God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible by Candida R. Moss
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
As usual, this is an expanded version of my Goodreads review. I've removed the spoiler alert that hid about half of the review, as well as expanding around the corners on various bits.
God’s Ghostwriters? This had a fair amount of disappointment, especially given that Candida Moss’ book on the “Myth of Persecution” was pretty good. That said, one moderate level "issue," there, not an error, but an issue of historiography, became a larger-level issue here.
At about 35-40 percent through, I was thinking this can’t be more than 3 stars. By 60 percent or so, I’m thinking, it can’t be more than 2. But, at around the 75 percent mark, I’m thinking, well, it can be 3. But, I eventually went back to 2 stars.
Contra many low-star reviewers on Goodreads, my issue is not primarily with some of her conjectures, but with some godawful mistakes on biblical criticism — mistakes that people below her academic pay grade, and below mine, know are wrong, at least in the first case. (Some of those low-star reviewers appeared to me to view her conjectures as "wokeism." None used that term, but, clicking through to their profiles, it's clear they were of that mindset.)
With that? On to those biblical criticism errors.
First, she gives the appearance of thinking Paul was a Roman citizen. (I didn't put down a page number in my notes when and whee I first observed that.) Moss doesn't explicitly say "Paul was a Roman citizen," but she does express thoughts in that direction. WRONG! Roman citizenship was mentioned or claimed by Paul, of course. The "of course" isn't meant to be snarky, but if it's taken that way, so be it. (Bart Ehrman, or one of his hacks writing on Bart's site, also thinks Paul was a Roman citizen. God, so much biblical scholarship is in the shitter.)
Related?
Second, she thinks the last one-quarter of Acts, from Paul’s temple arrest on, is historical, or at least historical enough to have him getting to Rome. WRONG! Go here for the particularly "high" ahistoricity of the last one-quarter of Acts, as well as comments on Paul not being a Roman citizen, to tie back to the above. Beyond that, Paul almost certainly never got to Rome. Moss does, correctly, in "Myth" believe the Tacitus passage about Neronean persecution of Christians is an interpolation, so why she seems to think Paul got to Rome, or hints at thinking he was a Roman citizen, I don't know.
Third, she seems to give some credibility to the historicity of Papias. Not.Even.Wrong. Based on a scribal slave of Cicero’s, and his veneration, if you will, she claims that an enslaved Mark would have testified to the veracity of recording Peter. Well, beyond this being based on one enslaved scribe and anecdotal comments about him, rather than a collection of statements to that end from patrician Romans, it’s also of course dependent on giving credibility to the historicity of Papias. Sadly, she's not the only person I've come across recently to, in my opinion, give undue credibility to him.See here and here.
Fourth? I found her claim that Mark doesn't have screwed-up geography on Jesus' peregrinations around western Galilee and southwestern Syria to be laughable. (She said this was actually the Markan Jesus being dilatory on facing his death, in a slave-like passive-aggressive way. This in turn assumed, on a non-fundagelical reading of Mark, that the Markan Jesus knew his mission would result in his death. Also dubious, as this was before Mark 6, which is where John the Baptizer meets his end.) In reality, to pick up at Mark 5, first, neither Gerasa, Gergasa, or Gadara borders the See of Galilee, so Jesus could not have gone to "the other side" even if some manuscripts leave out "in the boat." Yes, it's Mark 7 where the geographic muddle is worse, but it starts before John's death. And, speaking of Mark 7, Sidon is NOT NOT NOT in the Decapolis, or "the area of the Decapolis," period and end of story. It is, of course (needed again for snark?) not even a Hellenistic city.
I think one could make half a case for Jesus' foreknowledge in a non-fundagelical reading of Mark's narrative, but no more. Maybe three-quarters in Matthew and Luke, and fully in John. But no more than a generous halfway in Mark and hold on to John.
OK, with that said? My thoughts about her explication on ancient Roman slavery, New Testament slave imagery and its literalness and more are long. Beyond the historiography issue mentioned above, there's also the issue of anecdotal takes. I don't mind a certain degree of speculative history, but when you're trying to move beyond the speculative, you also need to move beyond the anecdotal.
First, the general slavery issue in Imperial Rome? Best estimates outside of Italy are that 10-20 percent of the provincial Roman population was enslaved. That’s well below the 1860 US South’s 30 percent, despite slave importation having been banned (on paper, at least) for more than 50 years. (The 11 eventually seceding states were at 42 percent slave population; in all 15 non-Northern slave states [there were still a few up there in 1860] it was 32 percent.) The high side is probably no higher than the three non-Delaware border states, I had said in my original review, and my guess was close enough for jazz, at 14.3 percent.
In other words, yes, there were a lot of slaves in ancient Rome; there weren’t THAT many, and many freemen who weren’t Roman citizens and weren’t agricultural landlords might well not have owned any. Even in Italy itself, they weren’t more than one-third of the population. Wiki’s article on Roman slavery also estimates that half of all slaves were owned by the “elite,” for which it offers a demographic determination — less than 1.5 percent of the Imperial population. In other words, the picture that Moss paints by insinuation — that most freeborns had at least a couple of household slaves? Taint so. Wikipedia's Slavery in ancient Rome piece has more. In the US, for all 15 slave states in 1860? About 5 percent of White folks were slave owners; putting it in family terms, it was about 30 percent. (Side note: Failure to dive more into demographics is one reason "Myth of Persecution" got 4 stars, not 5.)
