Christian Slavery with Candida Moss

Candida Moss I don't think anyone is well-served by pretending that Christianity isn't implicated in the history of slavery. There are texts within the New Testament that can be used, and hopefully should be used, for liberatory goals. But the fact of the matter is, if you read the Bible, as happened during abolitionist debates, the pro-slavery group have it, and you have to work really, really hard and ignore a lot of evidence to say that it's an anti-slavery text.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan Beecher?

Dan Beecher Oh, man. Things are great. There's fun things afoot. I'm actually really looking forward to our interview today. We've got some interesting stuff to talk about today.

Dan McClellan Me too. And you just returned from your annual pilgrimage. I don't know if you do it every year, but you went to Mardi Gras.

Dan Beecher This is my first time going to-

Dan McClellan First time. Okay

Dan Beecher ... Mardi Gras. So yeah, it was a lot of fun.

Dan McClellan Okay. And so what are you giving up for Lent?

Dan Beecher Mardi Gras.

Dan McClellan Mardi Gras. Okay.

Dan Beecher I gave up Mardi Gras for Lent.

Dan McClellan That's wise. Okay.

Dan Beecher It's fine. It went away anyway. There was no more to be had, so it was fine. All right, well- But enough about me. Let's introduce our awesome guest.

Dan McClellan Yes. Today, we have Dr. Candida Moss with us. Welcome to the show, Candida. And Dr. Moss, or Professor Moss, is the Cadbury Professor of Theology at Birmingham University, not Birmingham, but Birmingham. And she's also the CBS Papal News Correspondent, who every time the Pope does something globally noteworthy, she's called out to go comment on it. Welcome to the show, Candida. We're very happy to have you here.

Candida Moss Thanks so much for having me.

Dan McClellan And I remember the first time we met, and I think you do, too, was when you came out to Utah to come speak at a little conference that was being held at BYU with some folks like James Kugel and Pete Enns, and some others. And I picked you up from the airport, and I thought it would be funny if I held a sign with your name on it. So I printed one out in Greek, and the first thing you did-- And you thought it was hilarious, and you had to get a picture, but then you immediately pointed out that I had the accent wrong. Which is what I was terrified was going to happen. And I was like, "I've got to hurry." And I couldn't find a video on YouTube of somebody pronouncing your name that I could be confident was correct. So I accentuated the name as if it was pronounced Candida, which is how I had always heard it. So I still feel bad about that,

Dan Beecher but- Nevertheless- I remember- ... #nerdjokes. Well done.

Candida Moss I feel bad about even bringing it up. I constantly mispronounce as my name, and I didn't even really notice, so I can't believe I did that. That was- ... nerdy of me. Yeah.

Dan McClellan No, no, no. And you have a book that's coming out on March 26, and it is entitled "God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible." And we're here to talk about this book. Dan and I have had copies for a bit and have been, hopefully, reading through them. We're very excited.

Dan Beecher You don't have to be hopeful if you know that you've actually read it, Dan.

Dan McClellan Okay. Well, I'm not talking about just me, but-

Dan Beecher I know. I know. You're throwing me under a bus.

Candida Moss Mardi Gras. Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, you've been busy.

Dan Beecher No, I've been reading the book. It's actually a really fun read. And actually, so frankly, I went into it with a misapprehension because I went into the book believing that this was a book about this thing that I've heard plenty about, which is the enslavement of Christians by, say, the Romans. You hear a lot about historical enslavement of Christians by other groups. Mm-hmm. And what I had not anticipated was that that's not really what this book is about.

Candida Moss Yeah. Not at all.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So talk to us a bit about what you're actually exploring in this book, and what prompted you to tackle this subject.

Candida Moss Yeah. So the book is really about who is responsible for the Bible that we hold in our hands today. It's really, in lots of ways, it's a book about labor. And for me, it was sparked by the fact that about six years ago now, I needed these for the first time. These are reading glasses. I don't actually really need them for this. They're kind of a prop. But if I was reading, I would need them. And I've written on disability before, and I was like, "How would I have done this in antiquity? Would this be the end of my career?" And so I decided to look into it, and it became very clear to me that at the point at which you would need glasses, which might be your whole life, you would need someone else to read and write. And for Romans, for ancient Greeks, for ancient Jews, for early Christians, those were enslaved people. And the more you dug into it, the more widespread this practice became. And I began to realize this is actually just how people read and wrote in antiquity. They just used other people for a lot of reasons. It kind of hurts to write for long periods of time. Copying a text ... just enormously cumbersome to someone. And we sort of knew about them with respects to early Christianity, but it was the kind of thing, I was supposed to be writing a different kind of book about something else entirely, but I was like a dog with a bone. Once you start noticing this, you just can't let it go, and it sort of changes the way you think about so many things, from how the authors of the New Testament were writing, to who was reading texts aloud, to who were the actual missionaries, and then just how do you read the story? How do you read this collection of texts?

