I encountered archival ethnography at the very start of my project. On the eve of my Sabbatical in 2015 I shared my proposed project, The World of the New Testament on our Doorstep, with Professor Philip Esler. I intended to spend a month visiting Roman sites in Britain, a month researching the way in which they provide a window on to the world of the New Testament, and a month writing a general study. He was excited by my proposal, and immediately encouraged me to focus on something more specific. He suggested the curse tablets of Bath and elsewhere as there was a growing interest in them.

As our session came to an end, he ran off copies of a paper he had recently prepared. It was doing very much as I was proposing, but in the context of the Dead Sea. He had begun his researches on the Babatha archive in the cave of letters. Fleeing from the Roman forces as the rebels of the Shim’on ben Kosiba revolt in 135, she had sought refuge with others in a cave and had buried a satchel containing documents of importance for her and her family. They included betrothal documents, property deeds and many more. She was the owner of a date palm orchard. The particular document that had interested Philip Esler at this point was a loan arranged with the help of a kindly centurion.

• Esler, Philip F. ‘Reading Matthew by the Dead Sea: Matthew 8:5–13 in Light of P. Yadin 11’. HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies, 2014.

I modified my plans. My wife and I did our month of visits to Roman sites in Britain, I made general observations about the world of the New Testament on our doorstep, but in the second month I focused on the curse tablets of Bath, Uley and elsewhere as they had been published by Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. While the site is due to be replaced as the curse tablets are added to the Roman Inscriptions of Britain, it is still of value.

• Curse Tablets of Roman Britain.

At the end of July, I read my paper to the Context Group’s Cheltenham Conference and it was well-received. I joined Philip Esler’s Greek Reading Group, and before long we were studying documents from the Babatha archive. In 2016, the morning after the publication of the Bloomberg Tablets was announced on the TV News, Philip rang me and invited me to contribute a chapter to the second edition of The Early Christian World. When it came out in 2017, my chapter was well received and Philip encouraged me to ‘write the book’.

That year saw the publication of Babatha’s Orchard, the first fruits of his project. In it Philip explains the methodology of archival ethnography. When I retired in 2018, at my retirement I was able to embark on a PhD with funding from the Kirby Laing Trust. He suggested I adapt his methodology in the study of three ‘archives’ (in a very general sense) from Roman Britain, the Bloomberg Tablets, the Vindolanda Tablets, and the Uley Tablets, which at that point were beginning to be published.

My approach therefore is very much indebted to the work of Philip Esler, though be it said, I come to it with no background in the Social Sciences or Ethnography. My approach is therefore very much an ‘adaptation’ of the methodology Philip Esler explains in Babatha’s Orchard.

It wasn’t long before Philip published two other papers on Matthew and others on Babatha. The project goes on as he now turns his attention to a biography of Babatha.

• Esler, Philip F. ‘The Righteousness of Joseph: Interpreting Matthew 1:18–25 in Light of Judean Legal Papyri’. Preprint, University of Gloucestershire Eprints, 2022.

• Esler, Philip F. ‘Babatha’s First Marriage Contract: Hiding in Plain Sight’. Journal of Jewish Studies 74, no. 2 (October 2023) 303–22 University of Gloucestershire Eprints, 2023.

• Esler, Philip F. ‘Babatha’s Final Days: New Light from Papyrus Starcky’. University of Gloucestershire Eprints 2022.

• Esler, Philip F. 'Babatha, En-Gedi and the Bar Kokhba revolt: A new approach using evidence from the Cave of Letters'. Biblical Theology Bulletin: Journal of Bible and Culture, 56 (1). pp. 18-32.

• Esler, Philip F. ‘Female Agency by the Dead Sea: Evidence from the Babatha and Salome Komaїse Archives’. Dead Sea Discoveries 26, no. 3 (November 2019) 362–93.

Philip Esler directed me to the work of Rebeca Lennartson, and I drew on insights from Sabine Huebner’s micro-approaches to the world of the New Testament through Egyptian Papyri. Peter Oakes’s approach to the New Testament world via Pompeii, together with Bruce Longenecker’s more general work also caught my imagination. Peter Arzt-Grabner, Christina Kreinecker and John Kloppenborg’s More Light from the Ancient East, also excited me. Although a little too late for my researches, they appear to be the first to make use of the Bloomberg tablets and the Vindolanda tablets in the study of the New Testament.

Huebner, Sabine R. Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Oakes, Peter. Reading Romans in Pompeii, Paul’s Letter at Ground Level. London: SPCK, 2009.

• Oakes, Peter, and Benedict Kent. ‘Entering Early Christianity via Pompeii: A Virtual Guide to the World of the New Testament’. 2019.

Longenecker, Bruce W. In Stone and Story: Early Christianity in the Roman World. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2020.

Arzt-Grabner, Peter, John S. Kloppenborg, and Christina M. Kreinecker. More Light from the Ancient East: Understanding the New Testament Through Papyri. Papyri and the New Testament 1. Paderborn: Brill Schöningh, 2023.

My adaptation of ‘archival ethnography’ builds on the work of all of these, and many more besides.