Extended Notes: Author's Note and Introduction

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p.3 n.a “The archives of history” The historical archive for early Christianity was designed by freeborn elites. Our history is figuratively written by victors from an enslaving class of people who only strategically acknowledge the humanity of enslaved people. When Roman elites paid attention to their unfree workers, it was to discuss how best to control them, to crush their spirits, and to force them into submission. They only recognized the will and agency of so-called ‘bad slaves,’ those who resisted, rebelled, disobeyed, or sought freedom. ‘Good slaves’ are invisible to us; their work is obscured by passive verbs and a predatory logic that made their contributions a credit only to their enslavers. See David Brion Davis, who writes: “the slave has no legitimate, independent being, no place in the cosmos except as an instrument of her or his master’s will,” in Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 31–32. The subsequent erasure of certain voices means that we must adjust our expectations. So, David Kazanjian, “Freedom’s Surprise: Two Paths Through Slavery’s Archives,” History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 6.2 (2016): 133-145.

p.3 n.1 Saidiya V. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12.2 (2008): 1–14; Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 16; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Hartman’s method was employed in the context of the archives of transatlantic slavery and the erasure of the ship-ledger. Fuentes emphasizes that the history of enslavement reproduces the discourses of slaveholders and, thus, reinscribes the erasure of enslaved workers. Fuentes’s project disrupts the historical archives by rewriting her sources from the perspectives of enslaved and freed women. On agency: There is a thoughtful debate among scholars of Atlantic slavery about social death and agency. The important and influential work of Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) looms large here. 

     My use of Hartman’s mode of critical fabulation will be most clearly apparent in the imaginative narrations that open each chapter, but I find myself inspired by her work and methodologies in my reinterpretations of Biblical stories, characters, phrases, and manuscripts. On Hartman’s influence on public scholarship and life, see https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/26/how-saidiya-hartman-retells-the-history-of-black-life.

      Similar calls to imagination have been sounded by feminist theorists, queer biblical scholars, and disability critics, who note that our historical record reproduces a vision of women and sexuality that is ultimately patriarchal and ableist. We might compare, also, Robert Orsi’s statement that “constraints on the scholar’s imagination become, by means of his or her scholarship, constraints on the imaginations of others, specifically those whose lives the scholar aims to represent and understand,” in Robert Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2016), 64. See also Katherine A. Shaner, Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), xi-xiii: “How…do we incorporate the pervasive presence of enslaved persons in ancient life when our ancient materials often render them invisible apart from their masters’ perspective?” 

p.4 n.2 Imagination is not only a necessity for historical work; it is equally important when engaging with one’s contemporaries. In the early twentieth century, sociologist Amy Tanner and a friend took jobs as waitresses in the café connected to a military apartment house. She found herself working long, aching hours for an employer who was oblivious to the burden she forced upon her staff. Later, when Tanner published her findings, she wrote, “This mistress, then, sinned chiefly in her inability to imagine.” Even up close, Tanner reveals, powerful people in asymmetrical relationships fail to imagine the lives of others well. Her point is that imagination is the foundation of empathy and human connection. If all history writing is an exercise in measured imagination, and if imagination is grounded in human experience, then the goal of telling the story of Christianity necessarily shifts. The questions are now: with whom do we choose to imagine and live? Do we challenge ourselves to move beyond the stubborn limits of our own experiences and closely held assumptions? See Amy E. Tanner, “Glimpses at the Mind of a Waitress,” American Journal of Sociology 13.1 (1907): 48–55 [54]. 

     So, too, Deborah Kamen and Sarah Levin-Richardson direct us to the “ethical obligation” of using imagination to tell the stories of the marginalized. See their “Epigraphy and Critical Fabulation: Imagining Narratives of Greco-Roman Sexual Slavery,” in Dynamic Epigraphy: New Approaches to Inscriptions, ed. Eleri H. Cousins (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2022), 201–221 [217].

