The discovery of the Vindolanda tablets in the 1970s, and since then the Uley tablets and the Bloomberg tablets, has transformed our understanding of ordinary, functional literacy in the Roman world. This has a major impact on how we understand the world of the New Testament and the way that the New Testament was written and read.
I first met Dr Richard Cleaves at the British New Testament Conference, where he was giving a paper about Roman writing tablets and our understanding of the world of the New Testament as background to reading it well. (You can find some discussion of the Vindolanda tablets here.)
Richard has a new book out on reading Luke-Acts in the light of his findings, and I had the chance to ask him about this fascinating and important subject.
IP: What made you start making connections between the world of the New Testament and the world of Roman Britain?
RC: I grew up in Leicester, walking along the Via Devana (for a short stretch still called Devana Road!) into the centre of Ratae Corieltavorum. I did Scripture exams in Sunday School, O Level and A Level Scripture, a Theology degree heavily weighted to Scripture, and have spent a life time preaching, teaching the New Testament to University level and telling Bible stories to children. And yet I did not make any connection between the world of the New Testament and the world of Roman Britain until I was in my 40s.
In 1997, Gloucester celebrated the 1900th anniversary of its being recognised as one of the highest ranking of Roman cities, a colonia. The layout of the streets had been preserved; the course of the walls was marked out in the pavement and a life size bronze statue of the Emperor Nerva on horseback appeared on South Gate. At the time I was preaching on Philippians in the context of Acts 16, and it dawned on me that Luke goes out of his way to identify Philippi as a colonia. The whole story of Acts 16 and Paul’s talk of followers of Jesus having their citizenship in heaven in Philippians 3 fits exactly with what can be seen in Gloucester. That was the start of my interest. From that point on I was on the look-out for connections between the world of the New Testament and Roman Britain. And I have made use of them in my preaching, my teaching and in telling Bible stories to children.
IP: Where in Roman Britain do particular New Testament texts come alive?
RC: In addition to Gloucester, two more locations come immediately to mind—Caerleon and Colchester.
The Feeding of the 5000 occurs in all four gospels. Matthew tells us there were 5000 men, besides women and children. Mark describes them sitting in groups of 50 and 100, and in the Latin translations, each group is a contubernium. John tells us ‘they were about to come and take him by force to make him king’. Go to Caerleon and you can explore the fortress of the Second Augustan Legion, a fighting force of approximately 5000; you can see the barracks where each century of 80 men lived in their mess rooms or contubernia, and where the centurions’ living quarters and offices were. And you can see the bread ovens where they baked their bread. John was right! Those 5000 men on the hills of Galilee, sitting in their groups of 50 and 100, were a fighting force wanting Jesus to take up arms against Rome. Jesus would have none of it, withdrawing by himself to the mountain, later to enter Jerusalem not on a war horse but on a lowly beast of burden. Visit Caerleon, read all four accounts, finishing with John 6:15 and maybe you’ll see what I mean!
Claudius arrived in Britain with four legions and another 20,000 auxiliary soldiers. They were quickly victorious over the south east of Britain and established their capital at modern Colchester, which as the name suggests, quickly became a colonia. Immediately after the death of Claudius they built a magnificent classical temple dedicated to the divine Claudius. It was still standing a thousand years later when the Normans invaded; they used its foundations to build a castle keep that is the largest in Europe. Standing to five stories it is now an imposing home to Britain’s finest collection of Roman artefacts. But the temple was even bigger as you will be told when you visit those foundations originally laid in the middle of the first century!
With a porticoed surround, and a monumental gateway linking it to the forum and basilica, possibly with an account of the Acts of Claudius, it echoes the temple dedicated to Augustus in Pisidian Antioch with its copy of the Acts of Augustus, regularly visited by Paul. You can even argue that it’s not unlike Herod’s rebuilt (Roman classical style) temple in Jerusalem with its royal basilica. Talk of temples and of Jesus as Son of God in the New Testament has to be set in the context of the cult of the emperor and has everything to do with who the followers of Jesus owe their allegiance to. Visit Colchester, take a look at that remarkable temple and then read what Acts has to say about temples in 7:48–50, 14:15, and 17:24–25 and what Paul has to say about the human lineage of Jesus and what makes him ‘Son of God’ in Romans 1:1–7, and maybe you’ll see what I mean!
