The NT mentions 34 port cities, in many of which early Christian churches are attested: five in Judea (Gaza, Azotus, Caesarea, Joppa, Ptolemais), five in Syria/Cilicia (Antioch, Seleucia, Sidon, Tyre, Tarsus), two in Cyprus (Salamis, Paphos), two in Pamphylia (Attaleia, Perge), two in Lycia (Myra, Patara), one in Achaia (Corinth/Cenchreae), two in Macedonia (Philippi/Neapolis, Thessalonica), five in the province of Asia (Ephesus, Miletus, Smyrna, Troas, Assos, Adramyttium), five in the islands (Mitylene, Samos, Chios, Cos, Rhodes), one in Crete (Phoenix), two in Italy (Rome/Ostia, Puteoli), and one in Egypt (Alexandria). The three harbor towns in Galilee and the Gaulanitis (Capernaum, Magdala, Bethsaida) could be added. A new publication on the port cities of the Roman empire is thus of immediate interest for NT scholars.The 16 essays, all focused on the epigraphical evidence, constitute the first book arising from the Roman Mediterranean Ports project “which seeks a holistic understanding of early Imperial ports by addressing a range of key questions relating to their character, organization and roles” (p. 1). Simon Keay introduces the Portuslimen project in surveying the context of Roman Mediterranean port societies, and Pascal Arnaud and Simon Keay, the editors of the volume, provide an introduction to epigraphical evidence for port societies. Next, Dirk Steuernagel writes on the outposts of foreign merchants and their associations at Puteoli and Delos; Nicolas Tran on boatmen and their associations in the great ports of the Roman West; Dorothea Rohde on the Roman port societies and their collegia in Ostia and Ephesus; Hélène Rougier on occupations and social hierarchies in the ports of Hispalis, Arelate, Lugdunum, Narbo Martius, Ostia-Portus, and Aquileia; Catherine Virlouvet on warehouse societies; Taco Terpstra on the imperial cult and Roman overseas commerce; Jean-Jacques Aubert on law and life in Roman harbors; Sabine Panzram on Roman port city societies in Tarraco, Carthago Nova, and Gades in Spain; Michel Christol on ports, trade, and supply routes with a focus on Narbonne; Marc Mayer on the port society of Narona; Pascal Arnaud on municipal authority, central authority and civic euergetists in the port of Ephesus; Koenraad Verboven on the structure of mercantile communities; and Pascal Arnaud on the terminology and social-legal status of maritime shippers found in the roughly 600 relevant inscriptions (pp. 367–424, the longest essay in the volume). Nicholas Purcell summarizes, draws conclusions, and points to open questions in the concluding essay (“Reading Roman Port Societies”). All essays come with extensive bibliography. The indexes (pp. 444–55) cover emperors, names of individuals, consuls, deities, religious matters, geography, and, under varia, a subject index; there is no index of ancient references.Although there has been much progress, NT scholars often neglect to take into account the actual, real-life members of the congregations of believers in Jesus who listened to the texts collected in the NT being read and explained. It can be plausibly assumed that some of the people attending the Christian meetings in the large coastal cities worked as merchants and traders or worked in the harbor. The survey of the available epigraphical evidence by Rougier refers to the fact that the most frequently attested occupations are the negotiatores (merchants who engaged in overseas trade), navicularii (maritime transport), and nautae (river transport); other trading professionals are mercatores (merchants) and diffusores olearii (olive oil merchants). In connection with specific port related activities, for which there are fewer inscriptions, we find fabri navales (ship builders), stuppatores (rope makers), sacomarii (counterpoise makers or checkers), mensores frumentarii (grain measurers), saccarii (porters), saburrarii (ballast carriers), piscatores (fishermen), codicarii (boatmen), lenuncularii (boatmen), lyntrarii (boatmen), scapharii (boatmen), ratiarii (raftsmen), and urinatores (divers). Many port-based activities were seasonal, which means that “some of these workers became unemployed, while the others, free men or slaves, had to work elsewhere” (p. 137). Virlouvet’s essay references members of the elite who owned warehouse buildings and describes the managers of the warehouses, which were slaves of the family (horreari, conductores) who were responsible for the rental agreements for the storage units in the warehouse, for ensuring the safety of the stored goods, and for the accuracy of the registers listing the goods entering and leaving the warehouse. They worked with mensores, also slaves, who measured and counted foodstuffs in the large warehouses, assisted by office staff, bookkeepers, scribes, and archivists. Guards (custodes), mostly slaves, patrolled