GOD’S GHOSTWRITERS: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible, by Candida Moss
Near the end of the Epistle to the Galatians, the Apostle Paul adds a comment on his clumsy penmanship: “Look at what big letters I have written to you with in my own hand.”
Rhetorically, it’s a stamp of authenticity. Forged texts were common in the flux of early Christianity, so here is proof that Paul (who was possibly nearsighted) endorsed this message. It’s also an arresting reminder that the Epistle really was a letter, and that the Bible really is a biblion — a papyrus-and-ink book, transcribed (at a minimum) by individual human hands.
In “God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible,” Candida Moss stresses the further implications of Paul’s remark, ones that have often been overlooked. Like most writers in the Roman world, she points out, Paul mostly didn’t write. The force of his aside comes from the fact that he didn’t often take up a pen; he was making a special effort as a sign of his conviction. Instead, he dictated, to skilled aides, who — though euphemized as “secretaries” or “amanuenses” — were quite likely enslaved.
Such workers, argues Moss, a professor of theology at the University of Birmingham, were more than mouthpieces but “co-authors, meaning-makers, missionaries and apostles in their own right.”
Slavery was everywhere at Rome. Around the time of Christ, something like a quarter of the population of Italy was enslaved. In the countryside, enslaved people workedincreasingly consolidated large farms. In the city, they filled innumerable roles created by the Romans’ love of luxury, thirst for status and sinister genius for hierarchical classification: cook, wet nurse, bookkeeper, colorator (furniture polisher), a tabulis (keeper of pictures), ab argento (keeper of silver), nomenclator (rememberer of guests’ names) and dozens more. Among them were the scribes, readers and messengers who are Moss’s main subjects.
Tantalizingly, one appears by name in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “I, Tertius, who wrote this epistle, greet you in the Lord.” “Tertius” has the utilitarian ring of a servile name, Moss notes: It means “Third.” But we get nothing beyond this glimpse, itself a rarity. In Roman society, slaves were non-people, living in what the historian Keith Bradley has described as a kind of death suspended at their enslaver’s whim.
Direct evidence for how such workers shaped the Gospel and its reception is accordingly scanty, so Moss’s account is necessarily, and admittedly, speculative. But she grounds her imaginative interpretations in close reading of secular and religious texts and the appalling facts of ancient slavery in general.
Enslaved workers copied Christian manuscripts, cataloged them in libraries and helped compile cross-references, indexes and other aids for reading. They silently corrected faults in texts and chased down quotations in unwieldy scrolls.
Even when taking dictation, Moss argues, they could play a meaningful part in composition. She cites another passage written by Paul, Romans 5:1, where some manuscripts have “we have peace in God” and others have “let us have peace in God.” The difference rests on a single character in Greek — omega versus omicron. The thing is, as Moss observes, the two letters, formerly distinct, had come to be pronounced the same by the time Romans was transcribed. “Whichever reading was the ‘original’ written text, it would have been a decision on the part of Paul’s secretary,” an unacknowledged bit of “collaboration” between the named author and his enslaved scribe.
More speculatively, she notes the “pervasive bookish language” of Galatians, where enslaved people are twice referred to with a word that can also mean letters of the alphabet. This might be a way for Paul’s scribe of “inserting themself into the letter,” she suggests, a kind of in-joke. “Perhaps they let slip a wry smile as they inscribed the words.”
Enslaved people helped spread the Gospel as well as formulate it. Specialist lectores read — performed — biblical passages to Christians assembled for study and worship. Skillful improvisation by a lector might even explain the alternative ending to the Gospel of Mark recorded in some manuscripts, Moss suggests.
Couriers carried word from apostles to keep distant communities of nascent Christians on the same page, biblically speaking. Like ministers in the pulpit, Moss writes, these messengers were “interpretive guides,” ad hoc apostles who used gesture and intonation to supplement and explicate the text they carried.
Artisans, women and enslaved people also spread the Christian message through casual chatter; not for nothing did pagans denigrate Christianity as a “superstition of ‘women and slaves.’” Moss goes on to cite a scene from Acts where the imagery of the Holy Spirit sweeping down on the apostles recalls classical tropes of gossip spreading like uncontrollable wind.
Passages like that aren’t a fluke, she writes, but reflect the “consistent rooting of early Christian identity in the structures of slavery.” To be a faithful Christian was to be a “slave of Christ” like the Apostle Paul. Even biblical visions of hell, in Moss’s reading, are influenced by the brutal working conditions for enslaved laborers in mines.
Above all, “slavish” aspects can be seen in Jesus, from his habit of speaking in parables (a lowly literary form resembling the fables of the enslaved Aesop) to his ambiguous parentage (much emphasized by Mark, who himself was sometimes cast as enslaved). Philippians goes further, outright describing Jesus as “taking the form of a slave” at birth. Moss shows how Christians have applied such rhetoric selectively ever since, sanitizing servitude into a metaphor.
Moss’s points about the disquieting ease with which some people use phrases like “faithful servant,” heedless of the ideological tangle of Christianity and slavery that underlies them, are well put. But occasionally she can be too eager to yoke past and present. She declares at the outset that she’s not worried about anachronism, on the ground that “disinterested history is sometimes also morally negligent.”
Even so, her injections of modern rhetoric (“essential workers,” “emotional labor,” “precarity”) feel less subtle than the analysis that surrounds them. “God’s Ghostwriters” is also less a cumulative argument than a string of case studies.
But it brings the world of ancient slavery to grim life, and connects larger issues of collaboration and credit to the material facts of ancient work, making it impossible to ignore the labor between the lines.
GOD’S GHOSTWRITERS: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible | By Candida Moss | Little, Brown | 336 pp. | $30
