Ep 49: Christian Slavery with Candida Moss

00:00I don't think anyone is well-served by pretending that Christianity isn't implicated in the

00:09history of slavery.

00:11There are texts within the New Testament that can be used and hopefully should be used

00:16for liberatory goals, but the fact of the matter is if you read the Bible as happened

00:22during abolitionist debates, the pro-slavery group have it, and you have to work really,

00:28hard to ignore a lot of evidence to say that it's an anti-slavery text.

00:35Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

00:39And I'm Dan Beacher.

00:41And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to

00:45the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation.

00:51About the same.

00:52How are things, Dan Beacher?

00:53Oh man, things are great, there's fun things afoot.

00:58I'm actually really looking forward to our interview today.

01:01We've got some interesting stuff to talk about today.

01:05Me too.

01:06And you just returned from your annual pilgrimage.

01:11I don't know if you do it every year, but you went to Mardi Gras.

01:15This is actually my first time going.

01:18First time.

01:19Okay.

01:20Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

01:21Okay.

01:22Are you giving up for Lent?

01:24Mardi Gras.

01:25Mardi Gras.

01:26Okay.

01:27It's a Mardi Gras for Lent.

01:28That's wise.

01:29It went away anyway.

01:30There was no more to be had, so it was fine.

01:34Right.

01:35Well, let's introduce our awesome guest.

01:38Yes, today we have Dr. Candida Moss with us.

01:42Welcome to the show, Candida.

01:45And Dr. Moss, or Professor Moss, is the Cadbury Professor of Theology at Birmingham University,

01:52not Birmingham, but Birmingham.

01:55And she's also the CBS papal news correspondent, who every time the Pope does something globally

02:03noteworthy, she's called out to go comment on it.

02:07Welcome to the show, Candida.

02:09We're very happy to have you here.

02:10Thanks so much for having me.

02:13And I remember the first time we met, and I think you do too, was when you came out to

02:18Utah to come speak at a little conference that was being held at BYU with some folks

02:24like James Kugel and Pete N's and some others.

02:29And I picked you up from the airport, and I thought it would be funny if I held a sign

02:33with your name on it.

02:35So I printed one out in Greek.

02:39And the first thing you did, and you thought it was hilarious and you had to get a picture,

02:43but then you immediately pointed out that I had the accent wrong, which is what I was

02:49terrified was going to happen.

02:51And I was like, I got a hurry, and I couldn't find a video on YouTube of somebody pronouncing

02:55your name that I could be confident was correct.

02:59So I accentuated the word as the name as if it was pronounced Candida, which is how

03:06I had always heard it.

03:07So I still feel bad about that.

03:09Nevertheless, #nerdjokes, well done.

03:13I feel bad about even bringing it up.

03:15I just thought, well, this pronounces my name, and I didn't even really notice.

03:20So I can't believe I did that.

03:22That was very happening.

03:24No, no, no, no.

03:27And you have a book that's coming out on March 26, and it is entitled "God's Ghost Riders,

03:35Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible."

03:40And we're here to talk about this book.

03:43Dan and I have had copies for a bit and have been hopefully reading through them.

03:48We're very excited.

03:49Don't have to be hopeful if you know that you've actually read it, Dan.

03:53Well, I'm not talking about just me, but you're throwing me under it.

03:59Yeah.

04:00Well, you've been busy.

04:01No, I've been reading the book.

04:02It's actually a really fun read.

04:04And actually, so frankly, I went into it with a misapprehension because I went into the

04:11book believing that this was a book about sort of this thing that I've heard plenty about,

04:17which is the enslavement of Christians by say the Romans or by, you know, you hear a

04:24lot about sort of historical enslavement of Christians by other groups.

04:30I think what I had not anticipated was that that's not really what this book is about.

04:35Yeah.

04:36Not at all.

04:37Yeah.

04:38So talk to us a bit about what you're actually exploring in this book and what prompted you

04:46to tackle this subject.

04:50Yeah.

04:51So the book is really about who is responsible for the Bible behold in our hands today.

04:59It's really in lots of ways to talk about labor.

05:02And for me, it was sparked by the fact that about six years ago now, I needed these for

05:08the first time.

05:09These are reading glasses.

05:10I don't actually really need them for this, but if I was reading, I would need them.

05:16And I've written on disability before and I was like, how would I have done this in antiquity?

05:20Would this be the end of my career?

05:24And so I decided to look into it and it became very clear to me that at the point at which

05:28you would need glasses, which might be your whole life, you would need you someone else

05:33to read them right and for Romans, for ancient Greeks, for ancient Jews, for early Christians,

05:39those were enslaved people.

05:42And the more you dug into it, the more widespread this practice became.

05:47And I began to realize this is actually just how people read and wrote in antiquity.

05:52They just use other people for a lot of reasons, it kind of hurts to write for long periods

05:59of time copying a text.

06:03Just enormously cumbersome for someone.

06:06And we sort of knew about them with respect to early Christianity, but it was the kind

06:12of thing I was supposed to be writing a different kind of book or something else entirely.

06:16But I was like a dog with a bone.

06:19As you start noticing this, you just can't let it go and it sort of changes the way you

06:23think about so many things from how the authors of the New Testament were writing to who was

06:30reading texts allowed to, who were the actual missionaries?

06:36And then just like, how do you read this story?

06:39How do you read this collection of texts?

