New Book: Christian Life in the Greco-Roman City

If you plan to visit biblical sites, you will benefit from a good guidebook. For years I have recommended excellent resources such as Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land, Clyde E. Fant and Mitchell G. Reddish, A Guide to Biblical Sites in Greece and Turkey, and Mark Wilson, Biblical Turkey. These books share the same basic approach: organized by site, they explain a city’s principal features and its relevance to the Bible. Jason Borges’s new work takes a different approach, and for travelers in Italy, Greece, and Turkey, it may be just as valuable. Instead of going site by site, Christian Life in the Greco-Roman City: The Civic and Architectural Contexts of Early Christianity goes feature by feature, teaching you how to understand what you encounter again and again in every Greco-Roman city: theaters, agoras, temples, baths, and more. Perhaps you’ve had this experience: you visit an ancient theater, and the guide gives you the basics. At the next city, you hear the same basics. Then you arrive at a third theater, and well, here we go again. What you need is a single, in-depth exploration of what theaters were, how they functioned, how their architecture works, how they shaped soc...