     This is one place where we should, with Chin, attempt to admit history’s “weird” qualities: “The historical project of making people from past worlds like us is an empathetic project, and it does useful work in many contexts, such as when we argue for the continued relevance of ancient history to the contemporary world. I would like to suggest, though, that the empathetic project of history, especially premodern history, is better served by a kind of imaginative stubbornness, a determination to remember that people living in past worlds were not always very much like us, but that we should pay attention to them anyway. And this much harder project of empathy is what I think focusing on weirdness allows us to undertake,” in C. M. Chin, “Marvelous Things Heard: On Finding Historical Radiance,” Massachusetts Review 58.3 (2017): 478–91 [480]. It is because of Chin’s arguments that I documented the ancient sources for any projections of emotions in my text.

      The idea of consciously choosing to imagine with people draws upon an idea inherent to Latin American Liberation Theology, namely, that we actively read and live with marginalized peoples. I am grateful to Luis Menéndez-Antuña for inspiring this line of thought. See his “Whiteness and the Dismissal of Emancipatory Hermeneutics in Biblical Studies: A Decolonial Genealogy,” in Multiracial Biblical Criticism, ed. Wongi Park (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature Press, forthcoming). Compare here also Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 14: “I also recognize the political utility and ethical necessity of historical fiction.”

p.4 n.2a “quite rightly” I say quite rightly because I am not only an affluent white Englishwoman, but I can also be fairly oblivious. It was not until I was a teenager that I realized that others thought that my black (step)mother, one of the people dearest to me in the world, was my nanny.

p.4 n.2b “Sociologists” In utilizing the work of sociologists of labor, I do not mean to suggest that bad working conditions are the same as enslavement. They are not. 

p.5 n.3 “Spectral listening” This language comes from Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 23. I am mindful of Roxane Gay’s comment that it is not writing across identity lines but rather writing across identity lines badly and inaccurately that is the problem. See The Argument, “Who Can Write About What? A Conversation with Roxane Gay and Jay Caspian Kang,” The New York Times, 15 June, 2022. In adapting work from other periods, I am partly inspired by Ulrike Roth’s work on the vilica (the “wife” of the enslaved overseer of Roman agricultural slaveholding), which utilizes anthropological models of female economic exploitation in other pre-industrial societies. See Ulrike Roth, Thinking Tools: Agricultural Slavery between Evidence and Models. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Supplement No. 92. (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2007), 9–12.

p.5 n.4 “abstractions can be useful” See Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 17. But, as Cooper notes, abstractions do not shed light on the social or political experience of enslavement. Niall McKeown has warned that “we must be careful not to ‘rescue’ the voice of the ancient slave by making it a distorted version of our own,” in The Invention of Ancient Slavery? (London: Duckworth, 2007), 163. See also Angela Parker’s concern: “How can scholars and activists prevent Western epistemic racial frameworks from colonizing intersectionality as their own?,” in Angela N. Parker, “‘And the Word became…gossip?’ Unhinging the Samaritan Woman in the Age of #MeToo,” Review & Expositor 117.2 (2020): 259–271 [262].

p.5 n.4a “multifaceted, complex human beings whose interests and experiences varied widely” We might say, using the language of Crenshaw, that they led intersectional lives. See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, Article 8 (1989): 139–67.

p.6 n.5 In addition to being influenced by Hartman’s work, I am convinced by Vincent Brown and Walter Johnson that we should more carefully theorize questions of agency, resistance, and humanity. Social death was a compelling metaphysical threat in the lives of enslaved people, but agency is an aspect of existence that should be assumed. See Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37.1 (2003): 113–124; Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review 114 (2009): 1231–49 [1246–1248].

p.6 n.6 P. Gabrielle Foreman, et al., “Writing about Slavery/Teaching About Slavery: This Might Help,” Community-sourced document, Accessed November 20, 2020. https://naacpculpeper.org/resources/writing-about-slavery-this-might-help/.

p.7 n.7 On presentism in its various forms, see Laurent Loison, “Forms of presentism in the history of science: Rethinking the project of historical epistemology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 60 (2016): 29–37. I am grateful to historian of science Daryn Lehoux for leading me to these terms.     

