As the ultimate Author of Scripture, the Holy Spirit alone can give us a true understanding of the Bible—of the message and meaning of the book He has written. The Christian faith is, however, a distinctly historical faith, set in the immediate context of the Middle East, and, in the case of the New Testament, the Middle East of the first century. The customs, culture and everyday life of those times were very different from those of twenty-first-century Western life. So, if we wish to understand the Bible, we need to know about the world and the worldview in which it was first written. In this book Timothy Cross helps us do just that, providing a window into everyday life in Bible times—the setting and background into which God became man and lived among us, for us and for our salvation.