06:41Yeah, you opened early in the book, you told the story of a little sort of almost side note

06:50in I believe it was in Paul's epistle to the Romans, where there's like, we believe that

06:58Paul wrote that.

07:00But then there's this little other thing that's like, it's this little hello in the middle

07:04of it that I wouldn't have made any sense to me if I read it and didn't have your comment

07:11on it.

07:12Talk about that a little bit.

07:13Yeah, so in Romans, which we generally think of as this kind of magnum opus, at the end

07:19in chapter 16, tucked into that chapter, this person, Tercia, says, "I, Tercia, is

07:27who wrote this letter?"

07:29And that's Paul's secretary.

07:31And this is the only one of Paul's secretaries that we have a name for.

07:36And it is what in antiquity would have been considered to be a slavish name.

07:42And he said he greets the church in Rome.

07:46And in other letters of Paul, Paul kind of eludes to the fact that he wasn't writing.

07:50Like he points out what he wrote in his own hand in Galatians, for example.

07:56And when you look at that, you're like, wow, someone else wrote this down.

08:02And I knew that, I sort of knew that, I'm a New Testament scholar.

08:06And I had read people commenting on it.

08:09And they had sort of dismissed this and said, oh, well, you know, he's just a secretary.

08:15Just taking dictation of word for word copying it down is the idea.

08:19Yeah.

08:20And I have to say, like, first off, as someone who's done fairly low state of clerical work,

08:25there's no such thing as just a secretary.

08:28And in fact, you know, like all studies of book work from the medieval period to black

08:35pressmen and the American South to the mid 20th century will tell you that anyone who's

08:41doing this kind of work is actually doing sort of real creative work.

08:45I have a friend who's a provost and her administrative assistant regularly writes emails from her

08:51in her voice.

08:52Yeah.

08:53Yeah.

08:54And then there's this issue of shorthand and it's funny because when I mentioned this before

09:01people online, they're like, they don't have shorthand in the ancient world.

09:04I'm going to make no, no, they do.

09:07We have we have contracts for children who are enslaved to being a parentist to shorthand

09:13experts.

09:14What's different about it in antiquity is that elites can't do it.

09:19It's like a code.

09:21And so if you're dictating, someone is translating what you're saying into symbols.

09:27And as a very personalized system, you would sort of adapt the shorthand symbols to your

09:32needs as a shorthand writer.

09:34It's not standardized the way it was in the 19th, 20th century.

09:39And then you later on have to expand it because it's your special system.

09:44There are some kind of individual styles.

09:47But what that means is, let's say we picture Paul dictating Romans, it's a pretty long

09:52weather.

09:53Let's face it.

09:54All in one go.

09:55Tertius writes it down.

09:57Paul could not take up what Tertius had written down and read it himself.

10:03And only Tertius can then expand it into the letter.

10:06And as he does that, and it's a pretty kind of, it's sort of rough in comparison to modern

10:13shorthand.

10:14So remember, as he expanded what exactly he meant, there's a lot of duplication.

10:18There aren't that many symbols.

10:20And as he did that, he would have edited the text because that's his job.

10:25His job is to make Paul sound better.

10:29And so Roman secretaries, secretaries in the Roman Mediterranean, they are deeply involved

10:37in that process.

10:38They're not kind of fungible workers.

10:41You can't just swap them out, and they are editing as they go.

10:46And people sometimes say to me, oh, well, you know, it's really, it's really Paul.

10:50They just, they just fixed typos.

10:52Can you imagine if there was a typo?

10:56How important that would be theologically, like when you think about how Christians read

11:00the New Testament, we're not casual about it.

11:03Right.

11:04You know, we're like, this preposition means this and therefore Protestantism.

11:08So it's, it's, you know, even if people are going to say these are small changes, which

11:15I'm not sure they always are, but even someone was going to say these are small changes.

11:19That has huge consequences for what people hear in church on Sundays.

11:24Right.

11:25And a lot of times when we're reading the text, we're kind of imagining we're getting the

11:30thoughts and the words directly from the author, the idea that somebody is mediating this to

11:35us, providing a separate perspective and probably a additional education, they may be the one

11:42to say, oh, if you use this phrase, you know, this is from this author over here, and that

11:49would resonate with this over here.

11:51And you have somebody who's pulling things together, who's probably adding a significant

11:57layer of intertextuality, allusivity with other literature.

12:02And so we don't think about that, though, when we're reading Paul, we think, ah, this,

12:07this tastes like, like Paul's language, but probably a significant portion of it is coming

12:14from the person who's mediating it.

12:17That's right.

12:18Because the, these kinds of literate workers are really well trained.

12:22They've been educated.

12:23They learned Homer too.

12:25They, they have a sort of similar education initially to an elite author.

12:29So they are able to kind of improve the style, improve the rhetorical images, perhaps give

12:35input and ideas and, you know, give some examples of this in my book.

12:41But I think we should think of these kinds of secretaries and editorial figures as making

12:46the texts better.

12:49And normally when we talk about kind of secondary figures, we normally talk about copies, we

12:54normally blame them for stuff, you know, so there's a bunch of New Testament scholars

12:59who have blamed Tertius for their inability to read Romans.

13:03They're like, well, these verses are out of order, that's Tertius's fault.

13:07I'm going to reorganize them.

13:09And then that's going to make sense to me.

