Going to Church in the First Century

A First-Century Meeting'There I was, nervous but curious. My hosts were fairly level-headed types who wouldn't get mixed up in anything out of the way. Being Greeks, they didn't have the advantage of a good Roman grounding in our religious and civic traditions. They would be more inclined to fall for one of those secretive, emotionally-charged Eastern cults. But then you wouldn't expect a Jew, however atypical, to get involved in that sort of thing, what with his race's over-refined moral scruples and stubborn addiction to a single god.''From a religious point of view the whole meeting left a lot to be desired. What had happened contained scarcely anything religious at all. They didn't even have a priest, let alone all the ritual that you expect. This wasn't quite what I had bargained for. Neither decently ritualistic nor exotically mysterious. All very simply and matter-of-fact. I wondered what their god made of this slipshod and common way of doing things. Not at all in the manner to which I would have thought a god was accustomed.'