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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 ...

There I was—up at some ungodly hour to walk on my treadmill. I was listening to a podcast (I think it was this one ) featuring Candida Moss and discussing her recent book, God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (more from me on this book at some point in the future). It’s a good episode, and the book is a good read, and they—podcast and book—were a pair of experiences that covered things I knew in an abstract sense but made it all a lot more specific and interesting. But, I digress. The point is that I was walking on the treadmill and engaging with this interesting content, when the thought hit me: “ Mon Dieu! …,” (yes, for the purpose of this blog post, my subconscious sometimes speaks French), “…Mediated authorship in the form of enslaved and lower-class persons in antiquity seems a lot like how authorship with generative artificial intelligence is working right now!” Later—I don’t recall whether it was later that day, or later that week, or even la...

One of the recurrent points of discussion during the 20th century conversations between Marxists and Christians in German-speaking Europe had to do with the character of Prometheus – the titan from Greek mythology who stole fire from Zeus and the Olympian gods in order to give it to humanity. Within Marxist thought, Prometheus came to represent the Marxist criticism of religion and the conviction that humanity must reject religious authority and deity since it served only to keep humanity in servitude. Prometheus became the hero of human actualization and freedom. It isn’t hard to see how Prometheus would become a focal point when Marxist and Christian theologians got together to chat. Jan Milíč Lochman was a Czech theologian who, after 1968, taught at the University of Basel. He was active in the late heady days of Marxist/Christian dialogue in the 1960s. The engagement was driven, in no small part, by interpersonal and intellectual encounter in Czechoslovakia, which came to an ab...

"Statue of Justicia (Justice), by Walter Seymour Allward, outside Supreme Court of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario Photo by D. Gordon E. Robertson, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons William Stringfellow – the incisive, trenchant, and often quirky lawyer, activist, and Episcopal theologian – died 40 years ago this weekend (on March 2, 1985) in a Rhode Island hospital. Though death claimed him at age 56, after two decades suffering from chronic disease, it never defeated him. By the accounts of people close to him, he lived in the radical freedom of his calling in the Word of God. Indeed, one might profitably read his 15 books (including three co-written with his lover and partner, the poet Anthony Towne) as one sustained broadside against the rule of Death (the capitalization seems apropos to me) – that mysterious, penultimate, all-pervasive moral power reigning in a fallen cosmos, in society, in politics, and in our very bodies. The academic theology and ethics guilds have been slo...

I greeted with great pleasure the unlooked-for arrival on my desk of Mark Lindsay’s newest book, Markus Barth: His Life & Legacy . It is an occupational hazard for academic administrators such as me to find it increasingly difficult to read scholarship in their field, but that proved not to be the case with reference to this engaging volume—I gobbled it up in a weekend! Lindsay has done an admirable job in bringing to light the younger Barth’s many significant contributions while also narrating his story in a compelling and enjoyable manner. Well done, Mark! I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in exploring a broader “Barthianism,” in political theology, in Jewish-Christian dialogue, and / or in the theology of the sacraments.* As is my habit, I’d like to highlight a passage of this volume for you, gentle readers, wherein Lindsay narratives some criticisms that M. Barth made of American foreign policy, specifically. However, they are relevant beyond their time an...

[The series continues and now commences the fifth in-person session.  Find the last post here .]   McMaken: Last time we spoke about Nancy Bedford’s work on Galatians . We talked about her way of talking about the structure of Galatians as a chiasm, and I emphasized at the end of our time together a quote from Bedford wherein she sums up her understanding of what Galatians is all about. She said:   “The theological structure of the epistle shows that though the themes, that though themes such as justification do have their place, it is the character of the liberating and loving God manifested as Son, Father, and Spirit as well as the empowering, life-giving relationship of human beings to God that enliven Paul's letter with its themes of goodness, freedom, and justice.” [1]   This is how she helps us shift the center of our attention in reading Galatians away from just the doctrine of salvation, as we Protestants have understood it, to try to focus more ...