have
been the home of a particularly famous Sibyl, whose prophecies
were contained, moreover, in books (Parke 1988: 77–99, 152–6).
From its origins, then, Christianity was a religion that, in
both its action and its self-representation, was deeply embedded
in the Mediterranean contexts within which it developed. Wher-
ever we look in early Christian literature, we see the activities of
Jesus, his followers, and their successors touched by the diverse
experiences of life in the Mediterranean world of the Roman
empire. Its social, political, economic, and cultural rhythms
permeate the writings of the New Testament and later Christian
authors. Such were the frameworks within which early Christians
defined themselves, their aspirations, and their expectations. Yet
it is not simply the case that early Christianity conformed supinely
to the constraints presented by this Mediterranean context. On
the contrary, Christianity sought to overcome such obstacles.
That it did not fragment entirely, but endeavoured to maintain
its integrity and identity, indicates the measure of its success in
meeting these challenges.
century Approaching early Christianity in the twenty-first
Why do we study early Christianity? Why do the lives of early
Christians still matter to us as we begin the third millennium?
Twenty years ago, the Oxford historian Robin Lane Fox, begin-
ning his own study of the rise of Christianity and its eclipse of
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