now, i am so pleased to

introduce tonight's speakers. candida moss is edward cadbury chair of theology at the university of birmingham. she previously taught for almost a decade at the university notre dame. the award author of and coauthor coauthor seven books. she has also served as the papal news commentator for cbs and writes a regular column for the daily in addition to regularly on religious affairs for cbs, ms. has served as an on air expert for cnn and fox news and has appeared in documentaries for the likes of cnn nbc and national geographic. she is joined in conversation tonight by dr. shibley tj smith, assistant professor of new testament at boston university school of theology, and the author of strangers to family, diaspora and first peters invention of god's household. candida moss is presenting her new book, god's ghostwriters enslaved christians and the making of the bible. for the past 2000 years christian tradition, scholarship and pop culture have credited

the authorship of the new testament to a select of men. matthew mark, luke, john and paul. but hidden behind these names and sainted individuals are a cluster of unnamed enslaved coauthors and collaborators. these essential workers were responsible for producing the earliest manuscripts. the new testament making the department which the texts were written. taking dictation and refining the words of the apostles. reza aslan writes, quote at once eminently readable and rigorously researched god's ghostwriters cements candida moss as the most compelling voice in biblical scholarship. the role of enslaved people in writing and disseminating laminating the gospels has been ignored far too long. we all amass a debt of gratitude for. this monumental and eye opening work. we are so pleased there was this event at harvard bookstore tonight. please me in welcoming candida moss and dr. civility. jason. thank you so much. i'm so about the conversation

that we're going to have together about. your book, god's ghost writers, christians and the making of the bible. i'm also really excited to my colleagues in affirming how important and significant work is. so one of the geniuses of god's ghost writers that i think is important from my reading is how you leverage the authority already assigned to the sources of early christianity like the gospels the book of acts, the letters of paul and peter the early church fathers to show us why we have those names and writings to speak of today because. you call them you say servile workers and reading and writing or enslaved literary workers made it so and so. i really want to start by asking you a question about. this making it so dynamic that you're claiming in the book, why did you write a book that

tackles the phenomenon of enslavement in the literary production of the new testament and the spread early christianity and why did you feel compelled to write it now? well, thank you so much, shapely for that introduction. it means a great deal to me from you being familiar with your work. so thank and in truth, i was supposed to be writing different book. i was supposed to be writing what now feels? like a very boring book. a biography. the gospel of mark. and a few things came together for me. the first was that i reached that where i needed reading for the first time. i have a lot of medical problems, but i had never needed glasses beforehand. and as i'm getting these glasses, i'm increasingly expanding things on screens, getting external monitors. that's the thing i'm thinking,

because i write about disability. how do people do this in antiquity? that's right. yeah. and realized they had to use other people. hmm. and as i dug into that, i realized they were. by and large, you really using enslaved people to read and write, especially at nighttime when christians were meeting. right. when it's dark. i'm the one who gets at my flashlight at the restaurant now and i realized they're using enslaved people do this. and at the same time i start reading in classics where scholars of classics started to think about invisible workers, especially in this literate space. and as far as this historical moment goes, two things happened. i've taken longer to write and research this book than any of my previous books. i was maybe spamming academy before this. two things happened. the pandemic started and i you.

i stayed home with my family. immunocompromised was feeling very good about. but i was able to do that because of other people. other people who are delivering things to home, who are being placed in way on my behalf and i didn't even acknowledge them in the way i was speaking. i was like amazon delivered something to my house as. if jeff bezos came over right and just dropped it off and, you know there were people that was obscuring and it struck. that's a very roman thing to do. wow. to obscure the label when we talk about having our houses like renovated. i'm renovating my kitchen. i am not a construction worker. do not have me come to your plumbing. there's. there are all kinds of decisions being made. i'm taking ownership of. and alongside that, of course was we're at a moment in history where everyone is having a reckoning with their past.