13:12And that's, that's sort of not how we should be thinking about this.

13:17I think we should be saying this as a collaborative writing project.

13:21And we may not be able to pull apart who did what.

13:24But that doesn't mean we should default to it's all Paul or it's all the evangelist.

13:29And I think one of your chapters, you talk a little bit about how this influences the

13:36way we reconstruct Jesus in our minds, because when we cast our minds back, there are a lot

13:42of gaps that we have to fill in.

13:44And we usually just intuitively without even thinking about it, we fill in those gaps with

13:49things that are familiar to us.

13:51And that is, is one of the biggest problems with trying to reconstruct the ancient world

13:55is we assume there's a lot that is familiar to us and we can just fill it in.

14:00And the reality is it's very different and you describe an early Christian world that

14:05is very, very different from what we think of today.

14:07We have technology all around us that helps us, that aids us to do what we either don't

14:13want to do, can't do or can't do quickly enough.

14:16And the ancient world enslaved people were, to some degree, a technology that was available

14:22to those who who had the means.

14:26But what does this mean about how we, and you talk about the gospel of Mark, what does

14:30this mean about how we reconstruct the picture of the gospel of Mark?

14:36It's composition, how it's talking about Jesus.

14:39Yeah.

14:41So the gospel of Mark, like Allah, our first life of Jesus, and you're right, as his story

14:46ends, I think, anyone who goes to seminary or graduate school, or even if they do an

14:50undergraduate degree and they major in religious studies, you're told, you have to kind of

14:54think your way back into the world that these people live in, their historical perspectives.

15:00And we always say, well, you know, the experiences of the author are important.

15:04What does this mean to a second temple of Jewish person?

15:08That's how we understand what scripture means as scholars.

15:12And when you read the gospel of Mark, and you encounter Jesus who pops out, out of nowhere.

15:21And when I picture Jesus, I picture like an artisanal carpenter, you know, making like

15:27a really nice chair.

15:29And the reason for that is I went to Sunday school.

15:32But that's not what the Greek says.

15:33The Greek says he's a 10th time, which could be an artisanal carpenter, but also might

15:39be a construction worker.

15:40And if I see he's a construction worker, I am picturing something completely different.

15:47And it's still actually highly skilled work.

15:50But in antiquity, it's viewed quite particularly because it's sort of a low status work.

15:56No one wants to end up doing construction markets hard.

15:58You get injured.

15:59If you get injured, you likely die.

16:01And so you have this construction worker.

16:03He is not in the gospel of Mark, the son of a construction worker.

16:09He's just the son of Mary.

16:11There is no mention of a human father in Mark.

16:14That is such a weird gap.

16:16And it's really hard, you know, if you've ever been in the church to not picture Joseph

16:22here.

16:24And I don't think it's that the author of the gospel of Mark thinks he doesn't, that

16:28there wasn't a father there, but it's not mentioned.

16:31And most scholars will tell you that the gospel of Mark is written around 70, just sort of

16:37the destruction of the temple, the first Jewish war, a lot of enslaved Jews, a lot of trauma.

16:45And a lot of women without any kind of support, a lot of widows, a lot of women driven into

16:51sex work by the predicament of that war.

16:54And so when you think about Jesus, no named father, that makes him sound like them.

17:01Potentially like his mother was enslaved, potentially like maybe she had been a sex worker, which

17:06is not what Mark is saying.

17:08It's a gap that Mark leaves for us to make this text speak to us.

17:13And then he wanders around speaking in what we call parables, which are just fables.

17:20And the most famous fabulous ever is Esau, who also was enslaved, also was disliked by

17:28people from his own town and also died of horrible death.

17:32And then you get to the crucifixion and I grew up learning that crucifixion was a punishment

17:39for slaves and for traitors.

17:42And then we all talk about the historical circumstances that would lead people to see

17:46Jesus as a rebel.

17:47And that's certainly, that is a good thing to do to consider that.

17:52But at the same time, imagine that just so many people, including the person collaborating

17:56on this text, this was a punishment for enslaved people.

18:00And you have this figure who, as you read it, he has these slavish undertones to the way

18:08that he's characterized throughout, from the moment we meet him, when he doesn't have

18:12a father, and he gets adopted by God, to the way that he preaches, to even the way he walks.

18:20So there's this weird thing in Mark, the geography's all wrong, all wrong.

18:25It's one of the reasons some scholars will tell you, oh, this could not have been written

18:28anywhere near this region of the world.

18:31This is a bizarre, it's like walking from say South Bend, Indiana, by going over the

18:35top of the lake to go to Chicago.

18:38There's a highway right there, Jessica.

18:41So but in an ancient context, that's meandering, he meanders, and that's a slavish way of walking.

18:49And you can see why, because he is going to die, and I would probably take my time, too.

18:56And then, the way he dies is not very heroic in Mark, but it's a way that would have spoken

19:02to people, to people who would experience the trauma of war, to people who had seen, had

19:09either themselves or had seen other people who were enslaved or low status mistreated

19:15physically.

19:16So I think once you start to think about an enslaved collaborator on this text, you start

19:22to read stories differently, places where you would imagine a friend doing something.

19:28You have to ask yourself, isn't this a person, a friend, or maybe they're enslaved, or places

19:33where you see an English servant, you always have to ask yourself, does it say servant

19:39in Greek, or does it say slave?

