Epilogue

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p.255 n.1 On Petilianus and Church Councils, see Thomas Graumann, The Acts of the Early Church Councils: Production and Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 38–39. 

p. 259 n.2 When, two weeks after my encounter with the billboard, I contracted the most docile variant of the virus, it was quite dramatic, and I should confess that, as of this moment, I have not yet recovered fully.

p.260 n.2a “It is no accident that the writings of enslaved and formerly enslaved authors were open to constant revision by others” On the revision of the work of low-status workers, see Coogan, Moss, and Howley, “The Socioeconomics of Fabrication,” and Coogan and Moss, “Textual Demiurge.” What follows draws on my earlier work in “The Secretary.” See also Catherine Conybeare and Simon Goldhill, eds., Classical Philology and Theology: Entanglement, Disavowal, and the Godlike Scholar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

p. 260 n.3 For an overview of the emergence of the figure of the authorial genius, see Christine Haynes, “Reassessing ‘Genius’ in Studies of Authorship: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 8 (2005): 287–320. Important studies on the emergence and categorization of authorship include Roger Chartier, “Figure of the Author,” in The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 25–60; Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 

     Joseph Addison, The Spectator 160 (3 September 1711), in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 2.126–30. Gregory Moore, “Introduction,” in Johann Gottfried Herder, Shakespeare, ed. and trans. Gregory Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), xxx. Of the many candidates for the role, two—Shakespeare and Homer—stood above the rest, channeling, in plain speech, the “soul of the nation.” For a discussion of German Romanticism and the ways in which the author-genius was viewed as spokesperson of the people, see Walsh, Origins of Early Christian Literature, 78–84.

p.261 n.4 “Wherever the work of the genius is discussed, its foil is pictured as servile—as if servility and brilliant creativity are antithetical.” For an array of examples, see David Cook, “On Genius and Authorship: Addison to Hazlitt,” The Review of English Studies 64.266 (2013), 610–29 [614­–15]. Arguably, this bifurcation begins with Seneca, as already discussed.

     John Stuart Mill, signed “Antiquus,” “On Genius,” Monthly Repository 6 (1832): 649–59. Gregory Moore, “Introduction,” in Johann Gottfried Herder, Shakespeare, ed. and trans. Gregory Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), xxx. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 195–96.

p.261 n.5 On state censorship, see Hannah Marcus, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). On copyright: Paul K. Saint-Amour, The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). I do not want to pretend that anonymity did not have a rich life in the 18th and 19th centuries. It had expedience for women, for those who did not wish to create a stir, for those who wished to disrupt social norms, and so on. See, for example, Mark Vareschi, Everywhere and Nowhere: Anonymity and Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

p.262 n.6 Martin Luther, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, in Luther’s Primary Works, ed. Henry Wace and C. A. Buchheim (London: John Murray, 1883), 169–71. Compare Thomas Cartwright, Syn theoi en christoi:The Answere to the Preface of the Rhemish Testament (Edinburgh: R. Waldegrave, 1602), 113, who calls monastic scribes “ordinary jaylors” of the Bible. The demonization of Jewish scribes goes back to medieval passion plays, if not the Gospels themselves. 

      The new processing technology of the printing press—God’s preaching device—inspired and disturbed; it forced reflection about the transmission of the Gospel from one medium to another. On the question of oral tradition in the Reformation period, see Robert Preus, The Inspiration of Scripture: A Study of the Theology of the Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Dogmaticians (Mankato, MN: Lutheran Synod Book Co., 1955), 5. The question of medium was also relevant; on the aesthetics of paper and cheap Bibles during the Reformation, see Joshua Calhoun, “The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption, and the Poetics of Paper,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 126.2 (2011): 327–44. As John Calvin put it, “there is this difference between the apostles and their successors, [the apostles] were sure and authentic amanuenses (certi et authentici amanuenses) of the Holy Spirit; and, therefore, their writings are to be regarded as the oracles of God.” John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.8.9. Compare Institutes 4.8.6, in which he describes Old Testament prophecies as “compositions (lucubrationes) of the prophets, but framed (compositae) at the dictation of the Holy Spirit (dictante spiritu sancto).” We might here compare seventeenth-century Lutheran Abraham Calov’s interpretation of 2 Peter 1:12, in which he similarly describes the biblical authors as “amanuenses” of God, in Biblia Novi Testamenti Illustrata (Frankfurt: Balthasar Christoph Wust, 1676), 2.1034.

     See also Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 1.13.13; Edward Leigh, A Systeme or Body of Divinity (London: William Lee, 1654), 1.viii; Leonard van Rijssen, Summa Theologiae Elencticae (Amsterdam: Georgi Sonnleitneri, 1676), 2.xix, controversy I. This is not to say that understandings of the apostles as divinely inspired cannot incorporate the existence of additional workers. See, for example, Norman L. Geisler, who writes that “we can accommodate the fact that amanuenses were used in [scripture’s] production, without attributing inspiration to the amanuensis,” in Inerrancy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980), 190.

p.262 n.7 “We are heirs to this hierarchical system of categorization that recognizes some actors while eliminating others.” See Ellen Muehlberger, “On Authors, Fathers, and Holy Men,” Marginalia Review of Books, September 20, 2015, accessed June 1, 2021, http://themarginalia.review.com/on-authors-fathers-and-holy-men-by-ellen-muehlberger/

