This is one of three volumes collecting some of the most important of Professor Judge's many articles. Still forthcoming at the time of writing is a collection edited by A. M. Nobbs (What Jerusalem had to do with Athens: cultural transformation in late antiquity), and already published is a smaller collection of (mainly Pauline) pieces in D. M. Scholer (ed.), Social distinctives of the Christians in the first century (Hendrickson 2008), which contains among other items Judge's perhaps most well-known essay, ‘The social pattern of the Christian groups in the first century’. The first Christians is divided into four sections: part i, ‘Augustus in his times’; part ii, ‘The Roman empire and the first Christians’; part iii, ‘Social innovation in the early Churches; and part iv, ‘The First Christians and the transformation of culture’. The volume includes some significant large-scale pieces, such as the ‘Social pattern’ essay (included here in German), and a translation and commentary on the Res gestae. In some of the Augustan essays Judge locks horns with Syme on matters of Augustan policy, especially on the so-called façade of the respublica restituta (esp. chapters xiv, xvii–xviii). While his disagreements with Syme and others are often forcefully expressed, he also acknowledges when puzzles remain, as in his brief discussion of Augustus' extraordinary monopoly of wealth (chapter xi, ‘The real basis of Augustan power’). There are also smaller pieces, particularly on epigraphic subjects, and some of the chapters are lecture notes or summaries (chapters iv, v, viii, xii, xiii, xxviii). The essays on early Christianity are concerned in particular with prosopography (chapters xxxiv and xxxv), the relationship between Christians and other contemporaneous groups (for example chapters xxxviii and xxxix), and educational practices (chapters xlii and xliii). In sharp contrast to much New Testament scholarship, Judge sees no reason to think that Romans ever perceived Christians as a subset within Judaism, Suetonius' notice about Chrestus providing no support for such a view (chapter xxx). Judge's extraordinary learning is exhibited on nearly every page. He moves effortlessly between straightforwardly Roman topics and the study of early Christianity in a way which is almost unmatched today, and which threatens to be virtually extinct in generations to come. One hopes that there will still remain some who in the future will be able to propose an elegant restoration to one of the Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae (chapter vi) one minute, and to comment on the meanings (as in chapters xxviii and xxxvi) of ‘the mark of the beast’ or ‘the body of Christ’ in the next.