Early Christian Life and Thought in Social Context fills a vacuum in current scholarship. While there exist a number of anthologies of sources for students of the New Testament and early Judaism, this book integrates concise explanatory comment on various aspects of the historical and social situation of the early Christians with substantial extracts from early Christian, early Jewish, and Graeco-Roman sources.

Mark Harding is Dean of the Australian College of Theology. He is the author of Tradition and Rhetoric in the Pastoral Epistles (Peter Lang, 1998) and What are They Saying About the Pastoral Epistles? (Paulist, 2001).