Dan Beecher Yeah. Early in the book, you told the story of a little sort of almost side note in, I believe it was in Paul's Epistle to the Romans, where we believe that Paul wrote that, but then there's this little other thing that's like this little hello in the middle of it, that wouldn't have made any sense to me if I read it and didn't have your commentary on it. Talk about that a little bit.

Candida Moss Yeah. So in Romans, which we generally think of as his kind of magnum opus, at the end, in chapter 16, tucked into that chapter, this person, Tertius, says, "I, Tertius, who wrote this letter." And that's Paul's secretary, and this is the only one of Paul's secretaries that we have a name for, and it is what in antiquity would've been considered to be a slavish name. And he said he greets the church in Rome, and in other letters of Paul, Paul kind of alludes to the fact that he wasn't writing. He points out what he wrote in his own hand, in Galatians, for example. And when you look at that, you're like, wow, someone else wrote this down. And I knew that. I sort of knew that. I'm a New Testament scholar, and I had read people commenting on it, and they had sort of dismissed this and said, "Oh, well, he's just a secretary." And- Just taking dictation

Dan McClellan and word for word copying it down is the idea.

Candida Moss Yeah. And I have to say, first off, as someone who's done fairly low-status clerical work, there's no such thing as just a secretary. And in fact, all studies of bookwork, from the medieval period to Black pressmen in the American South to the mid-20th century, will tell you that anyone who's doing this kind of work is actually doing sort of real creative work. I have a friend who's a provost, and her administrative assistant regularly writes emails from her in her voice. Mm. Yeah. She even saw them,

Dan Beecher right?

Candida Moss And that happens in antiquity, too. And then there's this issue of shorthand, and it's funny because, and I've mentioned this before, people online are like, "They don't have shorthand in the ancient world." And I'm like, "No. No, they do." We have contracts for children who were enslaved being apprenticed to shorthand experts. What's different about it in antiquity is that elites can't do it. It's like a code. Mm. And so if you're dictating, someone is translating what you're saying into symbols, and it's a very personalized system. You would sort of adapt the shorthand symbols to your needs as a shorthand writer. It's not standardized the way it was in the 19th, 20th century. And then you later on have to expand it because it's your special system. There is some kind of individual styles, but what that means is, let's say we picture Paul dictating Romans. It's a pretty long letter, let's face it. All in one go. Tertius writes it down. Paul could not take up what Tertius had written down and read it himself, and only Tertius can then expand it into the letter, and as he does that, and it's sort of rough in comparison to modern shorthand. He would have to remember as he expanded what exactly he meant. There's a lot of duplication. There aren't that many symbols. And as he did that, he would've edited the text because that's his job. His job is to make Paul sound better. Mm-hmm. And so Roman secretaries, or secretaries in the ancient Mediterranean, the Roman Mediterranean, they are deeply involved in that process. They're not kind of fungible workers. You can't just swap them out. And they are editing as they go. Mm-hmm. And people sometimes say to me, "Oh, well, it's really Paul. They just fix typos." Can you imagine if there was a typo, how important that would be theologically? When you think about how Christians read the New Testament, we're not casual about it. Right. We're like, this preposition means this, and therefore Protestantism. Even if people are going to say these are small changes, which I'm not sure they always are, but even someone was going to say these are small changes, that has huge consequences for what people hear in church on Sundays. Right.

Dan McClellan And a lot of times when we're reading the text, we're kind of imagining we're getting the thoughts and the words directly from the author. The idea that somebody is mediating this to us, providing a separate perspective and probably additional education, they may be the one to say, "Oh, if you use this phrase, this is from this author over here, and that would resonate with this over here." And you have somebody who's pulling things together, who's probably adding a significant layer of intertextuality, allusivity with other literature. And so we don't think about that though when we're reading Paul. We think, ah, this tastes like Paul's language, but Probably a significant portion of it is coming from the person who's mediating it.

