The World of the New Testament edited by Joel Green & Lee McDonald

This is one big book of information.

For those curious about the culture of the New Testament times, this read will give you a very nice overview. They tackle the many different sects, backgrounds, and ideas during the times of Jesus and his contemporaries.

I don't want to say some might be overwhelmed by the amount of information they pack into this book, but you will feel brain-packed if you can finished this cover to cover.

It's quite easy to pick a chapter from the beginning and just skip around to what interests you at the time. Spanning the time of the exile all the way beyond the Israelite borders to other cultures, you will get a decent sense of what the world was like in the ancient east.

The first couple segments will deal with outside religious practices and cultures. The third segment inserts Judaism into that Greco/Roman worldview while the last couple segments opens it up to the Christian mindset of the first century.

This is a good book for a university student or even for the shelf of a minister.

This book was provided for review, at no cost, by Baker Publishing.