In ancient Roman law "you were what you wore." This legal principle became highly significant because, beginning in the first century A.D., a new kind of woman emerged across the Roman empire -- a woman whose provocative dress and sometimes promiscuous lifestyle contrasted starkly with the decorum of the traditional married woman. What a woman chose to wear came to identify her as either new or modest.

Augustus legislated against the new woman. Philosophical schools encouraged their followers to avoid embracing her way of life. And, as this fascinating book demonstrates for the first time, the presence of the new woman was also felt in the early church, where Paul exhorted Christian wives and widows to emulate neither her dress code nor her conduct.

Using his extensive knowledge both of the Graeco-Roman world and of Paul's writings, Bruce Winter shows how changing social mores among women impacted the Pauline communities. This helps to explain the controversial texts on marriage veils in 1 Corinthians, instructions in 1 Timothy regarding dress code and the activities of young widows, and exhortations in Titus for older women to call new wives back to their senses regarding their marriage and family responsibilities.

Based on a close investigation of neglected literary and archaeological evidence, "Roman Wives, Roman Widows" makes groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of first-century women, including their participation in public life as lawyers, magistrates, and political figures, which in turn affected women's ministry in the Pauline communities.

In this book, Bruce W. Winter maps out the role and obligations of Christians as benefactors and citizens in their society. Winter's scholarly insight is enhanced through the selective use of important ancient literary and nonliterary sources. Contrary to the popular perception that early Christians withdrew from society and sought to maintain a low profile, this outstanding study explores the complexities of the positive commitments made by Christians in Gentile regions of the Roman empire.

In this highly acclaimed work, Bruce Winter gathers for the first time all the available evidence on the first-century sophistic movement from two major centers of learning in the East. Together with the writings of the contemporary Hellenistic Jews, Philo and Paul, he discusses all the protagonists and antagonists of this movement in Alexandria and Corinth. This study provides important insights into the problems that this elitist movement created for Diaspora Jews in Alexandria and for Christians in Corinth. It also traces the origins of the Second Sophistic to the reign of Nero. Substantially revised and including a new foreword by G. W. Bowersock, this volume is also supported by a web site -- www.sophists.info -- featuring additional archaeological evidence and photographs.

This Prodigious New Six-Volume series presents the results of interdisciplinary research between New Testament, Jewish, and classical scholarship. Working to place the Book of Acts within its first-century setting, well-known historians and biblical scholars from Australia, the United States, Canada, Russia, and the United Kingdom have collaborated here to provide a stimulating new study that replaces The Beginnings of Christianity and other older studies on Acts. Starting with the understanding that the Book of Acts is rooted within the setting of the peoples and cultures of the Mediterranean in the first century A.D., this comprehensive series provides a multifaceted approach to the Acts of the Apostles in its literary, regional, cultural, ideological, and theological contexts. The composition of Acts is discussed beside the writing of ancient literary monographs and intellectual biographies. Recent epigraphic and papyrological discoveries also help illumine the text of Acts. Archaeological fieldwork, especially in Greece and Asia Minor, has yielded valuable information about the local setting of Acts and the religious life of urban communities in the Roman Empire. These volumes draw on the best of this research to elucidate the Book of Acts against the background of activity in which early Christianity was born. The Book of Acts in Its Ancient Literary Setting is the first volume in this groundbreaking series. The book includes fourteen chapters devoted to the literary framework that undergirds the Book of Acts. Topics include the text as an historical monograph, ancient rhetoric and speeches, the Pauline corpus, biblical history, subsequent ecclesiastical histories, and modernliterary method. All of these chapters arise out of a consultation by the project's scholars at Cambridge in March 1993.

Though the first century a.d. saw the striking rise and expansion of Christianity throughout the vast Roman Empire, ancient historians have shown that an even stronger imperial cult spread far more rapidly at the same time. How did the early Jesus-followers cope with the all-pervasive culture of emperor worship? This authoritative study by Bruce Winter explores the varied responses of first-century Christians to imperial requirements to render divine honours to the Caesars. Winter first examines the significant primary evidence of emperor worship, particularly analysing numerous inscriptions in public places and temples that attributed divine titles to the emperors, and he then looks at specific New Testament evidence in light of his findings.