Candida Moss That's right, because these kinds of literate workers are really well-trained. They've been educated. They learned Homer, too. They have a sort of similar education initially to an elite author. So they are able to kind of improve the style, improve the rhetorical images, perhaps give input and ideas and give some examples of this in my book. But I think we should think of these kinds of secretaries and editorial figures as making the texts better. And normally, when we talk about kind of secondary figures, we normally talk about copyists, and we normally blame them for stuff. So there's a bunch of New Testament scholars who have blamed Tertius for their inability to read Romans. They're like, "Well, these verses are out of order. That's Tertius' fault. I'm going to reorganize them, and then it's going to make sense to me." And that's sort of not how we should be thinking about this. I think we should be seeing this as a collaborative writing project. Yeah. And we may not be able to pull apart who did what, but that doesn't mean we should default to it's all Paul, or it's all the evangelist.

Dan McClellan And I think, one of your chapters, you talk a little bit about how this influences the way we reconstruct Jesus in our minds, because when we cast our minds back, there are a lot of gaps that we have to fill in, and we usually just intuitively, without even thinking about it, we fill in those gaps with things that are familiar to us. And that is one of the biggest problems with trying to reconstruct the ancient world, is we assume there's a lot that is familiar to us, and we can just fill it in. The reality is, it's very different. And you describe an early Christian world that is very, very different from what we think of today. We have technology all around us that helps us, that aids us to do what we either don't want to do, can't do, or can't do quickly enough. And in the ancient world, enslaved people were, to some degree, a technology that was available to those who had the means. But what does this mean about how we-- And you talk about the Gospel of Mark. What does this mean about how we reconstruct the picture of the Gospel of Mark, its composition, how it's talking about Jesus?

Candida Moss Yeah. So the Gospel of Mark, our first life of Jesus, and you're right, as historians, I think anyone who goes to seminary or graduate school, or even if they do an undergraduate degree and they major in religious studies, you're told you have to kind of think your way back into the world that these people live in, their historical perspectives. And we always say, well, the experiences of the author are important. What does this mean to a Second Temple Jewish person? That's how we understand what scripture means as scholars. And when you read the Gospel of Mark, and you encounter Jesus, who pops up out of nowhere, and when I picture Jesus, I picture an artisanal carpenter making a really nice chair. And the reason for that is I went to Sunday school. But that's not what the Greek says. The Greek says he's a tekton, which could be an artisanal carpenter, but also might be a construction worker. And if I see he's a construction worker, I am picturing something completely different. Right. And it's still actually highly skilled work, but in antiquity, it's viewed quite particularly because it's sort of low-status work. Mm-hmm. No one wants to end up doing construction work. It's hard. You get injured. If you get injured, you likely die. And so you have this construction worker. He is not, in the Gospel of Mark, the son of a construction worker. He's just the son of Mary. There is no mention of a human father in Mark. Mm-hmm. And that is such a weird gap. Now, it's really hard, if you've ever been in a church, to not picture Joseph here. Mm-hmm. And I don't think it's that the author of the Gospel of Mark thinks that there wasn't a father there, but it's not mentioned. And most scholars will tell you that the Gospel of Mark is written around 70. Just sort of the destruction of the temple, the first Jewish war, a lot of enslaved Jews, a lot of trauma, and a lot of women without any kind of support, a lot of widows, a lot of women driven into sex work by the predicament of that war. And so when you think about Jesus, no named father, that makes him sound like them. Potentially like his mother was enslaved, potentially like maybe she had been a sex worker, which is not what Mark is saying. It's a gap that Mark leaves for us to make this text speak to us. And then he wanders around speaking in what we call parables, which are just fables. And the most famous fabulist ever is Aesop, who also was enslaved, also was disliked by people from his own town, and also died a horrible death. And then you get to the crucifixion. And I grew up learning that crucifixion was a punishment for slaves and for traitors. Mm-hmm. And then we all talk about the historical circumstances that would lead people to see Jesus as a rebel. And that certainly is a good thing to do to consider that. But at the same time, imagine that to so many people, including the person collaborating on this text, this was a punishment for enslaved people. And you have this figure who, as you read it, he has these slavish undertones to the way that he's characterized throughout, from the moment we meet him, when he doesn't have a father, and he gets adopted by God, to the way that he preaches, to even the way he walks So, there's this weird thing in Mark, the geography's all wrong. All wrong. It's one of the reasons some scholars will tell you, "Oh, this could not have been written anywhere near this region of the world. This is a bizarre..." It's like walking from, say, South Bend, Indiana, by going over the top of the lake to go to Chicago. There's a highway right there, just go. But in an ancient context, that's meandering. He meanders, and that's a slavish way of walking, and you can see why, because he is going to die, and I would probably take my time, too. And then the way he dies is not very heroic in Mark, but it's a way that would've spoken to people, to people who had experienced the trauma of war, to people who had either themselves or had seen other people who were enslaved or low status mistreated physically. So, I think once you start to think about an enslaved collaborator on this text, you start to read stories differently. Places where you would imagine a friend doing something- Mm-hmm ... you have to ask yourself, "Is this person a friend?" Or maybe they were enslaved. Or places where you see in English, servant, you always have to ask yourself, "Does it say servant in Greek or does it say slave?" Because there's a whole tradition of erasing slavery from- Mm-hmm ... high-status Christian figures.

