This is also not a book on women in the Gospels or the Pauline churches. Numerous good studies have been written on those topics. Instead, this work is a prolegomena to the study of New Testament women, an introduction to the world of the first Christian century. My hope is to enliven the sights, sounds, and smells (well, maybe not smells) of the ancient Greco-Roman world so that the social and cultural fabric of the Jewish and gentile worlds will penetrate, inform, and even ignite the reader’s imagination