adopted this broad approach in his doctorate and applied ideas from the sociology of knowledge and of sectarianism to investigate how social and political factors had affected the way Luke wrote his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. Thus, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality supplied the idea that Luke was legitimating a new social and religious movement to its members in the late first century AD. Esler’s doctoral thesis was accepted by Oxford in 1984 and a modified version was published by Cambridge University Press in 1987. In 1984 Esler returned to Sydney, initially as a solicitor at Allen, Allen and Hemsley before being called to the Bar in 1986. He completed his LLM in these years. In 1985 he began teaching New Testament courses on a part-time basis at Sydney University. In 1990 Esler attended a meeting in Portland, Oregon of a group of mainly US biblical critics committed to social-scientific interpretation. At this meeting those present formally constituted themselves as "The Context Group: A Project for the Study of the Bible in its Socio-Cultural Context". Although of diverse interests, all members accepted the importance of Mediterranean anthropology in understanding the context of ancient Greco-Roman world. Esler remains a member of the Context Group and has written on its history and modus operandi. In 1992 Esler was appointed Reader in New Testament in St Andrews University, becoming Professor of Biblical Criticism there in 1995. At St Andrews Esler initially published research which drew on his initial focus on the sociology of knowledge and of sectarianism and his expanding interests in Mediterranean anthropology, millennialism and magic. Esler returned to the application of Mediterranean anthropology to biblical texts in Sex, Wives, and Warriors: Reading Biblical Narrative With Its Ancient Audience (2011). Esler has formulated an approach called ‘archival ethnography’ to assist in the interpretation of the legal papyri from 70 to 200 CE that survive from caves in the Dead Sea region. In 2018 he applied the anthropology and sociology of gossip to the Book of Ruth in an article in the Journal of Biblical Literature, an article that attracted a positive comment in a statement from the outgoing editor of the journal. In the mid-1990s Esler began using both the social identity theory of social psychologist Henri Tajfel and the approach to ethnic identity of anthropologist Fredrik Barth and these have been prominent in