Dan McClellan And we have, not the erasure, but the actual composition of a background for Jesus and the gospels that come later, which may not even be contemporary with the composition of those gospels themselves. But, this is something that comes up a lot when I'm talking with people about the historical Jesus. This is Jesus of Nazareth. He's not presented as anything other than somebody who was probably born and raised in Nazareth- Mm-hmm ... in the earliest gospel. It's the others that have to kind of renegotiate his background to move away from what seemed to be rather humble, maybe even too humble for their liking, beginnings for this Jesus. Now, in your book, you also talk about how there may be humble beginnings for the author of the Gospel of Mark as well. This is something I catch a lot of flack for on social media when I talk about the original anonymity of the gospels, and how they probably had the traditional authorship assigned to them in the 2nd century somewhere. But, even with some of the mid-2nd century references like Papias and others, we may be constructing an artificial author there in Mark. What did you find out about who "Mark" might be based on this new framework for understanding the composition and the circulation of the gospel?

Candida Moss Yeah. So let's just start with saying I completely agree with you. These were anonymous texts. They are anonymous texts that get titles. And so when I'm talking about Mark, I'm talking about someone calls this text Mark, and in the early 2nd century, Papias does that, refers to a text called Mark. May not be identical to the text we have, but he refers to a guy called Mark, who was the hermeneutis, the interpreter or the translator of Peter, who wrote down things, somewhat haphazardly is the implication. It's not the best writing, but- Mm-hmm ... as much as he could remember. And-

Dan McClellan Now, there is an argument that when Papias says not in order, that the idea is that it's not following literary conventions regarding structure and flow. Mm-hmm. Is that something that you think is worth keeping in mind, or do you think that is an attempt to apologize for the connection of Papias' Mark with our Mark?

Candida Moss Yeah. That's a good question. I think Papias is certainly apologizing for the text.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Candida Moss It's not Cicero or Homer- ... or Luke. Not that I'm sure Papias quite knows about Luke as we know about Luke, but it's certainly not Luke, which it claims to be an order. But the relationship between Peter and Mark is one of subservience. Mark is taking down dictation from Peter, and what is that doing for Papias claiming this? Well, he's claiming an apostolic pedigree. Mm-hmm. And he's presenting Mark as performing a very servile role. If you go look at all of the papyrological evidence for who does translation work, unless you're in the military, and even then sometimes, you're talking about enslaved or formerly enslaved people, people who used to speak a different language but have been brought elsewhere. I learned some languages in school that I don't really remember. So even if you're an elite and you studied Greek, but you mostly work in Latin, that doesn't mean that you're really comfortable reading and writing and translating Greek. So Mark is being positioned as a figure who's helping Peter communicate with other people, because Peter doesn't seem like the sharpest tool in the box, and his Greek is not going to be Mark's Greek. Papias is presenting Mark in this way because there is this idea in antiquity that people still have today, that secretaries, interpreters, these kinds of workers, they're mindless. They're just faithful translators. They don't really have agency. And so Papias is trying to say, "You can trust that this really comes from Peter." Mm-hmm. Because Mark is a translator taking dictation, and Romans think of enslaved workers as mindless, as body parts. That's why we so rarely hear about them. Yeah. And we shouldn't believe that. Of course, they're real people. But Papias is trying to harness that argument to say, "You can trust this text. It really goes back to Peter, ultimately." And around the time Papias is writing, there's a lot of concern among elite Romans about, I want to get a manuscript. So let's say "The Gospel of the Two Dans." I want "The Gospel of the Two Dans." I'm going to a Roman bookshop. I want to know I have the right gospel.

