← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Loading summary
Transcript79 lines
- [00:00]
Canada Moss
A BetterHelp ad therapy isn't just for times of major challenge. It's a valuable tool for anyone wanting to improve their well being. It can help you develop healthy coping skills, set boundaries, and Support personal growth. BetterHelp makes it easy to get matched online with a fully licensed therapist right from your phone. No commuting, no waiting rooms and you can switch therapists at any time. Sign up@betterhelp.com and get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com.
- [00:36]
Megan Lewis
Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis.
- [00:55]
Bart Ehrman
Let's begin foreign I'd like to welcome you to the special edition of the Misquoting Jesus Podcast. This week I will not be interviewed by a woman academic with a British accent. I'll be interviewing a woman academic with a British accent. I'm very happy to be doing this interview with Canada Moss. Those of you who came to our Bible conference this past year, new insights into the New Testament, heard Canada make a very, very interesting presentation for us on the Gospels. And now we're going to be talking about her book that is just coming out. It'll probably come out by the time we play this. Canada's book is called God's Ghost Enslaved Christians Making the Bible Canada Moss is the Edward Cadbury professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham in England. She earned her undergraduate degree at Oxford University and did her MA and her PhD at Yale focusing on the New Testament and Early Christian studies. Canada began her teaching career at the University of Notre Dame before taking her current position at Birmingham in 2017. She's the prize winning author of nine books now ten I guess, some of them academic books for scholars and some popular books trade books for general audiences. These books deal with different aspects of the New Testament and early Christian history. Canada is one of the real public intellectuals in our field of Early Christian studies. She's written for the New York Times, Washington Post, the LA Times, Atlantic Monthly, Politico, CNN and Slate, and probably other things. She's also a columnist for the Daily Beast and she works as a Papal News Corp Contributor for CBS News. So Canada, welcome.
- [02:48]
Canada Moss
Thank you for that lovely introduction. It's great to be here.
- [02:51]
Bart Ehrman
Right. So you have this book. It's a book written for a general audience. So it's a trade book. It's very wide ranging so, as I said, the title is God's Ghost Writers, Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible. The book is bringing together two fields that are normally kept fairly distinct from each other. There are a lot of people who have worked on issues dealing with slavery in the ancient world, and a lot of people have dealt with the textual tradition of the New Testament, the production of the literature, the copying of the literature, the distribution of the literature. But not too many people have worked on the combination of those two things. And your book is, in a sense, an attempt to show why these issues overlap so much, because of the issue of people who are enslaved in being involved in the production of the New Testament. But even more than that, I'd say the book also goes into issues of slavery within the New Testament itself, within the life of Jesus, the lives of the authors such as Paul and so forth. So I guess that was kind of a bad outside summary of your book. Can you give it an inside summary, like, what's going on with this book?
- [03:58]
Canada Moss
Great question. Well, I would say about five, six years ago, I needed reading glasses for the first time. And, you know, I'd worked on disability before, but this was the first time I was thinking, you know, what would I have done in antiquity? And when I looked into it, the answer was really clear. I would have had someone else do my reading or writing, especially as it gets progressively worse. I never really thought about that before. And as I dug into it, I realized just how much literate work, whether that was taking dictation or copying a manuscript or reading something aloud or carrying a letter and delivering it and framing it for an audience, was being done by enslaved and formerly enslaved people. And it seemed to me that this was something we just didn't talk about for a number of reasons. A lot of them sort of theological in our commitment to who the first Christians were and the idea that they better be volunteers and they better really be Christian. I realized that there's this whole field of scholarship in classics about the importance of enslaved workers in the writing of texts. And I wanted to bring together this sort of new field of classics with the field that you were very familiar with, the copying of manuscripts and the writing of texts and the work that had already been done in New Testament studies about slavery. And so I wanted to look at the sort of arc of writing from first inscription to then copying a text and moving it and reading it. And who was doing this work, and what did it mean?
- [05:31]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, great. You know, I want to start by talking about slavery itself in the ancient world. Most people naturally assumed that it was pretty much what they think of today for the situation in American history. Can you say something about. To begin with, just like some of the things that makes. When we talk about slavery in antiquity, in the Roman Empire especially, we're talking about what's similar, what's different from what we're used to thinking about today.
- [05:55]
Canada Moss
Yeah. So it's definitely important to talk about. I think people have a very distinct thing in their mind. So Roman slavery is different. It's largely fed by war and conquest. It is not race based, or at least it's not based on the same kind of categorizations of race that we have today. So if you have a big conquest in a particular region, you know, Caesar invades modern day France, he enslaves a million people, then enslaved people from that region, they have a particular look because genetics is local. And so for Romans, people with wavy red hair, that's the sort of slavish trait. So you might kind of incidentally have kind of a phenotypical control, as we would call them, to how people look. You might have a group of people associated with being enslaved, but it's not race based. You have enslaved people from all over the Roman Empire, but it's not just through war. There are other ways. If people have a child that they can't raise for whatever reason, they might expose it somewhere where a slave trader would come pick it up. There are also what we might horrifyingly call breeding programs in larger households where people would take infants who were born to enslaved women and educate them because they were thought to be more controllable. And then there are things like debt slavery. You get into debt, you sell your services for a period of time. And there is piracy and kidnapping. But the major sources are really warfare and those enslaved workers being bred in particular households.