Splitting this out per the above and applying back to Imperial Rome? Surely 5 percent, maybe 7-8 percent, of people in Italy owned slaves. We could say 10 percent in Rome. In the provinces? Probably no more than 3 percent. On families? Maybe 40 percent in Italy; no more than 20 percent in the provinces on average.
Also related to demographics, and related to the above? Moss presents an issue of Imperial Rome as towns and cities (and those humongous slave farms as assumed in the background). Well, in “Pagans and Christians” Robin Lane Fox reminds us that it ain't so. Not even close. Especially if you get away from Italy, Attica, and Alexandria-centered Egypt, the majority of the Roman population elsewhere probably lived more than 20 miles away from a town of 5,000 or more, and I'm being conservative with that guesstimate. These were SMALL artisans and small "freehold" farmers. In Fox's rural Anatolia, few people owned slaves.
Now, that said, it's a "commonplace" that Christianity was a religion of the towns and cities. Nonetheless, even there, not everybody owned slaves. So, would extreme focus on — pushing of — motifs of enslavement been a good selling point? Or was Paul, since he's the first New Testament "evangelist," legends of the disciples aside — have been pushing to the rich who owned those slaves? And, like the "Cuius regio, ejus religio" in states of the Holy Roman Empire after the Thirty Years War, slaves were along for the ride under the "neither slave nor free" rubric? This, too, Moss does not explore.
One other thing she does not do is explore John, vs. the Pauline corpus and Mark as the original of the synoptics. And, of course, John — in current form — opens with Jesus as pre-existent divine being. There is no Pauline kenosis. There is no idea of Jesus possibly being god's slave. So, Moss has to elide John, in essence, and yes, I think it's deliberate.
Scribal work by currently enslaved having deliberate errors as “an act of resistance,” as she claims with naming errors in the Old Latin Bobiensis? Tosh. That first makes the assumption we know the scribe was working for a particular owner, rather than being for hire. It secondly assumes we know the scribe was an ardent Christian-hating pagan. Third, it assumes he knew that he could get away with it. A pair of anecdotes about Aesop doing somewhat similar, taken from a biography written 600 years after his death, doesn’t really prove much. It’s also not clear how historical — or ahistorical — that bio is if Moss is referencing “The Aesop Romance.” Yes, parts of it may have been written “only” 200 years after his death, per Wiki, but 1st C CE for the final, and probably 3rd CE for current MSS? Oh, parts of it also borrowed from Ahiqar, at least in some versions. “Nice” of Moss not to mention any of this.
Also, no, Candida, Tyrannio was NOT a “manumitted … slave” other than in a purely technical sense. He was a prisoner of war. Your own description makes that clear. Ergo, we don’t know, if you don’t offer proof, how he was treated within Cicero’s late Republican Rome. Yes, he was technically “emancipated,” but per his Wiki page, Plutarch faults that as not the right action. Wiki also notes he reportedly became an acclaimed teacher, including of Strabo. (She mentions Strabo three or four pages later, but not in conjunction with Tyrannio!)
That said, Chapter 7, The Faithful Christian, was good. It set enslavement’s actuality within Christian language of being a slave to or of Christ, used many a time by Paul, of course. From there, Moss talks about pistis/fides, and how this faith, or faithfulness, which is a better translation of the famous Habakkuk passage, that the righteous, or just-living, man, or person, will be saved by their faithfulness (with “saved” also NOT meaning “eternal life” in that passage), is a relational issue, and that cuts both ways between enslaved and enslaver.. And, of course, and as she notes, Luther basically blew this, not just on “faith vs works” but the whole relational nature. On the both ways, she notes a little bit, but not as much as she could, how many Roman masters went “relatively” light on punishments and knew this usually produced slaves who were relationally better, or more faithful. She also discusses the idea of a spirit taking over a person, then the Holy Spirit. From this, she makes the claim (no, really!) that many Christian denominations today, because of this, still practice a “minor exorcism” before baptism. (No, really!)
One other interesting note? Moss references Jesus telling his hearers to forsake everything, in Mark 10, as the family details are omitted in Mt/Lk, interestingly, and that in turn they would get back mother and brothers and sisters, as well as other rewards, but NO father, perhaps because of the tyrannical nature of the paterfamilias, and no, not just because god is the father of all.
One other good thing I got? Whether Paul was tentmaker, tanner, or general leatherworker, in larger cities, there probably was a guild for that. Per a Jesus Seminar derived book of a few years ago, I had the light bulb go on that the ancient Greek mysteries in all likelihood were NOT the source of Paul’s creating the Lord’s Supper (create it he did, the “what I received” language is always an introduction to something he’s claiming to have by divine revelation) but rather, the Hellenistic Greek guilds’ monthly, or whenever, dinners, complete with invocations of their patron deity, as in Ephesian silversmiths and “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” (Insert blog link.) Well, Paul’s brainstorm would have been easier for him with a few such guild dinners being attended by him.
And, with all that?
The last tipping point down to 2 instead of up to 3 stars? This book could have been tighter, as well as less speculative, on its theme, as well as not having the errors in biblical criticism and the errors on demographics.
Related? There's too much food for thought for this to get the "meh" tag, let alone the "bs" one. But, Moss apparently is going to be headed more toward modernist sociology critiques of the New Testament and its world and I'll probably not ride that bus any more.
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