19:43Because there's a whole tradition of erasing slavery from high status Christian figures.

19:50And we have not the erasure, but the actual composition of a background for Jesus and

19:56the Gospels that come later, which may not even be contemporary with the composition

20:01of those Gospels themselves.

20:03But this is something that comes up a lot when I'm talking with people about the historical

20:08Jesus.

20:09This is Jesus of Nazareth.

20:13He's not presented as anything other than somebody who was probably born and raised in

20:17Nazareth in the earliest Gospel.

20:21It's the others that have to kind of renegotiate his background to move away from what seemed

20:28to be rather humble, maybe even too humble for their liking beginnings for this Jesus.

20:36Now in your book, you also talk about how there may be humble beginnings for the author

20:42of the Gospel of Mark as well.

20:45This is something I catch a lot of flack for on social media when I talk about the original

20:50anonymity of the Gospels and how they probably had the traditional authorship assigned to

20:58them in the second century somewhere.

21:01But we may, even with some of the mid-second century references like Papius and others,

21:09we may be constructing kind of an artificial author there in Mark.

21:15What did you find out about who, quote unquote, "Mark" might be based on this new framework

21:21for understanding the composition and the circulation of the Gospel?

21:26Yeah.

21:27So let's just start by saying I completely agree with you.

21:30These were anonymous texts, right?

21:32They are anonymous texts that get titles.

21:35And so when I'm talking about Mark, I'm talking about someone calls this text Mark and in

21:40the early century, early second century, Papius does that, refers to a text called Mark, may

21:46not be identical to the text we have, but he refers to a guy called Mark who was the

21:52home in Newtaste, the interpreter or the translator of Peter, who wrote down things.

21:59Somewhat haphazardly is the implication, not, it's not the best writing, but as much as

22:07he could remember.

22:10Now there is an argument that when Papius says not in order that the idea is that it's

22:15not following literary conventions regarding structure and flow.

22:22Is that something that you think is worth keeping in mind or do you think that is an

22:27attempt to apologize for the connection of Papius's Mark with our Mark?

22:35Yeah, that's a good question.

22:38I think Papius is certainly apologizing for the text.

22:42It's not Cicero or Homer or Luke, not that I'm sure Papius quite knows about Luke as

22:52we know about Luke, but it's certainly not Luke, which it claims to be in order.

22:57But the relationship between Peter and Mark is one of subservience.

23:04Mark is taking down dictation from Peter, and why would that, what is that doing for

23:11Papius, claiming this?

23:12Well, he's claiming an apostolic pedigree, and he's presenting Mark as performing a very

23:17servile role, if you go look at all of the pathological evidence for who does translation

23:23work.

23:24It's unless you're in the military, and even then sometimes, you're talking about inside

23:29your formerly enslaved people, people who used to speak a different language that have

23:33been brought elsewhere.

23:37I learned some languages in school, but I don't really remember.

23:40So even if you're an elite and you studied Greek, but you speak, you mostly work in Latin,

23:49that doesn't mean that you're really comfortable reading and writing and translating Greek.

23:55So Mark is being positioned as a figure who's helping Peter communicate with other people,

24:01because Peter doesn't seem like the sharpest tool in the box, and his Greek is not going

24:05to be Mark's Greek.

24:07PPS is presenting Mark in this way because there is this idea in antiquity that people

24:13still have today that secretaries, interpreters, these kinds of workers, they're mindless.

24:20They're just kind of faithful translators.

24:23They don't really have agency.

24:25And so PPS is trying to say you can trust that this really comes from Peter, because Mark

24:30is a translator taking dictation.

24:33And Romans think of enslaved workers as mindless as body parts.

24:39That's why we so really hear about them.

24:42And we shouldn't believe that.

24:45Of course they're real people.

24:48But PPS is trying to harm us that argument to say you can trust this text.

24:53It really goes back to Peter ultimately.

24:57And around the time PPS is writing, there's a lot of concern among elite Romans that I

25:01want to get a manuscript.

25:03So let's say the gospel of the two dance, I want the gospel of the two dance and going

25:08to a Roman bookshop, I want to know I have the right gospel.

25:13Yeah, but seeing that the person who wrote down the gospel of the two dance was your

25:20editor, would really reassure me, I'd be like, oh, is your editor who wrote this down?

25:25I feel better about this.

25:27And that is what PPS is saying about Mark.

25:30He's saying that Mark is someone very close to Peter, someone who can be trusted, someone

25:35who does this kind of faithful recording.

25:39But it's not an accurate depiction of who Mark is.

25:41And it's a rare sighting of an enslaved literate walker.

25:51Now in one of the chapters, you start by telling a story about an enslaved reader reviewing

25:56a copy of the gospel now called Mark, and I enjoyed getting to kind of close my eyes

26:05and that stopped me from reading for a bit.

26:08But I read and then close my eyes about this scenario that you paint.

26:14I thought it was instructive to think about the utility of the gospel this way.

26:20Did you talk about the narrative that you paint at the beginning of chapter six in your

26:29book?

26:30Yeah, so one of the things that we know about New Testament text is that they were performed

26:36aloud by readers.

26:38And because of how manuscripts were, you had a prepare, they sort of often weren't breaks

26:44between words or accents or emphasis, so you'd be very familiar with the physical manuscript

26:51to perform it.

26:52This is like a highly skilled role and it involves a lot of forebought.