IP: What about writings from Roman Britain? Are there any that connect with New Testament texts?
RC: It is very rare to discover documents contemporary with the events narrated in the New Testament. And yet that is exactly what happened in 2016 when wax writing tablets from mid first century London were published as The Bloomberg Tablets. They brought forward by thirty years the earliest writings to be discovered in Britain and joined the Vindolanda tablets in opening up windows on to the world of the Roman empire in the first century.
IP: What do they tell us about levels of literacy in the first century?
RC: They indicate that literacy reached deeper and further than had hitherto been supposed. Traders and merchants, together with many who lived in a military community, and those from the local population who dealt with them had a significant level of literacy. At the same time they pose interesting questions about literacy itself, and the even greater extent of what might be described as ‘functional literacy’.
IP: What are the Bloomberg tablets and are there particular ways that they relate to the New Testament?
RC: They are wax writing tablets that are a mix of financial, legal and personal documents. They show the extent to which the economy of the Roman empire was built on debt, mutual relations of trust, and the honour of those who traded with each other. They also give a glimpse of the way in which Roman law worked out in practice in the middle years of the first century. In the dealings of real people we encounter the world that Jesus was responding to in his teaching on finance, wealth, debt and poverty. We also encounter elements of the law which are apparent particularly in the later chapters of Acts.
IP: What about the Vindolanda tablets? Who were they written by and what sort of things do they discuss? How do they relate to the people of the New Testament?
RC: The Vindolanda tablets are the everyday working documents of an auxiliary fort on the northern frontier of the Roman empire at around the time Luke and Acts were arguably written and began to circulate (c. 85–120 CE). They show how extensive was the bureaucracy of the Roman army. More than that, they include personal letters that enable us to relate to the lives not only of the soldiers and their officers, but also the women and children who lived together as a community. In Luke-Acts we encounter a significant number of centurions, the commanding officers or tribunes, men of high standing, and leading women in different communities. These are precisely the kind of people we meet in Vindolanda.
It’s fascinating to see the way the Vindolanda tablets throw light on the letter-writing that is so important in the New Testament. In one letter (Tab. Vindol. II 291), Claudia Severa, the wife of the commander of a neighbouring fort, invites Sulpica Lepidina, the wife of the commander of the Vindolanda fort, to her birthday celebration. An amanuensis, no doubt a slave, writes the fulsome invitation at her dictation. But at the end Severa takes the pen into her own hand and lovingly implores her friend to come. In just the same way on four occasions, we see Paul taking pen in hand to add his own very personal greeting at the end of letters he has dictated to an amanuensis, who some suggest may well have been a slave.
IP: Are there any other writings from Roman Britain that relate to New Testament texts?
RC: Back in 2015 when I took a sabbatical, I intended to spend a month exploring Roman sites in Britain that relate to the New Testament, a month researching the literature in a library, and a month writing up an account of ‘The World of the New Testament on our Doorstep in Roman Britain’. When I shared my ideas with Professor Philip Esler at the University of Gloucestershire, he was excited as it tied in with work he was doing on the Babatha archive, reading Matthew by the Dead Sea. He suggested I focus closely on something very specific and pointed me in the direction of the so-called curse tablets of Bath and elsewhere.
I still enjoyed a month touring Roman sites with my wife but then homed in on the curse tablets. At the time, only a few had been published from the temple of Mercury on the Cotswold escarpment. Philip Esler invited me to read a paper to a conference of the Context Group meeting in Cheltenham at the end of July. That gave me something to aim for and I read a paper suggesting it was possible to explore the world of the New Testament in Roman Britain with a focus on the curse tablets in general, and one tablet from Bath in particular (Tab. Sulis 98). My paper was well received.
