All God’s Children

The years AD. 30-70 were among the most turbulent in human history, and All God’s Children is the most complete account ever assembled of how the Christians and Jews challenged the Roman world -- and why the degeneracy of their political overlords  paved the way.

All God’s Children is a factual history, but one using a fictitious narrator and the historical novel genre in order to reach beyond scholars to a mass audience. By seeing the first century through the eyes of Attalos, a Greek ex-slave and Roman immigrant who writes in A.D. 80, the reader is drawn into first century life -- before the existence of popes, crusades and cathedrals -- to the narrator’s world of  Olympic gods, rigid aristocracy and tormented masses. The result is a griping, inspiring tale of courage and compassion in a world of debauchery and despotism.            

All God’s Children also breaks new ground in scholarly research, revealing new insights into a forty-year period that was as confusing as it was critical to the formation of western civilization’s two most prominent religions. Author-journalist James D. Snyder aids the reader by: 

·       Organizing chapters into two year periods, including the most detailed chronology of the period ever compiled. 

·       Including 37 pages of endnotes, original maps, and illustrations of people and places of the mid-first century.

·       Casting new light on the close interaction between Roman, Christian and Jewish societies and showing how profoundly each one influenced the destinies of the others.  Thus, one learns, for example, how the debaucheries of emperors Caligula and Nero depleted the Roman treasury, why this caused a “raid” on the Jewish temple, and why desperate Jewish authorities felt compelled to crack down on the newly-emerging “sect” called Christians. And as readers come to understand why the Jews rebelled against Roman oppression, they learn why and how the Christians went their separate way.