26:58And so what I try to imagine was the ending of the gospel of Mark.

27:01And if you just open any kind of sort of critical Bible, you'll know that there are separate

27:06endings at the end, at the end of Mark.

27:09And what I wanted to imagine was how did the ending of Mark come about?

27:14And they're all kinds of scholarly imaginings out there already, but what I want to think

27:18of that was performing the text.

27:21And this reader I imagine called Felix, who's preparing to read this at a sort of dinner

27:25party event, which happened, people performed texts.

27:29You kind of have hand gestures, there's obviously tonal voices really important.

27:36You can use gesture to the environment around you to sort of produce a particular kind of

27:41reading.

27:43And then Felix knows he's going to come to the ending of the gospel of Mark.

27:47And the original ending is very underwhelming.

27:53And yeah, you said, you pointed out that it just ends with the, what was the word?

28:00Gar.

28:01Gar, the word for, which is, you know, it's like ending a sentence with a preposition as

28:07a little bit of that, but is this how you, this is how you end a gospel.

28:13And this is, and to be more specific, this is when they show up at the tomb, it's empty

28:18and the word order in Greek is a lot more flexible.

28:23But basically it's saying they ran away, they didn't tell anybody because they were

28:27afraid and seen and that's, and that's your gospel of Mark.

28:32Yeah, and Felix has to perform this for a group of people, you know, probably his

28:38enslaver wants us to be a successful event.

28:40And Felix has read that even if he does his best job, it's, it's not going to come across

28:46well because people are going to look at him and they'll be like, and then what?

28:51You know, they ran, they ran, and then what?

28:53Because it doesn't sound like the end of a book.

28:57So what I imagine is that Felix has heard other gospels, you know, stories circulating

29:01and he decides to sort of like bring a few together to kind of like round it out nicely

29:06and produce a sort of more satisfying conclusion to his performance that night.

29:13And at that event, we might imagine as regularly happened, someone else had bought an enslaved

29:19notary with them to take it down in shorthand.

29:23And that notorious, that shorthand writer has now taken down Felix's version and they're

29:29going to copy it up later onto papyrus and ink.

29:34And between them, these two people have now produced a new version of the Gospel of Mark.

29:40And this would have happened in small ways all the time, right?

29:43You skip a line.

29:45I know there have been times that I've been reading to my kids and I want them to go to

29:49bed and I'll try and skip a page if I care, you know, and in order to do that, and there

29:55will be all kinds of time pressures and things, you know, like Christiana too, and in order

29:59to do that, I have to kind of make up a sentence to connect it to wherever I plan to pick up.

30:05And so we can imagine that there will be places both deliberate like that and not deliberate

30:10where people would have slightly flexibly altered the meaning of the Gospel through performance

30:17and that then might become enshrined in a manuscript.

30:22And I'm sure some people are thinking, wow, she just made that up and they have all kinds

30:27of ancient evidence for thinking that happened.

30:29All I'd like to point out is that other explanations for the ending of Mark often are also making

30:36things up.

30:37Yeah.

30:38So there's one, there's one explanation, there's a scholarship, I'm wondering where Mark is

30:44sitting there and he's writing it and he just finishes that sentence and he gets arrested

30:49and thought, whatever reason, it's not clear and he gets arrested and taken off somewhere

30:54and then released.

30:56And someone had taken the manuscript and then he only gets to add in the next ending later

31:01on.

31:02And I mean, maybe, but we don't have any evidence of it.

31:09Yeah, that sounds like we're, we're ginning up a scenario that's not an evidence so that

31:13we can protect Mark and authorship of the end rather than have to conclude that someone

31:19else came in later and it does seem like maybe they have an agenda and a little bit.

31:25Yeah.

31:26Yeah.

31:27And I think it's funny because we're always like, when we're talking about people changing

31:33scripture, we always imagine they have a theological agenda, they're deeply invested.

31:38What if they just say, as we, as regularly happened with copious, what if they just want

31:43to be done for the day, what if they're just entertaining themselves, there are some amazing

31:49examples of people entertaining themselves in kind of modern book work that you know

31:56that if Bible scholars were pouring over this, they would assume that one person who varied

32:01how they spell the word or how they wrote out 90%, like sometimes in letters, sometimes

32:0790% sometimes 90% space percent written out in letters that if I saw that as a Bible scholar,

32:15I'd be like, we have three different people because 90% is written differently.

32:19And they, when they interviewed, they're like, I was just bored, I needed to entertain myself.

32:24And so what I want to try and imagine is other things that affected this text that we never

32:30think about, just real world things.

32:32I think it might, I'm just going to sort of take a broader view of this and step a bit

32:39away from the book just to say, I think it might surprise a lot of people.

32:44This notion that the Bible itself, not only does it, I mean, Dan can attest to how many

32:54people on the internet spend countless hours in apologetics trying to claim that Jesus

33:03doesn't condone slavery and that slavery isn't there in the New Testament or whatever.

33:12I think it would surprise people to know that like Christians used slaves in the creation

33:17of the Bible.

33:18Did, have you, like the impact of that feels like, like it might be pretty big for a lot

33:25of people who are trying to reconcile their view of what, what the message of Christianity

33:34might be with, with that idea.

33:37Can you talk a little about that?

