Did Slaves Give Us the New Testament?

Episode Outline:
0:00 Special episode: Candida Moss on enslaved Christians and the making of the Bible
0:25 Bart introduces God’s Ghostwriters and why slavery and textual production belong together
3:45 Candida explains how reading glasses led her to rethink literacy, labor, and enslavement in antiquity
5:28 How Roman slavery differed from the race-based slavery most modern readers first imagine
8:00 What kinds of labor enslaved people performed, from mining to accounting to literary work
11:27 Were there moral critiques of slavery in the ancient world?
14:05 Literacy in the Roman world and why so much reading and writing depended on enslaved labor
17:21 Why professional copying and bookselling were often done by enslaved or formerly enslaved people
18:43 Break: Bart’s free webinar on Gospel authorship
20:05 How enslaved children were educated and trained for specialized literary work
23:32 How historians identify enslaved people in the New Testament when the texts do not say it explicitly
26:47 Tertius and what dictation really meant in antiquity
32:08 Why the author of Mark may have been imagined through an enslaved literary role
36:41 How reading Mark through the lens of enslavement changes the way some details come into focus
45:31 How Candida balances imagination, evidence, and “critical fabulation” in writing trade history
50:10 Why the language of “enslaved” versus “slave” matters when writing this history today
52:29 Bart’s closing endorsement of God’s Ghostwriters

Episode Description
This week Bart will be interviewing New Testament scholar and public intellectual Candida Moss on her new book, God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible. In the book, Dr. Moss (Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham) maintains that parts of the Bible may have been written by slaves (Mark, possibly); or co-authored by them (enslaved secretaries of Paul?); or copied by them (in our surviving manuscripts). No one has broached the topic of "How We Got the Bible" from this perspective before, and the episode provides a lively discussion of numerous issues of real significance.

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