Two thousand years ago

by Charles A. Frazee

"Millions of people are familiar with the story of Jesus, but few could place the events of his life, as recorded in the New Testament, into the larger context of world history. Uniquely filling this gap, Charles Frazee's Two Thousand Years Ago offers an absorbing, unprecedented survey of peoples and events around the world at the time of Jesus." "Even though first-century events outside of Palestine arguably did not play much of a role in the life of Jesus, it is significant that he lived his whole life in a land where a Hellenistic monarch ruled under the surveillance of Roman emperors. Both Greek and Roman culture, as well as Jesus' message would have fit into other cultures of his day, or how important the literacy of the Mediterranean societies was to Jesus' enduring legacy, or whether we in the twenty-first century would have known him at all had he been a member of, say, a Celtic, Pacific, or Native American society." "Drawing on historical records and the work of archaeologists