33:39Yeah, I don't, I don't think anyone is well served by pretending that Christianity isn't

33:47implicated in the history of slavery and that the Bible wasn't used in fact to defend slave

33:55holding in this country, in America, I don't think anyone's well served by that.

33:59And you know, I know, I know what you're talking about.

34:03When I was talking to publishers about this book, there was one publisher I spoke to who

34:08was a sort of former evangelical now more modern Christian and we spoke about it is that you

34:13can't prove this.

34:14You can't prove they existed or they did things that say, oh, I can prove that and here's

34:19the evidence.

34:20And finally, he came to his point because I know a lot of people will struggle with this,

34:23the idea that Christians used enslaved workers, um, funny he came to his point, which is why

34:32do we have to keep talking about, you know, Christians having slaves?

34:38Why can't we talk about all the good things Christianity has done for slaves?

34:44And there was, there was a handpost, um, you know, um, there are texts within the New Testament

34:53that can be used and hopefully should be used for liberatory goals.

34:59But the fact of the matter is, if you read the Bible as happened during abolitionist debates,

35:04the pro-slavery group have it, you know, they have the evidence and you have to work

35:11really, really hard, really hard and ignore a lot of evidence to say that it's an anti-slavery

35:18text.

35:19And the number of stories that Jesus alone tells that use violence against enslaved people

35:26as a key plot device, you know, this is, this is not a text that, that we should pretend

35:34isn't implicated in that world.

35:37And the fact that enslaved workers are involved in it, doesn't mean that we're like, okay,

35:41we're all square, it's both enslavers and enslaved people figured, um, it should cause

35:47us to think and reflect more on the ways in which Christianity has been involved in slave

35:53holding in the way in which Christian texts have been used to support that.

35:57And I think more about how we might push back against that, um, it's work, um, it's a lot

36:05of work if you want to use Christian texts, it's very easy if you just care about basic

36:09ethics and human rights.

36:12So, um, but I think that's a thing that people should think about, um, if they are Christian

36:18and if they're not Christian, I think it is relevant to the history of the modern world

36:25to know how, um, powerful religious groups have been, um, involved in this process.

36:33I think one of the things that people have sometimes said to me online is like, well,

36:37you know, in medieval Islamic countries, they enslaved people too.

36:44They were, um, castry young boys and isn't that terrible Christians who could do that

36:49in the medieval period.

36:51I mean, this, it is true that, um, enslaved unics were not used at the court of, of kings

37:01and quite in European countries in quite the same way.

37:04But the fact of the matter is that almost all of the enslaved children from Africa who

37:09were funneled into those countries, um, that surgery was actually performed at a particular

37:14Christian monastery in Egypt.

37:16So we're talking about monks performing a surgery that had a mortality rate of 30%.

37:22Wow.

37:23Um, so definitely that should give, I think, people pause.

37:27Um, that's the kind of thing that we shouldn't know, not so much as like a sort of self-flagellation

37:34or something, but just because, um, I don't think there's, they can beat honest history

37:38um, without confronting these truths.

37:41That was probably much longer than you wanted.

37:44No, this is, this is exactly, I mean, this is a very important moment in, in American

37:50history right now because we, we're starting to see people moving against the idea of,

37:58uh, honest history and, and looking at the harder parts of history.

38:03We see a lot of, we see a lot of, uh, you know, state legislators who don't want books in

38:09libraries that would make people feel bad about their own, about the, you know, about

38:15their own people or whatever.

38:17And I think you have now given them a yet another book to ban if you're not careful.

38:24I think it'd be a good company.

38:25Yeah.

38:26Yeah.

38:27One of my, uh, when I moved my family out to, uh, to Oxford in 2009, I remember being in

38:33a bookstore one time and finding, uh, series called, and you know, I'm, I have no doubt

38:38you know about this series, horrible histories, um, which is, I, I enjoyed it because I, I

38:44mean, yeah, and I, and I love the artwork.

38:48I, I think the, um, the main, whoever it is, they have doing the, the artwork is incredibly

38:53talented, but it's basically the warts and all history where it's depicting all the things

38:58that are considered, um, you know, gross, uh, violence, uh, inappropriate stuff like that.

39:07And it does it in a, in a, in a frank and, um, very classy way, but, um, you, you mentioned

39:14in the book that, that Christianity was characterized by some of the early, um, non-Christian writers

39:19as for women and slaves, which made me think of, um, two of the earliest, uh, Christians

39:27that we ever hear of in the non-biblical non-Christian literature, uh, uh, plenty's story about

39:33coming across some Christians and he's writing, uh, to the emperor and saying, hey, I don't

39:38know what to do with these, with these Christians, I just, uh, there were two, uh, women who

39:44were slaves and so I, uh, I tortured them and, uh, to get more information from them because

39:50then that was, that was the only way you could, um, that was the only way you could trust the

39:56testimony of a slave was if that testimony had been extracted through torture, uh, and

40:02then he executes them and, uh, and then goes on and say, I, I said if you, you know, if

40:08you'll, um, denounce Christianity or whatever, uh, you can go otherwise I got to kill you

40:14and, and the emperor is like, yeah, you've done good kid, um, so the, some of the earliest

40:20witnesses we have to Christianity highlight the, um, that Christians were frequently women

40:26and slaves, uh, which then in, uh, in later history, um, kind of is, I don't know if it

40:34is intentionally obscured, but, but the way Christianity is represented changes significantly.

