What Am I Reading? Candida Moss’s “God’s Ghostwriters"
In God's Ghostwriters , an engagingly written and wide-ranging work, Candida Moss endeavors to bring to the wider reading public something that specialist scholars have known for some time—the people that most folks think wrote the books of the New Testament did not, in fact, write the books of the New Testament. At least not in the way that we tend to think of authorship. Rather than being a solitary labor of individual writers channeling spiritual inspiration into words on a page, the writing of these books was an intensely collaborative process. And very often--and connecting the dots here is, perhaps, Moss's most substantial contribution in this volume--the people collaborating in this process did not necessarily want to collaborate. As Moss sums things up (bold is mine): “Hidden behind these names of sainted individuals are enslaved coauthors and collaborators, almost all of whom go uncredited” (p. 12). Candida Moss, God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the ...