Wall Street Journal Book Review: The Bible’s Hidden Contributors, by Peter Thonemann (Oxford) (reviewing Candida Ross (University of Birmingham), God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (2024)):
“The stupid, the lowborn, the gullible; slaves, women, and children.” For the second-century pagan writer Celsus, it was easy to sneer at the adherents of the new Christian faith as a basket of deplorables. Still, insults often contain a grain of truth. In his point-by-point rebuttal of Celsus’ anti-Christian polemic a century or so later, the theologian Origen doesn’t dispute this particular charge. Yes, the lowborn, the uneducated, the marginalized were indeed at the core of the Christian mission: That was the point. Today, most theologians would accept that Celsus was right to foreground the crucial role of women in shaping the early church. In “God’s Ghostwriters,” Candida Moss attempts to make a similar case for the role of enslaved people. It is hard to imagine a reader who wouldn’t find this a thrilling, if at times infuriating, book.
Ms. Moss, a professor of theology at the University of Birmingham, is the author of several spiky and provocative revisionist studies of the early church. … In “God’s Ghostwriters,” she sets out to recover the contributions made by enslaved men and women to the development of the church in (roughly) the first two centuries after Christ.
In fact, “God’s Ghostwriters” is by far the best account we have of the roles played by enslaved people in supporting the high literary culture of the ancient world more broadly. … Throughout antiquity, every stage of literary composition, dissemination and reception was facilitated by enslaved letter-carriers, copyists and readers. As Ms. Moss reminds us, even reading a book generally meant listening to an enslaved person, who was himself reading from a scroll copied out by another enslaved person.
“God’s Ghostwriters” makes a more radical and specific claim: that enslaved people were integral to the formation of the New Testament.
Ms. Moss’s key concept is that of co-authorship. When an author dictated his or her ideas to an enslaved scribe, the scribe, she argues, was much more than an animate dictaphone: “Their interpretative work,” she argues, “gave shape to the thoughts and words of the speaker and made them an indispensable part of the compositional process.”
In a mundane sense, that is obviously true. The tricky question is how far we can legitimately stretch this idea of giving “shape.” Ms. Moss is admirably keen to engage in a project of “ethical reading that is reparative as it listens to neglected voices . . . to read with erased collaborators and to attend to invisible actors.” The trouble with invisible actors is precisely their invisibility. How can we tell if we are “attending” to the muffled voices of enslaved scribes, or simply imagining them? When does “ethical reading” tip into wishful thinking? …
“God’s Ghostwriters” includes a very great deal that is clever, important and well-argued. The final two chapters of the book, on the ways in which the metaphor of slavery shaped early Christian ideas of the relationship between worshipper and God, struck me as immensely powerful and even troubling. Ms. Moss has brilliant things to say about how Christian ideas of faith were modeled on the fidelity of a slave to his or her master, and how closely the punishments of hell were molded out of the realities of the Roman penal system for unfree victims. Regardless of whether enslaved people succeeded in slipping the odd verse or two of their own into Philippians, no one can possibly doubt, after reading this vigorous and provocative book, that the whole texture of Christian thought would have looked very different without them.
New York Times Book Review: The Hidden Figures Who Spread the Gospel, by Timothy Farrington (Author, Beauty for Ashes (2020)) (reviewing Candida Ross (University of Birmingham), God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (2024)):
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 worked in increasingly 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. …
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. …
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. …
“God’s Ghostwriters” is … 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.
Candida Ross (University of Birmingham), God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (2024):
For the past two thousand years, Christian tradition, scholarship, and pop culture have credited the authorship of the New Testament to a select group of men: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul. But hidden behind these named and sainted individuals are a cluster of unnamed, enslaved coauthors and collaborators. These essential workers were responsible for producing the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament: making the parchment on which the texts were written, taking dictation, and refining the words of the apostles. And as the Christian message grew in influence, it was enslaved missionaries who undertook the arduous journey across the Mediterranean and along dusty roads to move Christianity to Rome, Spain, and North Africa—and into the pages of history. The impact of these enslaved contributors on the spread of Christianity, the development of foundational Christian concepts, and the making of the Bible was enormous, yet their role has been almost entirely overlooked until now.
Filled with profound revelations both for what it means to be a Christian and for how we read individual texts themselves, God’s Ghostwriters is a groundbreaking and rigorously researched book about how enslaved people shaped the Bible, and with it all of Christianity.
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