40:39Yeah, that's right. And it's not just the plenty of tragic correspondence, which you

40:45referenced, although if you look at modern English translations of that, they're described

40:50as deaconesses. You almost like don't know they're enslaved, even, even in the, in classics,

40:58sometimes you'll see that that's bizarre. How did they stop being enslaved household servants

41:04and start being, you know, the sort of religious role? Um, and that's part of the kind of obfuscation

41:12of early Christian status. The fact that Romans say that Christianity is religion for slaves

41:19and women, it does obviously a slah, but there's a lot of data to suggest that that's true.

41:26We have references to other enslaved people. And when you look at sort of the names of

41:32the people who brought say a text like first climate, which is purportedly by climate of

41:36Rome, and it's sent to a church in Corinth. When you look at their names, their names are

41:42as slave names, fortune artists, like just lucky, you know, sort of, um, apofrotitus,

41:52you know, the most common name for enslaved people. And, and you see them all over the

41:58place, our first portrait of Jesus, and it is a caricature making fun of another enslaved

42:04child, but it's from a school room for enslaved children. That's our first portrait of Jesus.

42:12And the person, the child who made it is making fun of a Christian child who's there. And,

42:17you know, sometimes people want to say, Oh, well, this is persecution. And we can know

42:21this, this is playground bullying, um, at worst. And if you look at the other graffiti

42:27there, you're like, Oh, these kids are horrible to each other. And so that's not inconsequential

42:34that kind of data. And you can see why Christianity appeals to people. It's sort of beyond the

42:44sort of like the promise of sort of equality before God and heavenly rewards and punishment

42:51in a slave person for everyone who had treated them poorly. This is a religion about someone

42:57who had died at the death of an enslaved person who was apparently a God who took on according

43:02to full the form of a slave. There's a lot there for you. And you can see why it would

43:09appeal to people from those kinds of backgrounds. And Paul is repeatedly characterizing the

43:14ideal relationship between the Christian and Jesus as one of enslaved. Yeah, we don't

43:20take that seriously. And you're talking about the Alexa Menos graffiti corrects with this

43:35early playground bullying. And there's an Alexa Menos is mentioned in another room. Isn't

43:41there another graffiti where it says Alexa Menos is faithful or something like that?

43:45There are some people doubt the historicity of that particular graffiti. And this is like

43:52a problem with things that were discovered between the 17th century and the 19th century

43:58in Rome. It was a very pious period of archaeological excavation. But there are all kinds of reasons

44:08to sort of link this image, this idea of fidelity specifically with enslaved people, my classicist

44:16who reviewed all of the kind of funerary monuments, but formerly enslaved people for

44:21freedom. Revealed that being faithful, you know, we, the Latin D days, the Greek pisters,

44:31the language that we today hear as faith, you know, belief in Jesus, which at the time

44:36meant more sort of loyal. That's one of the most common words to find on a tombstone for

44:45an enslaved or familiar slave person that they were faithful. And we don't hear that anymore

44:51when we read the Bible. I hear Luther instead. But we should hear this. We should hear echoes

44:58of slavish virtues. You know, you mentioned that graffiti, though, you have a line drawing

45:04in your book of it that seems really good. It was done. I feel like whoever you got to

45:10do that, man, that was done. Yeah, I would I would even recommend him. Yeah. Dan, I'm

45:19going to specify Dan Collins. Thank you so much for doing this. Yeah, well, I was glad

45:24to be able to help. And I'm I hope I get a better version of this book where the images

45:31come through. I can't figure that out. But I was I was pleased to I was I was flipping

45:40through the book one day and I saw my last name on one page and I was like, what the?

45:44And then I was like, Oh, yeah, this is the book that those illustrations were for. Wonderful.

45:49And the Alexa Menos graffiti. If anybody doesn't know, this is where Jesus is pictured hanging

45:53on the cross with the head of an ass. And then Alexa Menos, whose face is drawn very carefully.

46:00It's a it's very skilled drawing is is kneeling before the cross and it says Alexa Menos worship

46:08surfers is or God. And so it's it's a pretty sick burn. And I think probably the second

46:17earliest artistic depiction of crucifixion that we have, I think there's another one from

46:24outside of Rome that is a little bit earlier, but a pretty, pretty important artifact in

46:32its own right. In addition to what it tells us about, about schoolyard bullying in the

46:41end of second or the beginning of third century room. Yeah, and that donkey hat is also that's

46:47not some kind of odd coincidence. A lot of people were talking about Jesus in that way

46:52because donkeys were associated with slavery. And so it is sort of implying you stupid child

47:01worshiping a God who was crucified. And it's clearly a slave. That's clearly a depiction

47:05of Jesus in his way. No, what is it? What does it change for you in terms of how you see Jesus

47:14as a figure? Because yeah, you mentioned it earlier, but but it feels like that is a very

47:23different view of Jesus. And if Jesus, if we think of Jesus as an enslaved person or or

47:30or at least sort of in the position, maybe even a figurative position of the enslaved

47:37person, what does that change for you in terms of how we should be interpreting his message?

