The work was initially published in the ‘Vremennik of the Demidov Legal Lyceum’, Vol. 20 for 1880. Dmitry Ivanovich Azarevich was a lawyer, specialist in the Roman Law; in 1876—1882, he was Associate Professor of the Demidov Legal Lyceum, a specialized school with a special accent at studying the Roman Law, particularly, on the base of European translated literature on various divisions of law.

Despite readers’ expectations, that book was not an essay on some western publication (which was typical for the Demidov Legal Lyceum), but an original research on the legal status of early Christians in the Roman world; the author’s aim was to show the peculiarities of early Christianity in the world of the classic religion and philosophy. The author argues against the idea of the exhaustion and exinanition of the classic Hreek and Roman religion of the beginning of our era; he described the far premises of the broad dissemination of Christianity in the epoch after Constantine the Great.