Patmos is not the bare prison rock of legend. It is a small, populated Aegean island south-west of Miletus, with villages, terraced fields, temples and a working harbour — the sort of place to which Rome sent a man it wanted out of the way rather than dead, under a sentence called relegatio. It is where an exiled elder named John spent a season, and where a winter's writing began the whole of this story.
A modest, respectable house in the streets above the State Agora — not one of the painted terrace houses of…
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 Christians of Ephesus had no church building. They met in houses — dining-room gatherings of a dozen or…
The largest theatre in the Roman world at the time: some twenty-five thousand seats carved into the hillside…
The seven cities are real, and so is the road that joined them, in the order the letter names them. So is the province of Asia under Domitian: its temples to the emperors, its guilds and their feasts, its harbours and trades. Most historians date the seven letters to the last years of his reign, around AD 95–96; a respectable minority place them earlier, under Nero, and the books do not hang on either date.
The pressure on believers in these cities was mostly civic and local: what a loyal city expected of its people. The evidence for an empire-wide persecution under Domitian is thin, and the books do not invent one.
The people. Every lead, household and neighbour in these novels is fictional, and so is the bearer who carries the letter. A few figures the New Testament itself names, such as Lydia of Thyatira, Epaphras of the Lycus valley and Antipas of Pergamum, stand at the edges, drawn only as far as the sources go. Later legends about them are told as rumour, not as fact.
Nothing in The Kept Flame is out yet. The opening chapters of What the Scrolls Were Worth are free now, and the list tells you when each city's books arrive.