47:43Yeah, so for me, they're all kinds of like small, you know, historian, Bible scholar,

47:50little things that I'm like, Oh, that makes much more sense to me. I think like many scholars,

47:55I'm pretty skeptical about the extent to which we can speak about Jesus of Nazareth,

48:00who he was and what he did. But for me, what's really powerful about this is in this earliest

48:07mayor of tradition, people are characterizing him in this way as this kind of, let's say,

48:17slavish figure. And that idea, that image of someone who once once you start thinking

48:25of it in that way, you read his interactions with people differently. As someone who sees

48:32other marginalized people, you start reading other characters in the story as also enslaved.

48:42And you see the extent to which he is speaking to them, interacting with them, offering things

48:47to them. Mark has always been my favorite gospel. And, you know, if you're in Sunday

48:53school, people will tell you it's the human Jesus, you know, he feels and stuff. The me

49:00though, he's not he's not just human. It's not deity human. This is a person is the most

49:07marginalized, the most vulnerable. And for me, I think that says a really powerful message

49:14about whom people care about these texts. Think Jesus is who they think who they think the

49:20Bible is for who they imagine themselves reading with when they read it. Um, some people a

49:29little resistant to this. They like, they like Christ, the king kind of thing. Um, there's

49:36nothing about Christian theology that's sort of at odds with this specifically, the specific

49:42idea of a, of a suffering God. And it is this particular kind of Jesus, the Jesus of Mark

49:48that resonates with marginalized communities today. Yeah, it makes sense to me when, you

49:55know, when, when we're thinking of the Jesus who says, you know, it's easier for a camel

50:00to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven. That's, that's

50:04not, that's not the, that's not the, that's not the pronouncement of a person who was born

50:09into wealth or who is, or who, or who appreciates wealth as a, as a virtue, you know what I mean?

50:14This is, it makes much more sense for that to be a pronouncement of a, of, of someone who,

50:20who under, who sides with at least the poor and the marginalized. Yeah. Over and over again.

50:28I mean, it's the most consistent moral teaching of the New Testament and the collection of

50:32texts that do not agree with one another on very much. They do agree with, they do agree

50:37about the perils of wealth and that if you are very wealthy, you are already very dangerous

50:43situation when it comes to your personal salvation. Yeah. And a lot of the, I am struck by, it

50:53seemed to me that one of the points of this book was to try to make a little more visible

50:56what is commonly invisible. I mentioned earlier, slave people were in a sense kind of a technology

51:04that that people had. And just like we don't make explicit reference to the technologies

51:09that we use every day. There are not a lot of direct references to this. It's easy for

51:14these things to, for these people to be dehumanized and to be treated as technology, which is

51:22a story that we see kind of throughout the Bible, you have ancient Israel being reminded,

51:28Hey, you were slave enslaved in Egypt. So you were foreigners in a foreign land. You

51:35were all these things. So be kind to these people. And we in the New Testament, we have

51:41this relationship is is brought up once again and how we should be related to to Jesus enslaved

51:51to Jesus. Could you talk a little bit about how you're trying to bring the invisible or

51:59make the invisible visible with this book? Yeah, that's definitely, and I don't think

52:05I'm concealing this part of the agenda of the book is about making invisible workers visible

52:13in the past and in the present. We still do this today. You know, Amazon delivers things.

52:19Amazon does not deliver anything. Jeff Bezos did not take time out from his yacht to bring

52:26me whatever people did invisible people. When we talk about having our houses decorated,

52:36or we decorated our house, we've redid our bathroom. In most cases, that is not true.

52:43You did not work yourself. And while you may have picked out tile, you didn't make any

52:48of the decisions, because there are so many decisions that are about the experience of

52:53working with the materials, knowing where something is going to break when you cut it.

52:58You don't know until you get into the walls exactly what's there. If you can if you can

53:01follow the plans, there's a lot of expertise and skill there that you as the person who

53:06picked out bathroom tile didn't even know about. And so we do this all the time in the present.

53:12And for me, I wrote it during the pandemic, most of the book during the pandemic. And

53:18you know, I was completely overwhelmed. Let me be honest, I'm not a natural fourth grade

53:23mathematics teacher as it turns out. I felt like I was working really hard, but at the

53:29same time, my ability to, you know, keep my children mildly educated and alive was predicated

53:39on the fact that other people were bringing stuff to my house. That's partly because I

53:44was in New York City. And I had to have things delivered because I was in the high risk band.

53:49And so I felt like pretty good about it. I have to isolate because of my health, feeling

53:55a little, you know, like morally good about myself, but other people are being placed in

54:00harm's way on my behalf. And we don't even acknowledge them when we say the Amazon delivers

54:08things. I didn't acknowledge them when I said that Amazon delivers things. And so I think

54:13we still do this. We take a lot of work for granted. We don't appreciate the effort, the

54:20energy, the bodily costs, the expertise of the skills. And we tend to privilege certain

54:26kinds of knowledge over others when we shouldn't.

54:30Well, I think that's a wonderful takeaway. The book is great. We said it's coming out

54:37March 24th. Is that what we said? Six. Well, Canada Moss, thank you so much for joining

54:45us. Where can people? The book will be widely available, I assume Amazon can deliver it

54:51to your house. Amazon can deliver to your house. So it could run to noble, so so could an independent

54:57book. And if you have local bookstores that you can keep in business, you should definitely

55:05do that. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming on. You are

55:11going to be joining us, I believe, in our after party for the patrons. So friends at

55:18home, if you would like to hear more from Canada, please feel free to go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma

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55:49and we'll talk to you again next week. Bye everybody.

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