i think christians in particular are to reckon with the bible's implication. that's right. in the history of colonialism and enslavement in this country. and we can all say it is not paul's fault that his works were put to this. mm hmm. mm hmm. but the new testament, as a collection of ancient texts, produced by people living in a world, in which slavery was for granted. yeah. encode values that have been used to support structure of domination and oppression. yeah in this country and around world. and this isn't book about making people feel bad about themselves. but i think that no one is well-served when we obscure that. so i would say it was sort of like a woe wind of things. those the the particular history of atlantic slavery in this country. there was my own wrestling with

an inability to read. there's all of this exciting new work being done in classics that is borrowing from histories of atlantic slavery. and then with my own realizing that i am rehearsing dinah mix despotic dynamics. it comes to labor. yeah. yeah. i really love the way in which you're talking about enslavement and. this matter of invisible labor, right? mean. so this is a different sort of way when think about our field and how it talks about matters of enslavement in the new testament. so we're we're very comfortable talking about enslaved as a metaphor for that shows up paul in a parcel of jesus christ and slave servant just depends which translation you're working with how obvious we want to be about enslavement where we are we are accustom to encountering the enslavement institution, although we're not going to want to really call that when we get to the parables of jesus, right? because it's really about the

parabolic speech of jesus in a real way. it seems to me that for you, you are trying to have a different. invite us to have a different conversation about where enslavement is in testament and early christian literature and how it is showing up there in a form that we're just not accustomed to engaging. can you tell am i reading you right on that? i think right when i think about the book and what it is a book about credit. and i think giving credit is itself subversive act, you know, go right and you know, if you go to seminary if you learn about the bible if you're in the pews on a sunday often you're thinking about what does this mean. that's right. what does this mean for the person who wrote it down and in writing this book, i wanted to show the enslaved people formerly enslaved people that were involved in composition.

the for if if you're a kind of traditional christian. that's right you know do you think apostles in their nineties could have written alone without. in their nineties. hmm. they needed help and that's just fine. but those people deserve credit to. we know that enslaved people in the ancient world improved the style of text that they were taking down dictation for and this is active work and once a text is written it has to be copy. that's almost always by sleepwalkers because it huts. mm hmm. if you ever had to write at length school, you did this, you know? yeah, i did. and no one wants to do that. and then when a text is read aloud, it's read aloud. usually by an enslaved worker who is prepared before hand and swearing and tone of voice. their people gesticulate wildly reading. in the ancient world their

facial expressions are the keys for interpretation are the faces of the gospel. and when those texts are carried somewhere, it's enslaved and enslaved people who are carrying them. when we talk about missionary expansion of early christianity, we tend to talk about this a group of sort of 12 people. that's right. but we're talking about dozens perhaps hundreds of enslaved and curious who are carrying texts interpreting them answering questions about them in ways that would be determinative for what understood they were hearing. that's right. this is not fungible. mm hmm. mm hmm. these are the first interpreters of scripture. and. and what does that mean in canada when we think about playing pushing this to imagine that the expansion of early christianity and the social

project this religious project as project is fundamentally not carried by these free agent apostles, just moved by the spirit. but it sounds like what you're indicating and pointing to is a reckoning with the history that begins to say, enslaved literary labor is the reason why christianity got so far in this. and you know initial context and origins and it is part of that invisible labor that invisible. how does it change our historical work to imagine that the expansion is being carried by people who are servile literary readers and writers to others? yeah. and i, i do want to be clear. i'm not saying that the emperor constantine was an important right. right. right. well, saying origin wasn't important. i'm just saying that might not have been a heck supplier, which is like his.

he has just like multi column edition of the hebrew bible might not have been possible without his workers. what i'm saying is we have just broader pool of people. and if we want to tell an honest history of who was important, we have to have a broader group of people. but i wouldn't even just say it's in slave labor. i would say. it enslaved genius. enslaved in ingenuity. enslaved skill, because this is active, creative, interpretive work. this is not just, you know a machine copying attacks. that's right. where do you that right. we already knew the changes in the manuscripts. this is intellectual. that's right. and so is what i want to change that slavery isn't just it's not just the thing. the new testament is sort of sometimes about enslaved people help create that text, help bring the bible to life and

spread christianity itself. and it's that person had that i want to draw attention to. so let's talk a little bit about that and maybe create, i don't know, some distance and maybe some similarities. so to talk about what the history let's talk about what the history of enslaved men in antiquity and this early christianity origins similar and distinct and you kind went there earlier but similar and distinct from our understandings of england. take enslavement, history and practices. so here's the question we think of these two enslavement systems enslavement in antiquity and in slave meant in the atlantic's as entirely different from each other. or is there a misstep when we do this? and how does your book help us think these connections and distinctions? yeah. so obviously this is a

complicated topic, a very complicated and to sometimes you'll see kind of crass generalizations about it. so both the roman slavery and atlantic slavery have been identified as slave societies? just they didn't just incidentally have people. that's right. that society for propelled forward by structures of slavery. the big difference that people often talk about is that, as we all know, atlantic slavery is grounded. particular theories, racial theories that emerge to support colonialization and the enslaved being structures that follow in and the particular systems of race, theories of race that we have that emerge in that moment, that persisted into to this day don't exist in antiquity in the same way.