- [07:31]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Okay, so what about, like, how slaves are breeded and what kind of jobs they're doing in antiquity? Are they comparable to what we think of in the antebellum south, for example?
- [07:43]
Canada Moss
Yeah. So the comparison game is. Is, to my mind, difficult. There is something distinctly horrifying about Atlantic slavery. Slavery in the antebellum south and the Caribbean and Brazil. But that doesn't mean that Roman slavery is good sometimes. There's actually one classicist who compares Roman slavery to an internship at a finance company, and it's not that. Yeah. You know, except that at a finance company, they probably can't beat you to death. When you think about Roman slavery, it is possible to be manumitted that is freedom. And many enslaved workers were manumitted, often at a stage in their life where something about themselves was compromised. So often women enslaved people were manufactured after the point at which they were able to bear children. So not so great for them in terms of the roles that they play. They do all kinds of things, things that we would expect, like agricultural labor, they worked in mines, they worked in ports. There are a lot of public enslaved people who worked for as civic slave, doing everything from cleaning a bathroom to taking notes. And then there are sort of the domestic slaves who might clean, but they also might do what we would consider to be quite elite, things like reading and writing, keeping accounts for their enslavers. There are a lot of children who are in charge of finances for households, which is amazing. When I think about, you know, my 13 year old, I'm not sure I would leave my finances in his hands. But we have funerary monuments to them. So they do wide array of things. They are subject to violence, sexual violence, physical violence, psychological violence on a regular basis. And it was sort of a tightrope walk. You weren't just beaten for things you had done wrong, you were beaten sometimes just to make a point or because someone was frustrated. And so there is a lot of violence associated with Roman slavery. And even once you were manumitted, you were still vulnerable. The Roman Senate would occasionally discuss, like, should we re enslave ungrateful freedmen? So you were vulnerable throughout your life. It was probably a fear that always stayed with you. Was it as horrifying as slavery in the antebellum South? Absolutely not. There's something very distinctive of that about that, but it's not good. And when people talk about Roman slavery as somehow magnanimous or kind, they're usually doing that just because they really love the Romans and they want them to be better than they are.
- [10:17]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, no, that's right. It sounds like there's a huge range. I mean, working in the salt mines is very different from being somebody's account. Right. And life expectancy for some of these people were not. Was not good. It sounds like there's a lot more range than we would normally experience. Not race based. This is the last thing, just on slaves themselves. But was there any kind of moral discourse about it? Like, people, you know, today we think, oh, my God, how can you possibly even imagine it? And, you know, 300 years ago, 400 years ago here, people didn't think that so much. Some did, some, many didn't. What about in the Roman world? Were there Objections to it, or did people just kind of take it as where it is?
- [10:55]
Canada Moss
Yeah, there are huge conversations about this. Most famously, people talk about the Jewish rite of Philo. They talk about the Stoics and their sort of. Their kind of position on slavery and their feeling that there's legal, literal slavery and then there's sort of the enslavement any of us might experience to our bodily passions. And there are people who think that enslaved people are really people, not just tools or body parts or property. And there are particular philosophical schools that talk about that. At the same time, when you look at their writings in their own personal lives, they're still pretty cruel, and they still use pejorative language of slavish to describe things that they just think of beneath them. There's a conversation going on that's. That really might seem very modern to us, but there are still all kinds of practices happening in the households of the same people who are advocating for enslaved workers that we would not, you know, agree with.
- [11:59]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, yeah, no, that's right. Some people get really kind of curious about why the New Testament doesn't condemn slavery. And even though you have this discourse about slavery and kind of, you know, nobody's out there trying to abolish the. That we know of. At least it might. So.
- [12:13]
Canada Moss
That's right. And, you know, Christians won't be trying to abolish it for a very long period of time. They will very quickly start enacting their own rules and legislation around slavery. And sometimes you'll see scholars trying to say, well, you know, post Constantine, post the Theodosian code, by the time you're in antiquity, Christians are kinder, Christians are nicer, they're still enslaved. Let's be clear. There's no kind of kind form of slavery.
- [12:41]
Bart Ehrman
Right. Yeah, you're owned. Okay, let's move on to your book. Is really talking about a certain kind activity among those who are enslaved. Literary activity, principally people copying texts or helping to write texts or involved in various kind of literary things, which requires an education. And most people in the ancient world were not educated to read and write, as you point out. Can you just say something about, maybe just briefly, about literacy in general in the Roman world, but then about this phenomenon of highly educated slaves.
