Desiring to fill a gap, the authors of this book interpret the New Testament as ‘human verbalisation of religious insights and inspiration’ during a time in the past which bears remarkable similarities to our own day. In the words of these authors, Alexander the Great and his successors had ‘shrunk the world’ during 333 to 30 BCE by gathering multiple ethnic, geographical, racial, religious, and political groups together under one large political domain. By the first century CE, the Roman Empire had overtaken this domain and created the Hellenistic-Roman world in which Christianity emerged. The emergence of new cities with immigrant populations throughout this world made virtually everyone a foreigner. In other words, not only were the large numbers of immigrant people foreigners, but the local people became foreigners in their own homeland in the context of the immigrant populations.

For the authors of this book, it is important to keep a sharp eye on this ‘shrunken world’ as one reads and interprets the writings in the New Testament. To replace the loss of kinsfolk networks that resulted from the intensive mixing of society, people formed social clubs and associations with cultic and religious rites and practices. Modes of ‘religiosity’ emerged that interwove dimensions of national, political, ethnic, and institutional forms of religious practice and thought in new ways. Religious traditions and practices that had spread both East and West throughout this large domain began to find new locations in households, marketplaces, village streets and buildings in cities constructed and financed through tribute fees, duties, and political and religious taxation. In this context, significant numbers of people began to participate in religious movements and groups sponsored by patronage from bureaucratic officials, rich landowners and wealthy merchants, rather than simply in religions sponsored by hierarchies of client-kingdoms and templekingdoms.

The Roman Empire in which Christianity emerged, the authors point out, was an agrarian society. Thus two main social groups, small ruling elite in the cities and a mass of labouring agriculturists in the villages, populated the world under the highest levels of imperial elite. Since Jesus's hometown Nazareth was in Galilee, rather than Judaea to the south, his way of life was orientated toward agrarian, village and city life in the regions around the Sea of Galilee.