but but there are still some stereotypes as right. just because they don't have the same structures of race doesn't mean that they don't have ethnic stereotyping. when you think about how roman slavery worked, it was primarily pushed forward by war and conquest. and that might mean that sometimes. roman slavery took on kind of phenotypic contours. so, you know, after julius caesar conquered goldman de france, then you see a million celts brought into of the center of the roman empire. many of them didn't reach rome. they were dropped off mines. but this is of their red wavy locks that comes through in the roman architecture. so that's a different structure. the difference, this difference and also the fact in roman slavery, you are more likely to be freed in your lifetime than in atlantic slavery should not let roman slavery off the hook.

sometimes this is where it goes. it's like there is something awful about atlantic slavery, but that doesn't mean roman slavery is quote unquote good. slavery. that's right. there's no good slavery. right. and i think there is a an analogy that's made by a particular classicist who says that roman slavery is like an internship at a finance company. no, i hear they work long hours, but they can't beaten to death. that's right. they. own their children are still their children. they're not they don't live in fear it's not the same. it's not good analogy. and i think into this comparative vortex is the problem and only ever serves to let other systems of slavery that people want to hold on to because they really like the romans. i mean think about the roman empire a lot off the hook.

that's right. i think a primary difference. it was instrumental for this book is that when people think about and they think about atlantic slavery, they know that used a literacy as a tool of control. that's right. and that they would that they would harm people in to prevent them from reading them, writing. that's right. but in antiquity, where they didn't have printing presses, they didn't have reading glasses, they needed enslaved workers to do this kind of work. yeah yeah. and that's one of the things that i found so helpful was thinking about how your book talks about this language enslave literary workers and you begin to talk about the different kinds of literary labor that are taken up. one is the writing, one is the transcribing and dictation. you begin to talk about the careers at our part of this, you start talking about those who are the oral readers that are a part of this. and you talk about this whole education system, this literary educational system, one that

serves the sort of elite group. and then there's this parallel education system around letters and the literary arts. i would like to say that, you see happening in the in with this enslaved labor group that that seems be being propped up. can you talk a little bit about what it means to be talking about these to sort of educate in a literary systems that are running side by side and actually seem to be interacting with each other in a particular way? yeah so. romans do educate enslaved workers to do this kind of they do have dedicated schools for enslaved workers. we have them archeologically. we found them in rome. example pliny says he has a whole school for enslaved workers on his property. but often they're enslaved alongside one another. and what that means is, you know, you have an enslaved child or even an adult accompanying, a wealthy child to school and

maybe taking notes for them. and one of the ways that children and were taught and learned or writing was they were actually being taught to dominate a lot of the reading exercises or how do come on to your enslaved workers. and so you can picture one child that is there hearing how the command enslaved workers how to threaten them with crucifixion and then another child there. that's right. who internalizing the risks and threats all around them. so it's kind of a very different experience depending who you are. yeah, that is so is this i want to move a little bit our conversation and sort of start thinking about of the nuggets in the passages of your text. so in the book in chapter three, which is a chapter i really love rereading the story of jesus you describe one of the classic stories of jesus healing about paralytic man and his four friends, and i want to hold on to that friend's language.

so you include the accouterments of the story, the bed to the roof being torn away, the four friends are lifting the man up and setting him down in line of sight of jesus, jesus performing, healing. so i'm thinking matthew nine, mark two here and but for you are where everyone else this as a healing story a lot of people see this as a healing story with jesus on healing the paralytic man whose four friends have made great strides to give him to jesus, as you describe it, as a story of enslaved laborers. so the question why for you is it necessary to consider are these four friends are enslaved, saved to the paralytic man, and how does it offer an alternate

pathway for understanding the representation of jesus in the gospel? yes. yeah. i think you this is a story that i think anyone grew up in. a christian family has heard many before. that's right. and i've translated many times in greek and with my students and i may not have said friends, but i thought friends, but they're not called friends they're not even actually identified as people in the greek, because greek can do that and so when you go look at the ancient evidence for who get carried in antiquity, it's two groups of people. it's people who cannot walk and it's people who can pay not to have to walk. so a lot of people get carried around in litters or chairs. and in the greek, the term for what the man's being carried in, it can mean either very expensive, heavy litter or just a stretcher. the simple pallet we heard about in sunday school.