- [13:14]
Canada Moss
Yeah. So like everyone, I went into this project thinking, well, only about 5 to 10% of people are literate, and we can debate what literate means, you know, signing your name, writing a treatise. There's a range of literacy. And that would only really be the majority of people who are being Educated would have been people from wealthy households at the same time. And precisely because about 40% of the population wouldn't have been able to do their own reading and writing just on physical grounds. Forget your education or socioeconomic background. They are training enslaved workers to do a lot of book work for them. Writing hurts. If you are copying a text that is painful, nobody wants to do that. You will shake out your hands. We have medieval manuscripts full of scribes complaining about how much it hurts to copy a text. And so this is one reason that they educate slave workers to do this. They don't want to do it themselves. And one of the things that I was surprised by, I thought, well, okay, Cicero, wealthy Romans with huge amounts of money. They have a whole fleet of enslaved staff who do this book work for them. Fine, we all agree that. But they're rich, not Christians. We're talking about the super elites. But the more I looked into it, the more people from the artisanal classes who themselves couldn't read or write would purchase literate, enslaved workers to do the kind of bookkeeping, draw up the contracts, do all kinds of work for them precisely because they couldn't do it it. And of course, if you were very poor, you didn't need to write all the time, but you would need a will. So then you would need to go and have someone to sort of put that together for you if you're in some kind of legal debate. So even though it was the very wealthy who had access to a lot of literate, enslaved workers, you see more literate, enslaved workers in other parts of the population as well, doing work for them, even if they were just rented.
- [15:12]
Bart Ehrman
Okay. Were slaves the only ones doing this kind of activity, like writing or, you know, if you need a copy of a document or something? Do you. Are slaves? Are they the ones, or are there others or what?
- [15:23]
Canada Moss
So I would group together, like, firstly, slaves and formerly enslaved people. So freedmen.
- [15:29]
Bart Ehrman
Yes.
- [15:29]
Canada Moss
I would put them all in one category. They're not the only ones. But if you go to a bookshop in Rome, every book dealer we know of is a Roman freedman. It doesn't mean they're not other people copying text. We know that that would happen regularly. But if you have a very long text, if you want something that looks sort of professionally copied, that's a profession. You have to be trained to write, you know, a beautiful codex. That's not a thing I could do.
- [15:54]
Bart Ehrman
Well, I'm sure you could, but I couldn't.
- [15:57]
Canada Moss
No, my handwriting is not as good as it was I use a computer now, and I actually won a handwriting price when I was young, but I used to a computer now and my handwriting doesn't look.
- [16:05]
Bart Ehrman
You won a handwriting price? Yeah. Of course you did.
- [16:07]
Canada Moss
Yeah, I did come from England, you know, we had like needle work and handwriting and physics. Yeah, right.
- [16:14]
Bart Ehrman
So like, if, if I want a really nice copy of a book, I mean, obviously you don't have your, you know, your copy Tron down the street or your FedEx or whatever. You can photocopy it. So somebody's got to copy it. So. But are the, the people doing that? They're, they're not people like getting paid to do this. They're, they're slaves.
- [16:31]
Canada Moss
Someone's getting paid, but they aren't getting paid. So by and large, it seems to me from the evidence we have, which is limited, you have a freedman bookseller who's probably past the point where they can copy things themselves. They probably have carpal tunnel. It's probably very difficult for them. They would have an enslaved staff working for them, and that staff would be young, they would be children, and, and that's the evidence. If you want something really beautiful made for you, if you have something short like Paul's letter to Philemon, that's a different situation, you know, so if anyone who is literate could write that out for you. But even copying Romans, that's effort, that's work. And the copyists in particular in this period seem to have been enslaved or formally enslaved.
- [17:18]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, good. Okay, we're gonna, we need to take a. Just a quick commercial break and we'll be right back.
- [17:25]
Megan Lewis
Have you ever wondered where the New Testament Gospels really came from? Were the books actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? As everyone seems to say, the answers to these questions may surprise you. In fact, what you discover may challenge everything you thought you knew about the Gospels. If you're ready to learn the historical truth, then you won't want to miss Bart Ehrman's free webinar. Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually write Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? In this 50 minute talk with Q and A, you'll learn answers to some of the most intriguing questions surrounding the Gospel's authorship, such why did early Christians say the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? If they're anonymous, what's the best evidence that the Gospels were written by the Apostles? Were the apostles apostles of Jesus, educated well enough to write books? And last, if the apostles did not write the Gospels, who did? And where did they get their information? Don't Miss your chance to uncover the truth behind the Gospels. Sign up now for free lifetime access to. Did Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John actually write Matthew, Mark, Luke, And John? @Barterman.com Authors. Thank you.
- [18:45]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, so we're back. You're saying that most of the series copying work is being done by slaves. And are they being trained in a way that's different from how educated people are being trained? Because within the educational curriculum, people in the Roman world, at least, they learn to read first, and then they learn how to copy letters, and they learn how to. Eventually, they learn how to compose. But it's a very long kind of process. And so does the slave education happen the same way as the freed person's education?