Dan McClellan Yeah, it's not for sale.

Candida Moss Yeah. But seeing that the person who wrote down "The Gospel of the Two Dans" was your editor would really reassure me. I'd be like, "Oh, it was your editor who wrote this down? I feel better about this." Mm-hmm. And that is what Papias is saying about Mark. He's saying that Mark is someone very close to Peter, someone who can be trusted, someone who does this kind of faithful recording. But it's not an accurate depiction of who Mark is, and it's a rare sighting of an enslaved literate worker.

Dan McClellan Now, in one of the chapters, you start by telling a story about an enslaved reader reviewing a copy of the gospel, now called Mark, and I enjoyed getting to close my eyes, and that stopped me from reading for a bit, but I read and then closed my eyes- ... about this scenario that you paint. I thought it was instructive to think about the utility of the gospel this way. Could you talk about the narrative that you paint at the beginning of the chapter six in your book?

Candida Moss Yeah. So one of the things that we know about New Testament texts is that they were performed aloud by readers, and because of how manuscripts were, you had to prepare. There sort of often weren't breaks between words or accents or emphasis, so you had to be very familiar with the physical manuscript to perform it. This is a highly skilled role, and it involves a lot of forethought. And so what I try to imagine was the ending of the Gospel of Mark, and if you just open any kind of critical Bible, you'll know that there are separate endings at the end of Mark. And what I wanted to imagine was how did the ending of Mark come about? And there are all kinds of scholarly imaginings out there already, but what I wanted to think about was performing the text. And this reader, I imagine, called Felix, who's preparing to read this at a sort of dinner party event, which happened. People performed texts. You kind of have hand gestures. There's obviously tone of voice is really important. You can use gesture to the environment around you to sort of produce a particular kind of reading. And then Felix knows he's going to come to the ending of the Gospel of Mark, and the original ending is very underwhelming.

Dan Beecher And- Yeah, you pointed out that it just ends with, what was the word?

Dan McClellan Gar.

Candida Moss Gar. Gar, the word for. Yeah. Right. Which is, it's like ending a sentence with a preposition. It's a little worse than that. But is this how you end a gospel?

Dan McClellan And- And to be more specific, this is when they show up at the tomb, it's empty, and the word order in Greek is a lot more flexible. But basically- Mm-hmm ... it's saying they ran away. They didn't tell anybody because they were afraid and seen. Mm-hmm. And that's- Right ... your Gospel of Mark.

Candida Moss Yeah. And Felix has to perform this for a group of people. Probably his enslaver wants this to be a successful event, and Felix is worried that even if he does his best job, it's not going to come across well because people are going to look at him, and they'll be like, "And then what?" They ran, and then what? Because it doesn't sound like the end of a book. So what I imagine is that Felix has heard other gospels, stories circulating, and he decides to sort of bring a few together to kind of round it out nicely and produce a sort of more satisfying conclusion to his performance that night. And at that event, we might imagine, as regularly happened, someone else had brought an enslaved notary with them to take it down in shorthand. And that notarius, that shorthand writer, has now taken down Felix's version, and they're going to copy it up later onto papyrus and ink. And between them, these two people have now produced a new version of the Gospel of Mark. And this would've happened in small ways all the time, right? You skip a line. I know that there have been times that I've been reading to my kids, and I want them to go to bed, and I'll try and skip a page if I can. And in order to do that, and there would be all kinds of time pressures and things, like Christian too, and in order to do that, I have to kind of make up a sentence to connect it to wherever I plan to pick up. And so we can imagine that there would be places both deliberate like that and not deliberate, where people would have slightly flexibly altered the meaning of the gospel through performance, and that then might become enshrined in a manuscript. And I'm sure some people are thinking, "Wow, she just made that up." And I have all kinds of ancient evidence for thinking that happened. Mm-hmm. But what I'd really like to point out is that other explanations for the ending of Mark often are also making things up.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Candida Moss So there's one explanation. This is scholarship, I want to remind you. Where Mark is sitting there, and he's writing it, and he just finishes that sentence, and he gets arrested, and for whatever reason, it's not clear. And he gets arrested and taken off somewhere, and then released. And someone had taken the manuscript, and then he only gets to add in the next ending later on. And maybe. But we don't have any evidence of it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. That sounds like we're ginning up a scenario that's not in evidence so that we can protect Mark and authorship of the end, rather than have to conclude that someone else came in later