and so there four men carrying him and they dismantled someone to roof which is which is quite a bold thing to do. would they let down and jesus first looks at them and the four people tells them their faith has saved them. he then has a back and forth with the his sort of assembled group and he then to the man you're a of forgiven we don't know what those are and take up your bed and walk he walk but if he's a man who's also wealthy jesus is now saying to him do not hop right back on the ladder now that you can walk you know this a story that's full of gaps right? that's a doorway people can't get through. there's now like a skylight in the in the roof of this house. we don't know anybody's name. that's right. and we all fill in gaps in this

story. we're building materials we bring from our own world. yeah. and there is one bible commentary published by a university press that just say that their friends, when it has its translation. that's right. puts friends into the translation as if it was in the greek psalm. that's how much it assumes that they're friends. but that's that's what's in the texts seem to be annoying person who's like it doesn't say that the greek but but it really does and when you read it that way when you think about the possible added this is and enslaver who's just been healed jesus now seeing the man that's right drawing attention to them talking how their loyalty saved, turning the man forgiving the man's sins and then telling him, do your own work. well, it's a very different story now. yeah. and it's so powerful because in

this story, in this instance, it seems like this is the disruption in, the sort of discourse, right? it is both the disruption and the invitation for us to analyze what we are automatically with unconsciously imagining are the identities the state, the opportunity or challenges or lack thereof of the text. so it seems like in a certain way a part of. this book is helping us to imagine an invisible group that may or may not be in visible as we think. right. so do we, in fact, have a story in this case? and when matthew mark and luke break through the gaps are, able to leverage the fact that they're audience would understand the status of the identity, the role of these four four people in a way that history and on this side of history for us we have we are

now imagine have a sort of imagination deficit we cannot imagine or have a blot to imagining and really appreciating what it means to say that the enslaved system in the roman empire it was so we'll say it it was everywhere slave enslavement a part of the roman militar arithmetic world. but it seems to me that we say that as historians and interpreters of the text. but your book is actually calling us to actually see that ubiquity to see how pervasive and everywhere it is in these gospel accounts. yeah, i mean that that is what i'm trying to do and it is about. but the key thing that the bible translation that put friends in was imagining as well. mm hmm. that's right. and so the question is, how do we imagine responsibly. that's right. who do we imagine ourselves imagining with?

how do we do that in a rigorous way that can truly be called history? that's right. and i think there are ways to do that. i read a sociologist, early 20th century sociologist amy tana, who went undercover as a waitress in like 1909, and she worked 14 hour days. and when she finally quit, her job was like actually, i'm a sociologist. and and spoke to her employer about her, the working conditions she had been in. her employer said, well, no, you plenty of time. she said, no, i'm working 14 hour days. it's really my back hurts my arm, but and tana summarized it by saying, mistress's primary send then was a failure of imagination she says she had done this work, but she couldn't imagine what was to do it. and i think that's what i'm hoping we can all do now. yes, we can recognize where what ready. bringing assumptions to our and we can try to imagine in new

ways that are reparative for people. i love it. you actually have a bit of a quote. i want to read some of this, the sort of related to this. so one of the things you say from the very beginning and the book is you identify that the of the project is dealing with limited direct source and attestation available from quote the enslaved coal authors and collaborators hidden behind our new testament heroes like peter, paul, matthew, mark, luke and john and to this point, you say this, the fact that they are not well known today is no accident, since in the ancient world, enslaved literary workers status entailed and ensured invisibility they were according to the logic of slavery extensions, of the more powerful followers of jesus, or of those from whom were rented or borrowed and as such, their idea as in their labor belong to

their enslavers, in quotes. i'm going to stay here for a minute on this and ask a question. how do you excavate a history that is not only hidden, but perhaps even erased? yeah, it's challenging. and this, i guess is where someone might accuse me of speculation. hmm. and what i did was i read really widely. this is why it took so long to do. i read in the histories of cognitive science. i read in histories of medicine to see what is ancient reading and writing due to body. i read a lot of history of atlantic slavery which is so far ahead of us. and that's why i read your work and scholars you i read a lot of work in classics and i read a lot in histories of book labor. so sometimes people like to say,

