Reading into the gaps
“Because certain scribal puns appear only in Galatians,” says Candida Moss, “we have to consider that they come from the secretary rather than Paul.”
You say in God’s Ghostwriters that your process as a historian involves reading into the gaps. You call it a form of history telling that is imaginative and not untrue. Why do you approach your subjects this way?
When I first became aware of enslaved literate workers, I wanted to try and figure out what they did, who they were, and what their lives were like. But our historical archive hasn’t preserved that information in detail.
Then I ran across the work of Saidiya Hartman, who talks about a responsible imaginative method of recounting history. For me, that meant protecting my subjects from the accusation that I’m just making everything up. So I read widely about the history of slavery, the history of people writing books, histories of labor, and the history of psychology. I looked at inscriptions and at manuscripts in libraries.