- [19:18]
Canada Moss
It depends. So you do have people who actually end up being sort of distinguished educators, which is also a profession for enslaved people who they learned to read and write just because they were accompanying an enslaved child to school. So that child was getting that elite education, and they just went there, too. And there are a lot of examples of that. And that probably would have been the case for a large number of people. There are some dedicated schools for enslaved children. Pliny says that he had one on his property. There's an imperial school in Rome that's very famous because it has a piece of graffiti known as the Alexamenos graffito, where you have Jesus being crucified with a donkey head. That was a school for enslaved children in the imperial household. There would have been some specialization, though, once you've learned some education and you be listening and doing the same sort of things as elite children. But you wouldn't. You might, if you were a particular enslaved worker, accompany a freeborn person to what we might call university. But you also might get specialist training in accounting or shorthand or other kinds of literate work that will be specialized, that will be about putting you to good use.
- [20:29]
Bart Ehrman
They would say, yeah, okay, good. So I want to move on to the New Testament specifically, but I think it's the lead into that. You talk about a lot of figures in the New Testament that you proposed were probably enslaved. And I have a question about that that I think maybe a lot of readers will have. When you. You identify this person or that person, possibly enslaved, I'm just wondering, how does. How do we go about identifying people as slaves if they're not? If you don't have somebody, you know, who says, you know, I'm enslaved, I'm a dou loss, which is the Greek word for a slave, or, I mean, sometimes you can do it by Names, Right. And sometimes somebody has a name that somebody who is enslaved is often given a name by. And. And the name has some kind of, like, meaning to it. You know, useful person or something like that. Happy person. So you. Sometimes you do. By name, sometimes we have information, right? I mean, like, in the New Testament, we know that Onesimus was a. Was a slave because Paul talked about him in Five Women, and he was a slave. And outside the New Testament, my. My favorite. I'm sure we've talked about him before. Epictetus, my favorite philosopher from the ancient world is Epictetus, who had been enslaved to a master who himself had been enslaved, was a slave serving under Nero. So we can trace this because they talk about it. But when you just get a name of somebody and they're like, they're just doing something, how do we decide? Like, is this person probably enslaved or not? Or how do we make a decision?
- [21:51]
Canada Moss
Yeah. So I think the first thing we have to do when we're talking about the New Testament is start with just no assumptions. Because the problem with New Testament figures is you have traditions, maybe beginning with acts, sometimes spanning four or 500 years, about who these people were. And in the case of, say, Paul's companions, they often wind up being bishops in later tradition. And so you have to kind of put aside all of that. And I would say put aside Acts, which I think is later, and supplementing tradition, and just look at what the person's name is and what kind of work they're doing. And I would also like to note you said, well, and it's a great question. Well, if it doesn't say that there are Doulos, how would we know if there are Doulas? And I just like to point out that there are many people in the New Testament who are identified as Doulo, as slaves. And we do not take that seriously when it's a metaphor. And so there's a lot of. There are all kinds of double standards going on here. So when you have someone in the New Testament who you just have their name. I'm looking for two things. What kind of work are they doing? Is that the work that typically an enslaved person would do or a formerly enslaved person? And what about the name? So there are names you mentioned, Onesimus, Epaphroditus, Tertius. These are all, you know, Fortunatus. These are all really common names for enslaved persons. You would never. If you were freeborn, you would never call your child Epaphroditus. Like, that's not a good name for a freeborn child.
- [23:19]
Bart Ehrman
What's her name?
- [23:20]
Canada Moss
Charming.
- [23:22]
Megan Lewis
Lovely.
- [23:23]
Canada Moss
It's a name used particularly for boys, young boys who are adorable and work at table.
- [23:29]
Bart Ehrman
Related to Aphrodite.
- [23:31]
Canada Moss
It's not, not related to Aphrodite. And then we have the abbreviation Epaphras as well. And these are, if you go. There are German scholars who have done this because they love to do this kind of thing. Compile multi volume works of all of the names from inscriptions of people who we know are enslaved. Onesimus, Epaphroditus, Fortunatus. These are all top 10 names for enslaved people. So if you're coming in and you have no idea who they are and you see someone and they have a name that generally is used of enslaved people and they are doing work that generally is performed by enslaved people, that might not be enough to get us to. They were definitely a slave, but we also should not be saying they're definitely a freeborn volunteer. That is to ignore all of the evidence.
- [24:18]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Yeah. So Tertius, I mean, I was going to begin a turdius because so for people don't know, Paul writes his letter to the Romans that you mentioned a minute ago. It's a long letter, 16 chapters. It's the longest letter that we have. And at the end of it, in chapter 16, Paul's greeting a bunch of people. He greets so and so and so and so and so and so. Then all of a sudden you get this verse where it says, I, Tertius, greet you. Wait a second, the writer of this letter, I, Turnus, the writer of this letter, greet you. Wait a second, I thought Paul was writing his letter. So it's clear that Paul's dictating this letter and Tertius is the guy he's dictating to. Is that, am I right so far?