outside and inside the buildings. Porters (saccarii) worked on a day-to-day or a more regular basis; archeological evidence from the hinterland of Ostia demonstrates the hard life of these workers: more than half of the men whose skeletons were discovered had died before the age of 40, the skeletons showing “signs of deformities and whose teeth were in poor condition” pointing to the hard physical labor and the poverty of these men (p. 168).Rohde discusses three associations in Ephesus: (1) the silversmiths, who called themselves hieron synedrion (IK 13, 636), some of whom belonged to the neopoioi, the public cult officials of Artemis (IK 16, 2212); they had a stall on the Arkadiane, one of Ephesus’s most important streets (IK 12, 547), and “they agitated against Christians because they feared financial losses, as is known from a famous passage from the Acts of the Apostles” (p. 120), which can be used as primary evidence for the social stratum of membership in the collegium of the silversmiths and for the integral part they had in Ephesian society; (2) the worshipers of the Egyptian deities, the naubatountes who organized the navigium Isidis, the ritual opening of the seafaring season in the spring (IK 14, 1231); (3) the athletes, who maintained a branch of the Empire-wide association headquartered at Rome in Ephesus, honored the emperor (IK 14, 1124). Arnauld describes the association of ναύκληροι in Ephesus, “probably one of the corpora naviculariorum that had been granted the vacatio munerum” (p. 410, with reference to I. Eph. 542).In Acts 27:11, Luke mentions “the pilot” (κυβερνήτης; BDAG: one who is responsible for the management of a ship, shipmaster) and “the owner of the ship” (ναύκληρος, NIV, NRSV; BDAG: shipowner, charterer, captain, freight contractor) to whom the centurion listened rather than to Paul, whom he had to safely transfer to the city of Rome. Arnaud explains that the κυβερνήτης is the commander of a ship (p. 380), while the meaning of ναύκληρος did not have a stable and strict legal meaning (p. 386), although “by semantic tradition” it designated “the person who operated (and generally owned) the ship” (p. 409). Arnauld draws a composite picture of the average ναύκληρος/nauklerus from the epigraphic evidence (table 15.3, pp. 196–404): “someone who sailed, usually far away from home, and someone who would often live a life on board with his wife and children. A vast majority of them died and were buried far away from home, and those who died at home often mention their maritime travels, sailing specialisms or skill . . . the average person styled as naukleros in inscriptions was freeborn and peregrine” (p. 413).Panzram describes the society of Ostia with regard to its “openness” as a “cosmopolitan” society with “an economically, socially, and ethnically very heterogeneous population” (p. 219); if this is indicative of other port city societies, Christian missionaries would have found, at least potentially, various audiences at least willing to listen to their message. As regards the plan of the apostle Paul to proclaim the gospel in Spain, Tarraco, the urbs opulentissima in which wealthy migrants from the region lived, a city “open to foreigners of all parts of the Empire” (p. 223), was only four days of sailing from Ostia, Gades at the finis terrae, the harbor for the fertile land and the mines of Baetica, at a distance of seven days (p. 219). The fact that Paul, who had been planning a mission to Spain for some time, was welcomed by believers in Puteoli where he stayed for seven days (Acts 28:13–14), raises interesting possibilities. Verboven describes an inscription from the Augustan era that documents mercatores qui Alexandr(iai) Asiai Syriai negotiantur in Puteoli (CIL X, 1797), that is, merchants doing business in Alexandria (Egypt), Asia, and Syria; they honor a local aristocrat who may have financed their business ventures (p. 348). The archives of the Sulpicii, financial middlemen active in Puteoli in the middle of the first century, mention 273 persons, including 12 women, more than half of the persons mentioned being freedmen (p. 349); the archives document “voluntary social networks that potentially cut through geographical and cultural lines” (p. 352), including contacts with merchants from Baetica which are well attested at Puteoli (p. 348). Steuernagel discusses the statio of the Tyrians at Puteoli, a reference point for the Phoenicians and Syrians residing in the city (pp. 64–68). Could Phoebe, the prostatis in Cenchreae, one of the ports of Corinth, whom Paul recruited for some role in his planned visit to Rome and mission to Spain (Rom 16:1–2), have belonged to such a network? Or Lydia, the merchant dealing in purple cloth from Thyatira who lived in Philippi (Acts 16:14–15), a short distance from the port city of Neapolis (Acts 16:11)?