A year later, when the publication of the Bloomberg tablets was announced on the BBC News at Ten, Philip Esler rang me the next morning and invited me to contribute a chapter to the second edition of his The Early Christian World. I bought the book immediately and my church gave me a couple of days each week for a month to research my piece which I managed to complete by the (tight!) deadline. When the book came out in 2017, Philip Esler told me that in a good review in the Brynmawr Classical Review, my chapter, ‘Reading the New Testament in Roman Britain’, had been singled out as of particular interest. That was what prompted him to challenge me to ‘write the book’. With funding from the Kirby Laing Foundation, I embarked on a (second!) PhD following my retirement as a Minister and have since adapted it into a book.
By 2018, interest in curse tablets across the Roman empire was growing rapidly, with the publication of significant volumes, and catalogues of the tablets. Roger Tomlin, who had published the Bath tablets in 1988, the Bloomberg tablets in 2016, now gave his full attention to the Uley tablets. They came out in small numbers, enabling me to focus on a significant proportion of them in my dissertation. When they were published in full in 2024, I was able to incorporate them into what was then becoming my book.
IP: So what exactly are these curse tablets?
RC: That’s the really interesting thing! There are grounds for saying they are not so much curses, as prayers for justice. Someone has stolen what may have been a plough, four oxen and other belongings from Honoratus who is farming somewhere below the escarpment. What can he do? He cannot go to the authorities. So instead he goes up to the temple of Mercury where with the help of one of the priests he scratches out his ‘prayer’ on a piece of lead that’s about A6 size. He asks the most divine Mercury to get him his property back, and to do all manner of horrible things to whomsoever has stolen it, be they slave or free, boy or girl, unless they return it (Tab. Uley 72). He folds up the piece of lead and deposits it in a pit in front of the statue of Mercury in the sanctuary of the temple. When that building is subsequently re-built, demolished, replaced by a Christian church and then in the 8th century lost beneath the grass, the folded tablet, with many others, is lost having long since been scattered among the debris.
Then in 1976, when a water pipe was being laid across that field, the archaeologists were called in, discovering a sequence of shrines, and a great number of these folded lead tablets. They painstakingly unfolded them and lo and behold the writing scratched on the surface was just about visible when photographed from lots of different angles. In 1993 the first five were published by Roger Tomlin, and another eighty were listed. It is not until 2024 that they were published in full. I was excited to be able to turn to those writings as well. It means, since 2016, we now have access to three ‘archives’ of written material from Roman Britain that come from an urban, a military and a rural context. What riches to use as a window on to the world of the Roman empire!
IP: How might these insights affect the way we think about the gospels and the rest of the New Testament? How does it help us understand how its teaching would have had an impact on readers in the first century?
RC: Imagine in a thousand years’ time someone came across a sealed plastic bag containing perfectly preserved post-it notes from a 21st century church with prayers on. They would give that archaeologist a millennium hence a field day in deciphering them, analysing them, and discovering how 21st century followers of Jesus prayed out of concern for people facing difficult circumstances in ill health and bereavement, for the needs of the world, and for peace. Drawing on the insights of Ordinary Theology, of the Lived Ancient Religion approach to religious practice in the ancient world, using a tool developed by Tania ap Siôn to study such prayer requests, I have made a study of those prayers from long ago. They reveal how manipulative, transactional, and vindictive prayers of the Roman empire could be. Had such people become followers of Jesus all his teaching about forgiveness, not least in the context of prayer, would really hit home. Bear all that in mind and read Matthew 6:7–15 and you’ll see what I mean!
You can also look at what the New Testament has to say about cursing, and about temples with those Uley tablets in mind; and what the New Testament has to say about money, wealth and debt with the Bloomberg tablets in mind; and what the New Testament has to say about centurions, commanders and women of standing with the Vindolanda tablets in mind. At each stage texts from the New Testament come alive in fresh and exciting ways.