well, can you prove to me that a secretary did anything? i'm already a little bit like really? you think i've done clerical labor? i was doing something, but when i read widely histories of clerical labor and, book labor, there is no period time where they are not contributing to the texts that they're producing. that's right. so would be oddly anomalous. and then as i tried to fill in my imagination because, i concede my imagination may not be very good. this is where i wanted to go and read other things. and in order to prove that i had some kind of basis for things that i was making up, i a whole website with real extensive notes. and so you can see this is why she's saying that. and here is where she says we have some evidence but it's not as good as we. and i did that to be transparent as i did that, i became aware of

how sloppy some of the more kind of traditional history writing was. so, in fact, so many dominant about how the gospels were written depend on a series of assumptions. so the gospel of john, the fourth gospel, when i was in high school, i learned this theory, this how dominant it was. a german scholar in 1941 hypothesized that the evangelist john was sat like shively at a desk. he had sources, pieces of paper like this, and he was writing with a pen alone looking heaven with maybe with some light. yeah, with light. and then he had sources and a gust of wind through a window, not the sheets of the table. and they got messed up. and this is why the gospel of john has the form that it has today. how wonderful is that? yeah, i don't have a problem with the fact that this is speculation, although i'm sure. you will appreciate that when

you're talking about minor meteorological event we're in the realm of speculation. my problem is it's not it's not good and the reason it's not good is because the evangelist john is supposed to be in his. that's right. alone and he's supposed to be using a desk. and they don't use in the ancient world and important of all, he's supposed to have loose leaf pieces of paper in his sources that have been scrolls or like format codices like this though don't get knocked by a gust of wind. that's right. at no point did he walk across the street at the university of munich to to the manuscript experts and say hey, do you have evidence for this. that's right. he didn't do that that was speculation. and so there's a lot of speculation that except in history that goes on scrutinized. i try to do my best with the website but i guess if someone said this to me i would say we do that all the time. what we need to interrogate are the assumptions and the values

in forming imagination. yeah, thank you for that. so i want to push a little bit and stay here on another example where i think you were pointing how our lack of or our own assumption have shaped some of the stories around christian origins that we're working with. let's talk about paul for a second and the conversation about paul's imprisonment and paul's prison. so one of the things that i found provocative of about the book is how you reset texts in context for us related to the matter. paul and paul's imprisonment in particular. i'm thinking about how we the carceral setting of paul at four letters of paul are written from prison. so ephesians, philippians, colossians so i lehman and you call this space repeatedly the paul inhabited as his subterranean chamber which i was like i love this subterranean

chamber. so here's the question. can you talk to us a bit about, the relationship between this roman carceral space that occupied this sub subterranean chamber, his enterprise of letter writing and his racket collaborations, secretaries or this of enslaved coauthors and collaborators you are referring to? how do we put these pieces together in a different kind of fits configuration that is maybe truer to what archeology is telling us, truer to what we about the text and how writing is happening now. how do you reset our our imaginations about? paul is writing letters in prison. yeah. so thank you for about this cathartic had a great deal this for my book so i'm always happy to talk about it. so i started the archeology and here i want to signal my

indebtedness to already published and future work by matthew lawson and mark gladney on the archeology roman prisons because they have collected it all together and what they really make apparent to anyone is roman prisons are dark they are cold and they are underground and you cannot see down there, uh, you know, i've seen some 19th century pictures of paul and you know, a secretary in this beautiful, high ceilinged prison with some great windows, lights. but actually they have like very small. so i consulted with them. i had them read the book for mistakes and i think it's not that the setting makes it impossible for, paul, to have written and reviewed the text himself, although it does. that's it is. that and again, i'm indebted to their work and to megan hennings, you start to look at how christians describe how health starts to look a lot like

roman prison like mines what's with the worms. you know what i'm talking about? the one the one that does not die in the new testament. where did that come from? well, when you look at their work and at henning's work, you see that there were no bathrooms in these prisons. and there are a lot of parasites. i realize it's before dinner. yeah. so there are lot of worms in carceral spaces, antiquity. the sulfa is from the the colonists were enslaved people were chained up outside at night or that the prison's underground very cold and damp. you know how is this is boston you know that when it's damp and cold it's even colder and so this is these these spaces imprisonment that are being described the new testament map onto the experience of incarcerated and marginal people in the ancient world. our ideas about how that some people really with this right