- [24:54]
Canada Moss
That is exactly right.
- [24:55]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, there's other evidence as you point out that Paul was dictating his letters and somebody else was writing it. And so you, you talk about Tertius as a slave? Because I think, you know, all you have is that thing I, turdius, greet you. And so. Yeah, just explain. So what is it? Are you saying that you, are you pretty sure he's a slave? You think he's a slave? Maybe he's a slave. What? And you know, just tell me about your thought process.
- [25:17]
Canada Moss
Okay, so Tertia's, it means third. That's a pretty common name for an enslaved person. It is, as you say, a very long letter. You want someone who's a little bit professionalized because it would be Very hard for someone who wasn't to do. This is actually early tradition that identifies who he's enslaved to. I would say if we have to make a judgment about who he is, we would come down on the side of enslaved or formerly enslaved. That's who Tertius is. And then there's a question of, like, how. How important is he? Sometimes people say to me, oh, well, they're just secretaries. They don't do anything. And I would say, I understand why they say that. They say that because ancient Roman authors tell us that secretaries don't do anything. They're just mouthpieces. They're the hand of the author. They're the mouth of the author. But then once I started looking at how you took dictation, it's clear that it's a fairly involved process, and it's very creative. So ancient shorthand, unlike modern shorthand, it's not entirely standardized. There's ancient shorthand we still can't read, and it's very ambiguous. Sometimes the same sign is used for multiple words. So whoever's taking down the shorthand then needs to translate back into longhand later. And in doing that, they would have to recall what had happened, make judgment calls about the style and improving things. If a sentence was given and it was a little bit awkward, they would change that because that is their job. They are doing that kind of editorial work. And so it's actually a very creative process. They aren't just mouthpieces. And I think anybody who's ever done secretarial work will tell you that, actually, it's fairly active. Even if you're supposed to do what your enslaver wants, you're still making judgments that are really important and affect the outcome of whatever you're doing. This is an inconsequential work, and I understand why this might be a little troubling to some people, because now it opens up a whole range of questions of how much of this is Paul? Who is this person? If they're enslaved, are they. Do we even really know if they're Christian? I understand why. You know, this would make many people nervous.
- [27:30]
Bart Ehrman
Well, not so much. I mean, I think, you know, if people taking dictation were crafting some of the writing themselves, that'd be significant, but it wouldn't be any more significant if it was a slave than if it was not a slave. Right. I mean, it's just. Just somebody else's craft.
- [27:44]
Canada Moss
You know, I don't. I agree. I don't think it makes more of a difference if it's an enslaved person. Not an enslaved person in terms of the changes they might make. What it does make a difference about is it makes a difference in terms of how visible they are to us in the historical record. Because enslaved people are. Are written out of this history. We don't see them because enslavers don't think of them as people necessarily. And I would say the enslaved piece is important to some Christians who were concerned about what if they're not a Christian, what if they're just an enslaved person? And, and that might worry them.
- [28:21]
Bart Ehrman
So that's why, since he's greeting the church, probably. But in any event. Yeah, no, it's a.
- [28:25]
Canada Moss
You know, I would agree he's. He's part of this, but we don't. No, I mean, I'm not bothered by the idea that he might not be Christian. I don't really mind. But what I am interested in is the fact that the role of people like this is generally obscured from our historical narrative, which is really why we haven't spoken about it before.
- [28:43]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, but I mean, partly they're obscure because all we have is I turn to his greed. So that's, you know, it's kind of what we'd really like is a scribe who's like an enslaved scribe changed some of these, these ethical requirements of the household where it says, you know, slaves, obey your masters. We like to say slaves, you know, mast your set, your slaves free will. That would be a nice textual change. But we don't have.
- [29:05]
Canada Moss
Yeah, we don't. We don't have that. And of course, a really excellent secretary or copyist writes themselves into non existence. You don't know what they did do. What we do have is we have multiple people producing a text that we credit just to one of those people. So we don't know what Tertius did. We do have a manuscript, p. Barrel 11, 6, 3, 2. It's one of those few autographs where someone. I wrote an article about it, perhaps an enslaved secretary or scribe, the person who took dictation, then crossed out part of the text and inserted enslaved people back into the story. So we could imagine that there they're doing exactly what you want. But we don't have any autographs of the New Testament.
- [29:46]
Bart Ehrman
I've noticed that.
- [29:47]
Canada Moss
Yeah, you may know. I don't know.
- [29:49]
Bart Ehrman
So let's move off of Tertius because most people have never heard of him. But I want to get to Mark because you argue that the author of the Gospel of Mark may have been enslaved. Am I correct?
- [30:00]
Canada Moss
I think that when people start to talk about who Mark is, they seem to think that he was enslaved.
- [30:06]
Bart Ehrman
Wait, people tend to think he's enslaved.