Candida Moss and

Dan Beecher meddled around in

Candida Moss it. It does seem like maybe they have an agenda and- A little bit, yeah. Yeah. And I think it's funny because we're always like, when we're talking about people changing scripture, we always imagine they have a theological agenda. Mm-hmm. And if they're deeply invested, what if they just say, as regularly happened with copyists, what if they just want to be done for the day? What if they're just entertaining themselves? There are some amazing examples of people entertaining themselves in kind of modern book work that you know that if Bible scholars were poring over this, they would assume that one person who varied how they spelled a word or how they wrote out 90%, like sometimes in letters, sometimes nine zero percent, sometimes nine zero space percent written out in letters. That if I saw that as a Bible scholar, I'd be like, "We have three different people." Because 90% is written differently. And when they're interviewed, they're like, "I was just bored. I needed to entertain myself." And so what I want to try and imagine is other things that affected this text that we never think about, just real-world things.

Dan Beecher I'm just going to sort of take a broader view of this and step a bit away from the book just to say, I think it might surprise a lot of people, this notion that the Bible itself, Dan can attest to how many people on the internet spend countless hours in apologetics trying to claim that Jesus doesn't condone slavery and that slavery isn't there in the New Testament or whatever. I think it would surprise people to know that Christians used slaves in the creation of the Bible. The impact of that feels like it might be pretty big for a lot of people who are trying to reconcile their view of what the message of Christianity might be with that idea. Can you talk a little about that?

Candida Moss Yeah. I don't think anyone is well-served by pretending that Christianity isn't implicated in the history of slavery, and that the Bible wasn't used, in fact, to defend slaveholding in this country, in America. Right. I don't think anyone's well-served by that. And I know what you're talking about. When I was talking to publishers about this book, there was one publisher I spoke to who was a sort of former evangelical, now a more moderate Christian. And we spoke about it, he said, "You can't prove this. You can't prove they existed or they did things." I said, "Oh, I can prove it, and here's the evidence." And finally, he came to his point, because I know a lot of people will struggle with this, the idea that Christians used enslaved workers. Funny, he came to his point, which is, "Why do we have to keep talking about Christians having slaves? Why can't we talk about all the good things Christianity has done for slaves?" Mm-hmm. And there was a long pause. Because there are texts within the New Testament that can be used, and hopefully should be used, for liberatory goals. But the fact of the matter is, if you read the Bible as happened during abolitionist debates, the pro-slavery group have it. They have the evidence. Yeah. And you have to work really, really hard, really hard, and ignore a lot of evidence to say that it's an anti-slavery text. And the number of stories that Jesus alone tells that use violence against enslaved people as a key plot device. This is not a text that we should pretend isn't implicated in that world. And the fact that enslaved workers are involved in it doesn't mean that we're like, "Okay, we're all square. It's both enslavers and enslaved people, we're good." It should cause us to think and reflect more on the ways in which Christianity has been involved in slaveholding, and the way in which Christian texts have been used to support that, and to think more about how we might push back against that. It's work. It's a lot of work if you want to use Christian texts. It's very easy if you just care about basic ethics and human rights. But I think that's a thing that people should think about if they are Christian. And if they're not Christian, I think it is relevant to the history of the modern world to know how powerful religious groups have been involved in this process. I think one of the things that people have sometimes said to me online is like, "Well, you know-" "In medieval Islamic countries, they enslaved people too, and they would castrate young boys, and isn't that terrible? Christians didn't do that in the medieval period." It is true that enslaved eunuchs were not used at the court of kings in European countries in quite the same way. But the fact of the matter is that almost all of the enslaved children from Africa who were funneled into those countries, that surgery was actually performed at a particular Christian monastery in Egypt. Mm. So we're talking about monks performing a surgery that had a mortality rate of 30%.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Candida Moss So definitely that should give, I think, people pause. That's the kind of thing that we should know, not so much as a sort of self-flagellation or something, but just because I don't think there can be honest history without confronting these truths. That was probably much longer than you wanted.

Dan Beecher No. This is a very important moment in American history right now because we're starting to see people moving against the idea of honest history and looking at the harder parts of history. We see a lot of state legislators who don't want books in libraries that would make people feel bad about their own people or whatever. And I think you have now given them yet another book to ban if you're not careful.

