Margaret H. Williams examines how classical writers saw and portrayed Jesus, engaging with the fact that as the originator of a new (and still existing) world religion, Jesus of Nazareth, otherwise known as Christus (Christ), is an individual of indisputable historical significance. Williams shows how from the outset Jesus was a controversial figure. Contemporary Jews in the Roman province of Judaea tended either to adore or to abhor him. When indue course his fame spread throughout the wider Roman empire, reactions to him there among both Jews and non-Jews were no less divergent. Each of the early classical writers who makes mention of him, the historian Tacitus, the biographer Suetonius, the epistolographer Pliny and the satirist Lucian, takes a different view of him and presents him in a different way. Williams considers these different depictions and questions why these writers had such differing views of Jesus. To answer this question Williams examines not only to the different literary conventions by which each of these writers was bound but also to the social, cultural and religious contexts in which they operated.

This collection of translated texts is designed to introduce those interested in Graeco-Roman and Jewish culture to the realities of Jewish life outside Israel in the period between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the ending of the Jewish Patriarchate by the Christian emperors of Rome in the middle of the fifth century. Designed for student use, a feature of the collection is the prominence given to papyri and inscriptions. Composed in accordance with Graeco-Roman epigraphic conventions but written by Jews, these texts, some only recently discovered, should prove a rich source of information about the values and practices of real, as opposed to stereotypical, Jews in antiquity.

Margaret H. Williams presents a selection of studies, most of them epigraphically based, on the Jewish Diaspora in Graeco-Roman antiquity. Those collected in the first part deal with problems connected with the Jewish community in Rome, its history, organisation and burial practices. The papers in the second part are mainly concerned with other Jewish settlements in the Roman Empire, most notably those of Aphrodisias and Corycus in Asia Minor and Venusia in Italy. The third part focuses entirely on Jewish naming practices such as the use of alternative names, the formation of festal names and the increasing preference in Late Antiquity for Hebrew names. The reception of these studies, previously dispersed over a variety of publications, forms the subject of the over-arching introductory essay. Since the original articles were written, many of the inscriptions have been re-edited in new corpora. References to these are systematically included in this volume.