- [30:08]
Canada Moss
They think that he does enslaved work. So he's described as an interpreter. Papius, you know, you translate.
- [30:14]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, you mean ancient people, you mean. Yes, yeah, yeah. I thought you meant people today think of Mark as a slave. I've never heard of anybody say that.
- [30:21]
Canada Moss
I'd love to get them around in that perspective. So Papius, this pictures Mark as, you know, a hermeneutase, whatever that is, interpreter, translator. And when you go look in the paper, logical record, and you look at who's doing that work, they're often, almost always enslaved or formally enslaved. You have a lot of people with that title who actually can't read or write, who have people working for them. And the reason why Papias presents Mark in this way is because Papias wants to have Mark be the kind of faithful mouthpiece for Peter. He's trying to get back to Peter. But what you see in that dynamic is a very common writing dynamic. When people write, you have an author dictating to a person who is well educated. And in the case of early Christians, you can imagine that they would be using secretaries who had a higher level of education than them, who would have been loaned to them or rented. So I don't think we can categorically say who Mark was, but we can say that when people start thinking about it, they think he's doing that kind of work. They are picturing him in that way. And when you read the Gospel of Mark and you think about that before
- [31:37]
Bart Ehrman
you get to gospel Mark, I wanted. Some people may not know who Papias is. So Papius is an early. He's an early second century church father. He wrote a five volume work. We don't have it, but we have some quotations of it from later writers. And probably, I don't know. When you date him. I date him around 130 or so, but people have different dates for him. But he says at one point that Mark was the. The interpreter or the translator of Peter. And what you're saying is, if that's the case, then that would suggest that he might have been a slave. Do you think Papias is. Is accurate? Do you trust Papias's report about Peter having this person Mark write his account?
- [32:17]
Canada Moss
I mean, Peter having this person Mark. Well, I think that Mark was written after 70. And all early Christian accounts say that Peter was dead by then. So p. Sort of narrative about how the writing happened does allow for there to be a gap between Mark learning about things from Peter and writing down. So it is still possible. I think it would make me sound much more apologetic than I am to say. I think Papias is right. It comes from Peter. Certainly there are a lot of Peter traditions there. What I think is more likely is that by the second century you have this emerging Peter Mark tradition. Because one of the big questions is, why is it called the Gospel of Mark? If it is Peter, why isn't it called the Gospel of Peter? And you can't say, well, there's another Gospel of Peter because that hasn't been written yet. I think it's called the Gospel of Mark because by the second century, people worry about getting the right copies of texts. And by saying, well, this is the Gospel of Mark, you're saying, look, this is written by the right secretary. It has a good textual history. You know, you would want a copy of Cicero's work written down by his favorite secretary, Tiro. And here's Mark writing for Peter. So there's a tradition about it. Do I think Peter was truly involved in the composition of Mark? I'm not willing to say that.
- [33:36]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Okay, so. But that leads you into the question, though, of whether Mark was enslaved. Because you have this early tradition where Papias describes the person who actually wrote the gospel as doing the kind of work that a slave might have done. But then you're going to talk about Mark itself like something in the Gospel of Mark.
- [33:54]
Canada Moss
Yeah. So what I would say is I think that that dynamic is typical of how people wrote longer texts like gospels, that kind of. You have an author dictated. And if you read New Testament accounts, if you read the Gospels and you think about it as there's an enslaved person in the contributing helping shape this story. And we know it's a story that's been shaped. This is not court reporting. And you read the Gospel of Mark, then it reads quite differently. And it's not that. I think that whoever the enslaved person was who was in the room has changed the entire story. I think they leave gaps and phrase things in certain ways to speak to their own community. I think anyone who learned to be a New Testament scholar was told that the intentions of the person who wrote the text matter. And I think that that is true of Mark and the composition of Mark, too. I think that's true of so many early Christian texts. When I read Mark now, I realize, wow, Jesus does not have a named father in this text. There's no Joseph there's no even son of a carpenter. It's a really. It's a really easy gap to plug. And someone decided not to do that. They allowed for the possibility, as what happened later, that people would say that his mother was a sex worker or had had, you know, had had relations with a Roman soldier. They just didn't mention a father. But that was an experience that lots of enslaved people would have had. I see Jesus talking in parables, which is a form of speech commonly associated with enslaved people. I see a man who gets crucified, which we always talk about brigands and treason and rebellion. But this is the way in which you execute enslaved people in antiquity. That's its primary role. I think when you look at Jesus throughout the Gospel of Mark, he actually looks quite slavish. This is not to say that he was enslaved historically, but that whose evidence composing this text is allowing space for that interpretation because of who they are and for whom they're writing.
- [36:05]
Bart Ehrman
You think Mark is suggesting to his audience that Jesus is enslaved?