Candida Moss I think I'd be in good company.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Absolutely. When I moved my family out to Oxford in 2009, I remember being in a bookstore one time and finding a series called, and I have no doubt you know about this series, "Horrible Histories." Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher I enjoyed it because I'm an

Dan McClellan honest- I bought it for

Candida Moss my kids. Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And I love the artwork. I think the main, whoever it is they have doing the artwork is incredibly talented, but it's basically the warts-and-all history where it's depicting all the things that are considered gross, violence, inappropriate, stuff like that, and it does it in a frank and very classy way.

Dan McClellan But you mention in the book that Christianity was characterized by some of the early non-Christian writers as for women and slaves. Mm-hmm. Which made me think of two of the earliest Christians that we ever hear of in the non-biblical, non-Christian literature. Pliny's story about coming across some Christians, and he's writing to the emperor and saying, "Hey, I don't know what to do with these Christians. There were two women who were slaves, and so I tortured them to get more information from them," because then that was the only way you could trust the testimony of a slave, was if that testimony had been extracted through torture. And then he executes them, and then goes on to say, "I said if you'll denounce Christianity or whatever, you can go. Otherwise, I got to kill you." And the emperor's like, "Yeah, you done good, kid." So some of the earliest witnesses we have to Christianity highlight that Christians were frequently women and slaves, which then in later history kind of is, I don't know if it is intentionally obscured, but the way Christianity is represented changes significantly.

Candida Moss Yeah. That's right. And it's not just the Pliny-Trajan correspondence which you referenced, although if you look at modern English translations of that, they're described as deaconesses. You almost don't know they're enslaved. Uh-huh. Even in classics, sometimes you'll see that,

Dan McClellan and you're like,

Candida Moss "That's bizarre. How did they stop being enslaved household servants and start being the sort of religious role?" And that's part of the kind of obfuscation of early Christian status. The fact that Romans say that Christianity is a religion for slaves and women, that's obviously a slur. Yeah. But there's a lot of data to suggest that that's true. We have references to other enslaved people, and when you look at sort of the names of the people who brought, say, a text like First Clement, which is purportedly by Clement of Rome, and it's sent to a church in Corinth. When you look at their names, their names are slave names. Fortunatus, like just lucky. It's sort of- Yeah. Epaphroditus, the most common name for enslaved people. Mm-hmm. And you see them all over the place. Our first portrait of Jesus, and it is a caricature making fun of another enslaved child, but it's from a schoolroom for enslaved children. That's our first portrait of Jesus. And the child who made it is making fun of a Christian child who's there. And sometimes people want to say, "Oh, well, this is persecution." I'm like, "No, this is playground bullying at worst." And if you look at the other graffiti there, you're like, "Oh, these kids are horrible to each other." And so that's not inconsequential, that kind of data. And you can see why Christianity appeals to people. It's beyond the promise of equality before God and heavenly rewards, and punishment in a slave prison for everyone who had treated them poorly. This is a religion about someone who had died the death of an enslaved person, who was apparently a God who took on, according to Paul, the form of a slave. There's a lot there for you, and you can see why it would appeal to people from those kinds of backgrounds.

Dan McClellan And Paul is repeatedly characterizing the ideal relationship between the Christian and Jesus as one of enslaved.

Candida Moss Yeah. We don't take that seriously, of course. Obviously. Now it's just, "Oh, it's just me, super devoted."

Dan McClellan And you're talking about the Alexamenos graffito, correct? Mm-hmm. With this early playground bullying. Mm-hmm. And Alexamenos is mentioned in another room. Mm-hmm. Isn't there another graffito where it says, "Alexamenos is faithful," or something like that?

Candida Moss Some people doubt the historicity of that particular graffito.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Candida Moss And this is a problem with things that were discovered between the 17th century and the 19th century- ... in Rome. It was a very pious period of archaeological excavation. Hmm. But there are all kinds of reasons to link this image, this idea of fidelity, specifically with enslaved people. Mm-hmm. A classicist who reviewed all of the funerary monuments for formerly enslaved people, for freedmen, revealed that being faithful, the Latin fidei, the Greek pistos, that language that we today hear as faith, belief in Jesus- Mm-hmm ... which at the time meant more loyal. Right. That's one of the most common words to find on a tombstone for an enslaved or formerly enslaved person, that they were faithful. Hmm. And we don't hear that anymore when we read the Bible. Yeah. I hear Luther instead. But we should hear this. We should hear echoes of slavish virtues.

Dan Beecher You mentioned that graffito. You have a line drawing in your book of it that seems really good. Mm-hmm.

Candida Moss Do you- It was- ... pretty well done.

