Reveals the diversity and strangeness of early Christianity as seen by non-Christian contemporaries and by the modern world.

This is the fascinating story of the beliefs, practices and experience of individual Christians of antiquity, their relationships to Jewish tradition and the wider Roman world, and the shockwaves they caused among their contemporaries.

The particular excitement of this volume lies in its focus on the everyday realities of Christians' lives in the era of Christian ascendancy and Roman decline.

To address this question, this volume shifts the focus from various Christian elites, whether clerical or theological or political, to "average" people.

Ancient Christianity had an ambivalent stance toward violence.

Examines the nature of the changes that transformed the Christian world from the fourth to the end of the sixth century.