- [36:10]
Canada Moss
I think he's allowing people to reach that conclusion if they want to, but he's not saying that. I think, you know, when we're looking for what kinds of. What kinds of changes could enslaved people have made? Not huge ones. He's not going to ride off on a unicorn into the heavens, you know, but there are things that can be sort of like slightly altered, shaped in certain ways. It's the kind of thing that if you were enslaved, you would notice, but if you weren't, you might pass over.
- [36:40]
Bart Ehrman
A second ago, you said something about Mary being a sex worker. So by sex worker, you mean you're talking about somebody who gets paid for sex?
- [36:49]
Canada Moss
Yes.
- [36:50]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, so who says that? You lost me on that one. Where do you get that? So, and you're saying that Mark might suggest it, is that right?
- [36:59]
Canada Moss
I don't think Monk's suggesting it. I think Monk is suggesting that Jesus doesn't have a legal father, which is the status for enslaved people or anyone who had been orphaned in the first Jewish war. You know, that's an experience that a lot of people would have had. They wouldn't have had fathers anymore. Yeah, but by not identifying a legal father, he's also suggesting that there is no legal father. That reads as enslavement or being orphaned. But in the antiquity, the way people read that was, maybe she's sleeping around. Yeah, and Matthew and Luke and John sort of change this in certain ways. Matthew, not as successfully as you would think, given that he has a genealogy that also Includes sex workers. But then you have both in rabbinic literature and in Roman critics of Christianity, the suggestion that this is someone. That Mary is someone who was a sex worker who had sex with a Roman soldier. Her. And this is where Jesus comes from.
- [38:02]
Bart Ehrman
But you think they're. They're suggesting that she's doing it for pay, that this is the way she's making money.
- [38:07]
Canada Moss
It is also equally possible that they mean to imply that she was enslaved.
- [38:11]
Bart Ehrman
But I. I think, couldn't she just be. I assume people in the ancient world were born out of wedlock.
- [38:17]
Canada Moss
They were, but the. The accusation of being born out of wedlock invokes a kind of complex sort of like a set of behaviors that are about sort of of prostitution in addition to. They're not really like, oh, she's kind of, you know, she has sex with people outside of marriage. There's a lot of a name for women who do that that I'm trying not to use.
- [38:39]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, okay, well, you. Well trained. Okay. So, I mean, we. You and I can talk about forever about this stuff because it's, you know, it's. It's really interesting. There's a lot. There's a lot of depth to what you're covering in this book because, you know, we're scratching the surface of this book because you've got a lot going on in here that isn't just about. About, you know, the Gospels or, you know, Mark and Tertius. It's about a wide range of stuff going into early Christianity. And so it's very. It's a lot of stuff here. We don't have that much time left, though, in our talk, and I want to talk about something more broad about your book itself and about how you imagine writing a book like this. And my interest was sparked because of the way you begin the book with, you know, it's your. Is it your author's note or is it the introduction? Yeah, yeah. No, it's your author's note. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where, you know, you're dealing with. One of the reasons people haven't written this book before is because the evidence is so tantalizingly sparse that, you know, you have to dig really deep to get much out of it. As you note in this, you know, it's just you've got to dig deep. And as you were saying before, using names and stuff, that that's a really useful approach that many people haven't just haven't even thought about doing, I think. But when you're writing a book for a general audience, you And I both know, because we've both done this, it's different from writing a book for scholars. Right? This is not how you would write a book for a scholarly community. Because when we write our scholarly books, everything gets footnoted. You document everything, you analyze everything, you give an argument for everything. You give 20 authors who've talked about it before kind of everything that ain't what you're going to do in a trade book, so you have to do it differently. But with this kind of book, how do you go about doing it is the question that you obviously had to wrestle with. Many people who write a trade book basically want to state the facts. And it's like a lot of those books are just dry as dirt and they're not really very interesting. You have another extreme with people who just kind of like go wild with their imagination. I mean, you've probably had this experience too, where I've picked up some books that were books about the historical Jesus that I at first thought were novels. I'm not going to name names here, but I mean, I thought, what, where? And so, you know, I consider those the two extremes. So what I'd like to know is how, how you deal with that and have you talk about. Because what you say at the outset is that you've got to read between the gaps, because there's so many gaps in our information. You've got to somehow come up with an imaginative way. And you, you quote an author that talks about critical fabulation, where the historytelling is imaginative but not untrue. That's a really interesting, really interesting line and that it involves imagination, but that all history in some sense is imagination. And so I guess I'm just wondering how. How do you go about deciding like, where to exercise your imagination, where to. How to market, how do you, like, how do you go about doing it?