are promising the punishments were levied only on the most marginalized for everyone. no enslaver ever would have seen one of these prisons, but now they might. and i think when you look throughout human there has been like an old correlation between how we imagine how and how we punish people in society it should make us uncomfortable. yeah. yeah. what how do you talk about the relationship then between and his couriers as secretaries, as coauthors as his co-writers? when you think about his production in this space, where do where should imagine see and understand their to play out. if we're putting we're putting paul in this subterranean chamber space in this way paul is with other people who make it for him, stay in contact with

his churches. he is dependent upon them. but thing is, he does acknowledge them. that's right. he does talk about coauthor. that's right. it's up. it's where. the once. i don't mean the point of view. yeah. no, we're in this together. i'm just, you know, see, paul wrote the letter. the romans. that's right. when? woman 1622 we have tessier saying trust you just wrote this letter. that's right. we are the ones racing tertius where the rate racing timothy and and all of these other collaborators done something, pulled it. that's what we've chosen. do over time. wow, wow. i'm to ask you one more question. i think i've got time. ask one more question. and it's sort of i to talk about peter. just just the little boy is your boy. he's a boy. i have to. about peter just a little bit. one of the things that struck me while i was reading this, thinking about how you're

restoring the footsteps and presence of enslaved persons to our imagination, oceans of early christian origins is thinking about, okay, now what stories do i need to go back and review and revisit recognizing these matters, enslavement and seeing what i notice? and so i went to a very particular passage. so this is a moment with where peter and acts ends up encountering going to this italian centurion, corneille yes, and we find. peter being brought to cornelius, his house. and here's what the text says. the text introduces the envoy that corneille sends after having a vision to peter and the text says two, three people are in this envoy of them are enslaved of his household. so actually the greek word oikos so household enslavement and then is quote a devout soldier

of cornelius. so we get this verse, verse seven, three people, cornelius. and then the chapter unfolds and for the rest of the chapter. in chapter ten, we no longer hear language enslavement at all. it refers to all three of them. repeat as men. the men, the men to went to peter. the men took peter to cornelius house. and so in some ways there's this real quick reference of household and and action and activity, and then all of a sudden the text seems to kind of drop that language out right. and so here's a question. consider your how do some of the stories of early christian interactions and movements and the act of presence, even your chapter worker status of these enslaved persons now appear in ways that were absent before,

where these countless numbers of people whom we have not seen talked about or presence in these stories forged the context of an enslaving and militaristic roman world. what where should we be looking as we revisit of our favorite stories and saying i bet you that that's and there's a slave live person that's here where where are we missing those footprints, first off, shively, i have to say, you should write that up. death was definitely a paper there. i can see it in a variety of ways, but i don't want it to be documented. i a writer i think if we're looking for people where we haven't seen them, we should look them in the passive verbs that it was done pilot had it written. do we really. i know pilot when he commissioned that little title that goes on the cross of jesus says what i have written i have written i do not think he got out paint.

no and did and painted himself and i don't think anyone else does. so we're looking in passive verbs sometimes in active. that's right. and i think to the example you gave, whenever you find an apostle finding shelter and support in the household of a centurion, no less, they are going to be enslaved workers making the food, showing them around the town that they've just arrived. how do we imagine that the newly blinded paul makes it into the city of damascus, were it not for the people who were traveling with him? that's right. so think that's where we have to look. we just have to ask ourselves in every situation. how did that stuff get there? yeah i love it. how do they get there? i've enjoyed having this conversation with you, my friend. thank you. we are going at this point what we would like to open it up. as for some q&a and invite others to join us in this conversation. so we're inviting you to step up and ask us a question and so and

ask canada a question. i'm just sitting here supporting ask canada a question about her book and our research. we welcome you. yes. one second. so this may be just too much supposition. there were other religions. the time they were competing, they i assume all had enslaved people who are probably helping to create some of the texts but christianity succeeded far beyond all of them. the slaves weren't getting a pay raise. is there any evidence that christianity maybe resonated with them more and that they were more enthusiastic in helping it spread. so there has been since. thank you for your question. so there's been since antioch equity there's been this idea that christianity was a religion

for women and. and i do think there's some truth that that you can see the appeal of christianity. you can the reading against the grain you see the power dynamics that are being said but it it's not as simple as christianity is a religion of the oppressed. and because of how quickly that changes. and because of the ways in which it encodes some really oppressive structures. i do think that christianity is a particularly bookish religion and gets textual very quickly and that way because that it is benefiting from enslaved literate labor and it continues to do in all kinds of context. so for example, all of the people who are reading in churches, those are children enslaved children. and the minute get notice of who they were.

