The discovery of handwritten documents dating to New Testament times is a rare event. Three such exciting discoveries have recently been made in Britain. In the Bloomberg tablets (2016) we meet some of the Apostle Paul's contemporaries as they arranged loans and drew up contracts. In the professional and personal correspondence of the Vindolanda tablets (1983-2019) we get to know the women and men of a frontier fort. In the prayer requests of the Uley tablets (2024) we meet people from a rural community who turned to their local temple in times of trouble. Telling the story of the discovery of those three sets of tablets, this book introduces us to the kind of people who appear in Luke-Acts and who were its first readers. We are invited to imagine how people such as these--merchants and traders; centurions and women of standing; ordinary farmers--might have understood Luke-Acts had they become followers of the Way of Jesus. Serving as a guide to the world of the New Testament in Roman Britain, this book brings Luke-Acts to life in unexpected ways and throws new light on the way the first followers of Jesus negotiated the Empire.
