New light on the New Testament

Readers of the Bible, you are almost certainly in for a shock. A new book, drawing on recent archaeology and literary criticism, persuasively argues that some of the most important parts of the New Testament were written or edited by slaves. Its author, Candida Moss, presents this thesis in God’s Ghostwriters, a general interest book which asks readers to look beyond the Bible’s named authors and imagine their collaborators, some of whom were enslaved scribes.

In the Roman era, ‘writers’ did not usually inscribe the text themselves but composed through dictation; and most people who took dictation were enslaved. They were well educated from a young age, and it was customary for them also to act as proofreaders.

St Paul, for one, clearly employed scribes. In his Epistle to the Galatians, he writes: ‘See what large letters I make when I am writing with my own hand.’ The implication, says Moss, is that ‘the preceding section – what amounts to almost the entirety of the letter – had been written by someone else’. Towards the end of the Epistle to the Romans, Paul’s most theologically important work, the text reads: ‘I, Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord.’

Scribal collaboration seems even more important when one considers that Paul composed at least four letters from prison. Recent archaeology has demonstrated that most Roman jails were underground, with a small window. They were cold, damp and barely lit – appalling places to write. Moss argues that, had Paul written his epistles himself in these conditions, the text would have been ‘almost unreadable’. It is much more likely, she says, that he dictated these letters through the window.

In addition to Paul, Moss focuses on the Gospel of Mark – the earliest canonical account of Jesus’s life.