Were Slaves "God's Ghostwriters?"

 

 Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times in all ways. 

The Lord be with all of you.  I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. This is the mark in every letter of mine; it is the way I write. 

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with all of you.

2 Thessalonians 3: 16-18 NRSVue 

Along the way I've been straightforward about my Christian convictions -- mainly that I'm a Trinitarian, Easter kind of guy in my theology. I am inclined to a certain wariness when I hear someone described as a "progressive" Christian, in part because it sounds a trifle arrogant and also because it can mean that it is a faith stance that has moved away from the extraordinary and improbable movement that began 2.000 years ago after a Palestinian Jew was executed by the Roman empire. The very existence of Christianity as a world faith is a miracle.

This said, I really appreciate the theologians and writers who push me to think beyond conventional assumptions about gender and inclusion, patriarchy and institutionalism, caring for Creation.  I've found that women have often been most provocative and thought-provoking in this regard and most of the books I've read and chosen for study groups in recent years are written by women scholars. 

Recently I heard about a new book called God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible by Professor Candida Moss, a New Testament scholar. Moss  contends that those who actually physically wrote some of the letters of Paul could have been slaves. We find within certain letters that the apostle Paul used scribes to write down what he was dictating. He makes a point of saying, for emphasis, that he had written with his own hand at the conclusion of a letter to the church in Thessalonica. At the conclusion of Romans a scribe offers "I Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you in the Lord."

Candida Moss argues that in the ancient world some slaves would be taught to read and write specifically for the purpose of acting as scribes. While their role was to record what was being said accurately they may well have included personal flourishes. 

Is this revelatory scholarship or outlandish conjecture? The reviews I've read find the book intriguing and this is certainly something that has never occurred to me, even though I learned about Paul's use of scribes back in seminary days. 

Obviously, there is so much more that could be said about Moss's theory and we would need to read the book to find out what led her to these conclusions (yes I'm mightily tempted to buy it). In the end, it's worthwhile to see a subject in a different light.