we suddenly learn just how young they were. there is there is a very idea that christianity is just more egalitarian, neither slave nor either male or female. and it has thread that i think probably does appeal to people. but i don't think we should be so naive as to think that when an enslaved person accompanied their enslaver a gathering of christians that, they felt that they were equal. i'm sure that when people left they picked up their traditional roles at the door and. it is one of the sad truths that christianity did not ban. and that's just a hard that we have to wrestle with. think others, please. one thing. yes. first, i want to thank you for this conversation. now i have that image of them

lowering, you know, the man and just to go back and read that, now that you've about it. but my question goes to your process. you talked about imagination. right, and how we have to have imagination when we're reading the text and also did so much research, which i truly appreciate you, know i'm excited now about reading the book how do you find way as a writer as a researcher as a person a preacher, anyone who's going to study these texts to balance that, when do you say when and when do you run across and do some more research, ask some some people that will will help you do it. thank you for your question. that's such a difficult regardless of who you are. right. you know, and what kind of research you're doing because when you start researching it feels too soon and too.

so for me when i stop is when i feel like i'm reading the same thing over and over again. now in this case that was really hard to do, so. so there was some examples it's a story i tell it's from an story called the acts of andrew and it's of maxim, ella, a christian woman, and in slave work, you clear and maxim ella basically pimps out nuclear to her husband and and nuclear meets this horrible and and there has been a push from scholars and i consider myself a feminist to sort of be sympathetic maxim ella because you know she's probably in a bad marriage you know sure she loves it's horrible thing happened to this young woman but you know it was tough for women in antiquity and that's true. and then i read this story it was actually in a in article about gardenias were used on

plantations in the south it was about a particular enslaved woman who's one of the rare cases where we this woman was a victim of childhood abuse. what also know that garden, which were like sort of like fraternal houses for the children of enslavers to learn how to enslavers that there were no white women only men and enslaved women. so we can imagine that these are sites for horrible atrocities against those enslaved women and you have this this enslaving woman who knows what it is to experience sexual violence participate in constructing one of these on her property. and that was really instrumental me it gave me this new light that i wanted that i could criticize maxim to empathize with her, predict it as as a woman in situation with no power in the ancient world still say as stephanie jones rogers said,

she could have done a lot better, you know, and for me, it's when i run across that that that really i'm like, okay, now i'm thinking differently about this. you you won't always have that, though. thank thank you. any other questions for us. well, thank you. question right here. so i could be mistaken, but in the ancient world, slaves weren't can they couldn't reach legally. so in the example you brought up of x ten, is it possible to that as giving those slaves status by calling them men? i kind of thought was where you were going to go. i was going to i was i was going to let you i was going to let you play with that. but this is your book, i think, in my mind, my book is going to

be your audience. so i think you could read it that way. right. the sort of elevation of to the status of adulthood and full legal recognition. that's right. and it contrast with the so so many examples that you have in the roman literature of, you know, horus poet is walking alone when he gets interrupted by someone. and all of a sudden hear, actually, he wasn't alone. right. and a bunch of enslaved people with him. and then suddenly appear. so it's sort of contrast that kind of encounter story really nicely if you wanted to break that in. yeah. i mean, so the other piece for me that that's at in that and a passage like is to think about the difference between a game and slave men in antiquity how it's narrated and then enslavement in the atlantic sea when we start thinking about us, american in particular. so the move towards an explicit of household enslavement, which now what gets assigned to this group, these or part of the

envoy is humanity, personhood is actually a distinction between the roman antiquities system of enslavement and when we think enslavement in the us american system. so that move is so striking to me because i start saying, well, do we see enslavement as it is being talked and conceived in this particular historical period? i mean, one of the defining pieces of this is in fact the absence of an explicit recognition for recognition, humanity and personhood that someone who is enslaved could actually qualify as man within this system, within this notion, when you think about the 1800s and 1700s and how that's being constructed. and so that's what was interesting to me. i think it's a great example of the in which enslavement is being narrated, how it is act acting out in the roman empire