IP: This information seems rather important to me—but I am not sure that scholarship is yet taking these insights seriously. Why do you think that is?
RC: Two things come to my mind.
First, we have a tendency to compartmentalise things. Roman Britain is studied by historians, archaeologists and classicists, while the New Testament is studied by biblical studies scholars, theologians, ministers, pastors, and Christians generally. Children of about eight or nine ‘do’ the Romans. That’s the age of children we tell Bible stories to in primary school assemblies, in Messy Church, in Open the Book, and in all sorts of settings. Why don’t we bring those stories to life in the context of what the children are studying especially in Roman Britain. That’s exactly how I’ve taken to telling the Feeding of the 5000, and the children and the staff, are fascinated and can see how it relates to the real world long ago, and also to the real world today.
Second, it is only since 2016 that we have had access to an archive of writings from an urban setting in Roman Britain, and only since 2024 that we have had access to an archive of writings from a rural setting. First published in 1983, the Vindolanda tablets so far excavated were only published online in 2019, and that included tablets excavated only a couple of years before. So the other reason is that it is only now that these documents are available and this story has been told!
IP: If people want to find out more—and perhaps even read all these tablets for themselves—where should they go?
RC: There’s a great display of the Bloomberg tablets at the Bloomberg European Headquarters in the City of London, exactly where they were found. They are on the way into the London Mithraeum, which itself is well worth a visit. There will also be a major exhibition of the Bloomberg tablets and the other finds at those excavations at the Museum of London when it reopens at the end of November 2026.
There are excellent displays of the Vindolanda Tablets and the Uley Tablets in the Weston Gallery at the British Museum. Vindolanda can of course be visited, and the tablets and other artefacts are on display in the Vindolanda Trust Museum.
There is nothing to be seen at the site of the Temple of Mercury on the Cotswold escarpment but everything to experience, not least as the sun sets over the Welsh mountains: the nearby Iron Age Hill Fort (see also here) and neolithic burial chamber, Hetty Pegler’s Tump, can be visited – the temple site straddles the road in the field where Hetty Pegler’s tump can be found. There is also an informative display of artefacts found at the site, with large pictures of some of the tablets at the Museum in the Park, Stroud.
But in answer to your question in a different way, If you’ll excuse the plug (!!), I would start with my recently published book, Imagining Luke-Acts in Roman Britain Through the Eyes of the People of the Bloomberg Tablets, the Vindolanda Tablets and the Uley Tablets, and its accompanying website.
I introduce each of those sets of tablets in detail, and the people who wrote them. I then offer my own reading of texts from Luke and Acts. I do that in the hope that it will spark people either to agree with my reading or (better still) to come up with a better one. The book begins by exploring some explicit connections between the world of the eastern Mediterranean and the world of Roman Britain in the first century, and by offering a select gazetteer of places to visit (which, of course, are mainly the places my wife and I visited during that 2015 sabbatical!!). Once you’ve seen how to make the connection, you’ll quickly find all sorts of unexpected connections when reading the New Testament.
Another wonderful thing is that since 2019, the Vindolanda Tablets and the Bloomberg Tablets are all available on a comprehensive website, Roman Inscriptions of Britain. The Bath tablets are already there, and the Uley tablets will eventually follow them.
Through the book, and the website, I hope to inspire others to read the New Testament in the context of early Roman Britain.
IP: Richard, thank you for all that fascinating information—and especially these resources for further study. I hope that they will be explored and read widely.
Dr Richard Cleaves is a Minister of Congregational Federation churches latterly in Cheltenham, and taught New Testament in the Congregational Institute for Practical Theology. Since Gloucester’s 1997 celebration of its foundation as a colonia, he has researched the world of the New Testament in Roman Britain and caught the imagination of adults and children in his preaching and teaching.
Buy me a Coffee