     “Lady Typists” Price and Thurschwell, “Introduction,” in Literary Secretaries / Secretarial Culture, ed. Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 3. In 1893, Edward V. Murphy wrote in defense of his class of reporters and courtroom stenographers that they “are not manufactured… as are typewriters, clerks and bookkeepers,” and went on to assert, in true Roman fashion, that unlike their lowly female counterparts, the male stenographer must possess all the learning of a good “liberal arts education.” In Edward V. Murphy, “Stenography as a Skilled Profession,” National Stenographer 4 (1893): 301–7 [305].  It might be of interest to the reader to know that many nineteenth century typewriters were modelled on the design of contemporary sewing machines. 

p.263 n.7a “we also prize authorship because we see cognitive labor (thinking, writing, planning, and managing) as more dignified…” Many others have highlighted the problems with Cartesian mind/body dualism. In the work of postcolonial scholar Vanessa Andreotti, this logocentric commitment to the mind comes at a cost to us as people and as a society. See Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, Sharon Stein, Cash Ahenakew, and Dallas Hunt, “Mapping Interpretations of Decolonization in the Context of Higher Education,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 4.1 (2015): 21-40.

p.263 n.8 On kinesthetic expertise and experience, see Roger Kneebone, Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery (New York: Viking, 2020). Kneebone, a surgeon, explains how his own work depends on sensory and embodied expertise that is learned through experience. This he calls not a skill or a craft, but a practice. To push back against myself, Origen believed that the kidneys produced the sperma necessary for intellection and writing.

p.264 n.8a “what might be gained by decentering authorship and thinking with collaboration instead?” The language of “decentering” is drawn from an approach in Biblical scholarship that decenters traditional questions and actors. For examples of this project and criticisms of the Eurocentric goals of New Testament scholarship, see the work of Vincent Wimbush, “Knowing Ex-centrics/Ex-centric Knowing,” in MisReading America: Scriptures and Difference, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1-22; R. S. Sugirtharajah, “Critics, Tools, and the Global Arena,” in Reading the Bible in the Global Village: Helsinki, ed. Heikki Räisänen, Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, R. S. Sugirtharajah, Krister Stendahl, and James Barr (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2000), 49-60. For an introduction to the New Testament that utilizes this approach, see Toward Decentering the New Testament: A Reintroduction, ed. Mitzi Smith and Yung Suk Kim (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018).

     Pursuing authors and authorial intent is certainly part of the traditional array of approaches that scholars, influenced primarily by white European Enlightenment values, bring to the New Testament. Our interest in and pursuit of authors and apostles—to the exclusion of enslaved collaborators —is not just an unwitting reproduction of the ancient structures of power that privilege the will of a single “master”; it is also a statement about ourselves. It is a statement about our own power and agency, about our freedom to express and power to claim ownership, about those with whom we identify, and about those whose ideas, work, and personhood we think is worth preserving. Given that all texts are collaborative and also the ways in which ascribing credit and authorial power have erased the work and contributions of others, why not just give up on authorship altogether and center other questions?

     Perhaps we should, but I have stuck with it here for two reasons: the first is that authorship and intentions have stuck. Despite many elegant and compelling interventions in favor of other interpretative priorities, as a society, we continue to privilege authorial intentions. The academy may have moved on, but I am not convinced that society has. Whether we speak of books, ideas, or social movements, we care about authors and their viewpoints. Intention is what the prosecutor chases down in the courtroom, and it is what matters in petty conflicts between lovers and friends. We can forgive people a great deal if we think they acted with good intentions. We care what the authors of the texts meant to say. 

     My second reason is related to power. Is it for those who have had power and have historically been able to leverage authorial status to put an end to its authority at exactly the moment in time when others are being recognized and acknowledged as contributors and coauthors? Can invisible and alienated workers not have their day in the sun? Rushing to non-authorial models runs the risk of ignoring the tyrannical ways in which the power of authorship has been utilized in the past and continues to be felt in the present. Disenfranchised literate workers have always been subject to violence: as surrogates for the more powerful author, they were vulnerable to flogging, crucifixion, and scapegoating. Given all of this, perhaps we might pause for a moment to recognize their contributions? 

     When I was researching this book, I spoke to editors at various publishing houses about the project. Almost all the editors were interested and encouraging, but one—a former conservative Christian turned more progressive book editor—seemed frustrated with me. The irritation was palpable: “You can’t prove that slaves wrote any of these texts,” he began. I walked him step-by-step through the arguments showing that, in fact, the arguments for enslaved collaborative co-authorship are stronger than those for solitary authorship. At each turn, he conceded the point and endeavored to find another objection before, finally, coming to his true concern: “Why do we have to talk about slaves as authors?,” he asked exasperatedly. “Why can’t we talk about all the good things Christianity has done for slaves?” There was a long pause. Later, I spoke to my (step)mother Marcia about his response. I didn’t understand why he was so resistant and upset. “Giving credit,” she said, “is a subversive act.”

p.264–5 n.8b “The perspectives of enslaved collaborators can explain plot details and narrative elements that trouble Christian readers and lay historians alike.” By listing these few examples, I do not mean to imply that collaboration is only important because it “fixes” problems in traditional approaches, as if the dominant forms of interpretation should maintain their status in perpetuity. I am conscious, thinking with Wimbush, of the ways that traditional modes of analysis have devalued unconventional ones. As Wimbush puts it, “the views, sentiments, passions, testimonies and interpretations of nonwhites, especially black peoples, are devalued. Their ‘readings’ within this racialized society are always necessarily understood by the ‘white’ mind/ear/eyes —in the complex effects of empire, attached to any color of body! —as a ‘lack,’ a ‘misreading’ of a different kind,” in Wimbush, “Knowing Ex-centrics,” 2. 

p.265 n.9 On power and forgery, see Coogan, Moss, and Howley, “The Socioeconomics of Fabrication,” Arethusa (forthcoming); and Coogan and Moss, “Textual Demiurge.”