in a way that is different from how we see it necessarily being narrated and described and played in particular us american enslavement, context and discourse. we will watch this space. we will watch this space. well yes. we've got one more. yeah. i just wanted to ask a if you could say about your process with regards to how your the you something along the lines of you want to ensure that when you're making comparisons that you don't do so in a cross way, right. you use the example of transatlantic slavery, roman slavery, right? and that's where you have the opportunity to bring in imagination and how you're really pulling from other in order to construct this

imagination. i for myself as a researcher it's sometimes you know the people when i think about imagination when i think about say you to hartman and critical tabulation i'm thinking hortense spillers right like they give me an imaginary to think about enslavement in a very real intangible ways that i abhor the way enslavement is presented in the hebrew bible, in particular because it's not it it doesn't give me the the people that i'm reading are like that that german guy that right you said he sat down and had a vision of of how john was written and it was this way and it was so of touch or not in touch, the ways in which, you know, the text was

probably. so how can you make how can you make the comparisons without being right while at the same time what you're doing is ultimately really subversive civ because you are saying that despite tools we have in our field that maybe maybe the traditions and you know the training that we have don't actually give us the tools to talk or or imagine what actual enslavement look like or how it was experienced and that maybe we really should consider, you know, these other more comparative feel to go about really thinking about well what what did slavery look like then? yeah, it's a great question and

it's hard. i think i have this focus. i was interested in literate workers, right. and so i so having focus helped write. so i, you know, and it's not like i abandoned my field. i still did all of this sort of, you know, i at roman funerary monuments to see what proportion of them were in slave or freedmen. i looked papyri to see how they had been written. i wrote a bunch of peer reviewed articles first. so there is that traditional work at play here, and there's the archeology that can be helpful. and then for me, and looking at literate enslaved workers because i've worked on disability before, it's sort of instinctive for me to say what does this do to a person how much sense touch how do you do it? how much do you need? would it be easier with a book like this or a scroll? and so that was that was a pretty instinctive form of research for me. and then what would happen was i

would go and i would give talks and people would give me objections like what can't prove they're really doing anything right. and i was like, you know, ethically i have a problem with saying that a person is a machine but and so they just do work, but know i would hear that objection. i would go back and, i say, well, how am i going to go look at cognitive science? you know, one of the things that tends to happen in antiquity is you only see enslaved workers when they're being for things. all of a sudden they're real people when they have. well, that's right. you know, like they recognize people in order to punish them, that's when they become recognized. and so those of moves like talking to people, getting the pushback so usually go back, reconsider my worry in writing project was. first that i which is ventriloquists just my imagination which trust me you don't want and then if i do this comparative work maybe i move from being a ventriloquist to a

puppeteer. now i'm just making from different periods speak to each other, but really i'm the one doing it and. so my step at that juncture to have other people read it. so i consulted with medical experts about the impact on the bodies. i spoke to archeology. is this possible? is this how this works? i wrote a sentence that cut from the book that was about how a reader might have felt anticipating reading a text aloud it over in it at a dinner party and something like felix was lucky that he felt fear in his stomach than his mouth. and i spent a whole afternoon looking for the ancient texts that talk about people feeling fear in their stomach and people feeling fear in their mouths. and at one point, i. i was missing a text. i knew it was a galen and galen is a medical writer whose responsible for a third of all ancient greek literature.

so, you know, i was going to find this in a minute. finally, i emailed friend who happens to be one of the world's foremost experts on galen, was like, you know that. and she did know where this is. and so that was what i did. i then consulted with experts. you can imagine how i felt that sentence got cut. that's right. the whole day's work on a sentence that didn't end up it was worth it. that's right because i feel like i wrote a better book. i wrote. you know, i've written a lot of history books. some have won prizes. people read them, i'm told. but this one is more rigorously research precisely because i was more aware of where i was imagining. whereas before i made all of these assumptions, it's powerful. well, gods goes, enslaved christians. the making of the bible my friend candida moss thank you for the work and for contributing to our field in a way that changes engagement and who we required to see and name

in biblical texts. early christian history and then also around us. thank you. thank you for