- [41:40]
Canada Moss
Yeah, it was actually really hard and took a lot of work. And like you, I've. I've opened up history books, the general public, and you start reading and, oh, this is interesting. But then you think in your mind, how do you know this? Where are you getting this from? That seems to be how we think now. Do we know they thought that way 2,000 years ago? And so what I did was I couldn't have all the footnotes I wanted in the book, kind of a footnote at all. So I created a website where I would explain all of the justifications for what I thought. And the great thing about the website is then I can put links in. You want to See, does he get inscription? You can just click on the link. And oddly, I found myself doing sort of better history because I did that than I had done in my academic books. There were so many things in my academic books where I hadn't, because I hadn't had to do that. I maybe said things that we all assumed as historians, but that weren't true. And to write this book. So I read very widely in other periods of history where people have thought about slavery and the dearth of evidence. That's where the critical fabulation comes from. I read a lot of histories of labor because it is throughout the entire history of labor and clerical work. It turns out that copyists and secretaries always make changes. Always. There are no instances when they don't. Sort of deliberate changes, too, for a variety of reasons we hadn't thought about. I obviously went back to the material with which we're familiar. The manuscripts, the archaeological data. I looked at a lot of inscriptions, and I realized that I could document it on the website. But I also realized that what I thought of as just the facts, history was also very imaginative for a very long time. I learned this in school. People thought, because of a scholar called Rudolph Bortman, that the Gospel of John was put together from sources. And Bultman said that John was writing and he had these sources on his desk. And a gust of wind blew the sources apart. And this is why they're out of order.
- [43:37]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah.
- [43:38]
Canada Moss
He didn't even bother to cross the street to the Papylogical Institute to find out if there was any evidence of this ever happening in what we had. That's imagination. There are people who say that the reason why there's a sort of problem with the ending of the Gospel of Mark in manuscripts is because Mark got arrested and then came back later and finished it. This, too, is imagination. That's not. That's not more serious scholarship than what I'm doing in my book. And I actually think that this process, which was hard and required that I read many more things than I normally do, actually ended up with better history. I hope it's still engaging. But in order to be responsible, I had to check things out in ways I never had before.
- [44:21]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, okay, thanks. You know, that's very helpful. I have one last question that's kind of related to it. You know, you're dealing with a really, really difficult topic. Not just in terms of the historiography that kind of understand the history, but because of the moral issues involved with slavery. And this is always particularly with slavery. It's always been a. It's been a difficult issue for New Testament scholars, even to the level of knowing how to translate the New Testament as you know. Well, the terms of that we used earlier, dulas means slave. It means somebody who's owned by another person. It doesn't mean servant, somebody who's like paid to do their labor and go home at night, do watch TV if they want to. It's slave. But. But translators are reluctant to translate it as slave because they're afraid that it will conjure up a wrong image for modern readers. And it raises the question of how you talk about a ancient phenomenon without modern inceptions of it. But it creates problems because, I mean, you, in your book, you objected using the words slaves and masters. You prefer enslaved and enslaver. So my question is, like, how do you, when you're writing a topic like this that is just fraught in terms of kind of moral issues about a different period in a different place, how do you draw a line between maybe like, I mean, a description from like somebody on the inside back then to an evaluation from people now? Or is there a line to be drawn?
- [45:48]
Canada Moss
I mean, I think the answer is carefully. You have to think about it. This isn't. It was a different topic than anything I had written about before because of exactly the reasons you're identifying. I use enslaved and enslaver because the language of just slaves sort of makes it seem as if someone is sort of by definition in their personhood. I want to say ontological. It's not a great word for this audience that they are just that that's who they are. And there have been objections to that raised by historians of Atlantic slavery. But when I'm quoting someone, I'm going to use the language they used because it is brutal and I don't necessarily want to soften it. And I did worry as writing, when I was writing it, there were sections that I thought, do I want to describe this violence? You know, this is horrible. You know, these are horrible stories that Christians told about the mistreatment of enslaved workers. And I came to the conclusion that I think Christianity is kind of erasure of those experiences. Don't help anyone. Yes, that I don't think anyone's well served by pretending that this language isn't there. And I don't think anyone's well served by pretending that Christianity is sort of different or good for enslaved people because historically that has not been the case. This isn't about making people feel bad, but it is about being sensitive to the ways that These texts are received today by people who. For whom slavery is more pressing. You know that this language that Ethan McCauley has used of slavery sitting in the soul of black and brown people. And I think anyone who writes on this subject has to be aware of that. Have to be aware that there are people for whom this is powerful and violent, even today. And so I think it's a very difficult line to walk. And I hope that the parts of this book, which I think of as history, not theology, that are helpful for people sort of invested in projects of liberation, that they will take up the parts that are useful and they will discard what is not. Right.
- [47:55]
Bart Ehrman
Okay. Very good. Yeah. Okay. Slavery is not the only issue where that comes up when dealing with ancient texts, obviously, and with dealing with the New Testament. I mean, lots of issues that. Where people had different sensibilities than we have today, and it's hard for us to get our minds around them sometimes. So. Well, Canada, thank you very much. The book, again is God's Ghost Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible by Canada Moss. Probably by the time you hear this, it has just been out. So thank you, Canada. I really enjoyed it.
- [48:26]
Canada Moss
Thank you, Matt.
- [48:30]
Megan Lewis
This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel, so you don't miss out from Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.