Written for readers who have finished Book 1.
The Christians of Ephesus had no church building. They met in houses — dining-room gatherings of a dozen or so across the whole city, lamp-lit, with a shared meal at the centre and "peace to you" as the greeting that marked them out. What held such a scattered thing together was not an address but a network: letters, visiting, the older women who called on the sick, and one overseer who knew every group by name.
A modest, respectable house in the streets above the State Agora — not one of the painted terrace houses of…
Patmos is not the bare prison rock of legend. It is a small, populated Aegean island south-west of Miletus…
A small scroll-copyist's workshop in the craftsman quarter of Ephesus, with the living rooms above it and an…
One of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, the Temple of Artemis stood a mile and a half outside Ephesus…
The seven cities of Roman Asia were strung along a real road — the postal circuit that ran Ephesus, Smyrna…
The largest theatre in the Roman world at the time: some twenty-five thousand seats carved into the hillside…