Dan Beecher I feel like whoever you got to do that, man, that was...

Candida Moss Yeah. I would even recommend him to others.

Dan Beecher Oh, would you?

Candida Moss Yeah. Dan, I'm going to specify, Dan McClellan, thank you so much- Yes ... for doing those images. I really appreciate it.

Dan McClellan Yeah, well, I was glad to be able to help. And, I hope I get a better version of this book where the images come through a lot more clearly than the other one.

Candida Moss I think that I can figure that

Dan McClellan out. But I was pleased to... I was flipping through the book one day, and I saw my last name on one page, and I was like, "What the..." And then- ... I was like, "Oh yeah, this is the book that those illustrations were for. Wonderful." Yeah. And the Alexamenos graffito, if anybody doesn't know, this is where Jesus is pictured hanging on the cross with the head of an ass, and then Alexamenos, whose face is drawn very carefully, it's a very skilled drawing, is kneeling before the cross. And it says, "Alexamenos worships or fears God." Mm-hmm. And so it's a pretty sick burn. And I think probably the second earliest artistic depiction of crucifixion that we have. I think there's another one from outside of Rome that is a little bit earlier. Mm-hmm. But a pretty important artifact in its own right, in addition to what it tells us about schoolyard bullying in- ... the end of second to the beginning of third-century Rome.

Candida Moss Yeah, and that donkey head is also... That's not some kind of odd coincidence. A lot of people were talking about Jesus in that way because donkeys were associated with slavery. Mm-hmm. And so it is implying, "You stupid child worshiping a God who was crucified." And it's clearly a slave. That's clearly a depiction of Jesus as enslaved.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher What does it change for you, in terms of how you see Jesus as a figure? Because yeah, you mentioned it earlier, but it feels like that is a very different view of Jesus. And if we think of Jesus as an enslaved person or at least sort of in the position, maybe even a figurative position of the enslaved person, what does that change for you in terms of how we should be interpreting his message?

Candida Moss Yeah. So for me, there are all kinds of small, I'm a historian, Bible scholar, little things that I'm like, "Oh, that makes much more sense to me." I think, like many scholars, I'm pretty skeptical about the extent to which we can speak about Jesus of Nazareth, who he was, and what he did. But for me, what's really powerful about this is, in this earliest layer of tradition, people are characterizing him in this way, as this kind of, let's say, slavish figure. And that idea, that image of someone who, once you start thinking of it in that way, you read his interactions with people differently. As someone who sees other marginalized people, you start reading other characters in the story as also enslaved, and you see the extent to which he is speaking to them, interacting with them, offering things to them. Mark has always been my favorite gospel, and if you're in Sunday school, people tell you it's the human Jesus, because he feels and stuff. For me, though, he's not just human. It's not deity human. This is a person who's the most marginalized, the most vulnerable. And for me, I think that says a really powerful message about whom people who care about these texts think Jesus is, who they think the Bible is for, who they imagine themselves reading with when they read it. Some people are a little resistant to this. They like Christ the King kind of thing. Mm. There's nothing about Christian theology that's at odds with this specifically, the specific idea of a suffering God, and it is this particular kind of Jesus, the Jesus of Mark, that resonates with marginalized communities today.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It makes sense to me when we're thinking of the Jesus who says, "It's easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven." That's not the pronouncement of a person who was born into wealth or who appreciates wealth as a virtue. You know what I mean? It makes much more sense for that to be a pronouncement of someone who sides with, at least, the poor and the marginalized.

Candida Moss Yeah. Over and over again. It's the most consistent moral teaching of the New Testament. In a collection of texts that do not agree with one another on very much, they do agree about the perils of wealth, and that if you are very wealthy, you are in a very dangerous situation when it comes to your personal salvation.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And I am struck by, it seemed to me that one of the points of this book was to try to make a little more visible what is commonly invisible. I mentioned earlier, enslaved people were, in a sense, kind of a technology that people had, and just like we don't make explicit reference to the technologies that we use every day, there are not a lot of direct references to this. It's easy for these people to be dehumanized and to be treated as technology, which is a story that we see kind of throughout the Bible. You have ancient Israel being reminded, "Hey, you were enslaved in Egypt, so you were foreigners in a foreign land. You were all these things, so be kind to these people." And in the New Testament, we have this relationship is brought up once again in how we should be related to Jesus, enslaved to Jesus. Could you talk a little bit about how you're trying to bring the invisible, or make the invisible visible with this book?