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 Making of the Bible (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2024).

Furthermore, simply getting the words down on parchment did not end the work of these enslaved collaborators. These writings needed to be carried to their recipients, read—even performed—and interpreted (think of something like a Q&A session) by those carriers, and then they needed to be copied (which also included interpretive work) and distributed by further enslaved collaborators. All of this underscores the important point that the meaning-making that occurred in the earliest strata of what came to be the Christian movement was less about so-called “inspired” texts produced by authoritative authors, and more about the skilled labor of enslaved person to craft and communicate the significance of a story that they may not even have personally found compelling.

Moss lays all this out expertly. I had encountered some of this piecemeal along the way, but Moss’s own authorial gifts (and she does her best to acknowledge all her collaborators) compellingly pulled together substantial amounts of specialist scholarship and presented a textured picture of writing in the ancient Mediterranean world in a way that I had not previously encountered. Although the text is not heavy on textual interpretation, there are several points along the way where Moss takes insights into the writing process and the ancient world’s systems of enslavement to illuminate different New Testament passages.

Just coming to grips with how extensive those systems of enslavement were, how they were built into the social fabric, and how the Jesus story and the New Testament writings emerge out of and are integrated with that social fabric, provides a great deal of food for thought that I’ll be chewing on for quite a while. For example, consider the term kurios, “lord,” which is found throughout the New Testament writings as well as the Septuagint. Moss notes: “The word kurios or ‘lord’ was used for enslavers, as a title for Jesus in the New Testament, and as a name for God in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible: (p. 116). What does it mean for how we think and speak about God that one of the key biblical terms used of God and Jesus is also a term for enslavers?

I’ll end with some of Moss’s own reflections on this lager question of enslavement in the Christian texts and traditions (bold is mine):

“The point of centering enslavement and enslaved workers should not be to fix the problems that interpreters currently have when they read the Bible, nor should it be about the explanatory power that enslavement has when it comes to narrating the history of Christianity. Centering enslavement is about doing justice, sharing credit, and recognizing harms. As the idea of Christ followers as part of the body of Christ reveals, the same passage can be used either to foster equality or to enforce hierarchy and oppression. Even benign metaphors can be harmful if we are not attentive to how they work and how they have been used. Reparative work in this case involves excising the explicit violence from, and acknowledging the power embedded in, cherished concepts and ideas about Christianity. It may not be Paul’s fault that subsequent generations of others have used his work to enslave and oppress, but it is ours if we do not notice the opportunities for abuse that his words have afforded them.” (p. 265–66)

*Note: to read about my co-authored article that Moss's work inspired, follow this link: Ghostwriters Then and Now: Biblical Scribes, Generative AI, and Collaborative Authorship.

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