Did enslaved people write the New Testament?

We refer routinely to “Paul’s Letter to the Philippians” or “the Gospel of Luke,” and most Christians today assume that Paul and Luke were the authors of these works. Countless paintings throughout history portray Paul in a small prison cell, quill in hand, carefully inking his thoughts by dim candlelight; or Luke posing with a large book while resting his arm on an ox, the ancient animal symbol of the Third Gospel. These are evocative and inspiring images, but they are often full of anachronisms. A more realistic picture of writing, document delivery, and reading from the ancient Roman world was far more mundane and excruciatingly laborious—and writing was almost never done alone. That’s where Candida Moss’s latest work comes in. God’s Ghostwriters sheds light on the contributions of the often uncredited and “invisible” workers who were everywhere in the Roman world: slaves.

Of the approximately 60 million inhabitants of the Roman Empire in the first century, scholars estimate that about a quarter of them were slaves, and they performed many of the tedious tasks in society. Moss’s meticulously researched and exquisitely written work makes the undeniable (but often unstated) case that there would be no New Testament without slave labor and slave expertise. There is a subtext running throughout God’s Ghostwriters that the early Christians were not unlike the rest of Roman society when it came to ownership and use of slaves.

Moss repeatedly notes that a slave need not be mentioned in the New Testament for slave contributions to be implied or assumed—from dictation to skill in copying to delivery and public reading. Even tasks that required education and professional skill were often performed by slaves, either because these “unfree” workers (as Moss often calls them) were highly educated before taken captive in war by Rome, or because they were bred and trained from a young age to develop skill (or face the consequences of incompetence).