      I have seen firsthand how a failure to name even the clearest forms of violence can harm. In 2021, I wrote a piece for the Washington Post entitled “Five Myths About Catholics.” One of the myths I identified was the problematic and erroneous assumption that homosexuality and, to a lesser extent, celibacy are responsible for the sex abuse in the Catholic Church. One reader of the piece, whose letter was printed in the newspaper, felt that in jettisoning this myth, I had been insensitive to those who had experienced this violence. I was mortified. I took it as read that pedophilia is a horrendous crime. It is a mistake I do not want to repeat.  

p.7 n.7a “My work is neither the beginning of the conversation nor the period at the end of the sentence.” For the metaphor of ellipsis, I am grateful to Sarah Bond.

p.9 n.1 “Roman Society” I do not mean to suggest either that those in the Roman provinces were not powerful and wealthy or that Paul could have expected to mingle with the uppermost echelons of society. On wealth in the provinces, see John Weisweiler, “Capital Accumulation, Supply Networks and the Composition of the Roman Senate, 14-235 CE,” P&P 253.1 (2021): 3–44.

p.10 n.1a “fishing for good will” This is a literal translation of the Latin captatio benevolentiae, an element typical of ancient letter writing that was usually included at the beginning of a letter. The sender would praise and flatter the recipients, thus putting them in a good mood.

p.11 n.2 The phrase “brothers and sisters,” which in Greek just reads “brothers,” is used as a shorthand for the community in Rome, in Rom. 1:13; 7:1; 8:12; 10:1; 11:25; 12:1. The social connections are mentioned in Rom. 16. 

p.11 n.2a “I, Tertius…” While some have portrayed Paul as generously allowing Tertius to include this greeting, it is possible that Paul was unaware of this insertion in the letter.

p.12 n.3 On Tertius: Heikki Solin, Die stadtrömischen Sklavennamen: Ein Namenbuch I-III. Forschungen zur antiken Sklaverei, Beiheft 2 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1996), 1.152-3. Tertius is a Latin name, and we might infer from this that Tertius was a verna, or “home-born” enslaved man, on which, see more below. The identification of names is notoriously tricky. A seal ring found in the luxury villa at Oplontis, for example, was owned by the elite Lucius Crassius Tertius. Hans Petersen argues that Tertius was used as a praenomen (personal name) in Celtic circles in the imperial period. There are, thus, a number of possibilities for his social status. See Hans Petersen, “The numeral praenomina of the Romans,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 93 (1962): 347–354.

p.13 n.4 On the baptism of enslaved workers, see Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 47. The same was true of enslaved workers in the homes of Jewish enslavers, who were forcibly circumcised. On this, see the directive in Gen. 17:12-13, and Catherine Hezser, Jewish Slavery in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 30–31. 

p.14 n.4a “enslaved workers (and often the fact of their enslaved status) have been obscured” Tertius, for example, is remembered today as a bishop and a martyr. He is not celebrated as a coworker on the most influential and theologically weighty texts in the New Testament. We might want to refer to this process as being “forgotten” or rendered “silent,” but as scholars like Tera Hunter and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò have emphasized, this kind of language deemphasizes the ways in which the “forgetting” and “silencing” were deliberate and violent. 

p.15 n.5 “Neither slave nor free”: Gal 3:28. See Angela N. Parker, “One Womanist’s View of Racial Reconciliation in Galatians,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.2 (2018): 23–40. The task here is to excavate both culpability (that is, of Christ followers who willfully participated in slavocracy) and responsibility (what it would mean to admit this past and deal responsibly and reparatively in the future). I am grateful to Laura Nasrallah for this analysis.

p.15 n.5a “This is not to cast blame, of course…” Blame might rightly strike some readers as a strange concept to introduce into this discussion. How could enslaved writers be held accountable for how others utilized their writings? The suggestion that enslaved workers might be blamed was raised to me even as I first started thinking about this project. I introduce it here both to head it off at the pass and for two other reasons: First, the task of assigning or claiming authorship is about credit and power. Second, assigning credit is a powerful act. While some might want to avoid the economic and reductive framework of credit/blame, I do not think that we are there yet. Even philosophical conversations about the agency of objects and computers turn quickly from questions of agency to ones of blame. See, for example, Ronald N. Giere, “The Role of Agency in Distributed Cognitive Systems, Philosophy of Science 73.5 (2006): 710–19 [716].

p.15 n.5b “spawned and nurtured later theories of enslavement that were” For the connections between colonial slavery and ancient slavery, see Dorothy E. Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: The New Press, 2011), 51. Recent work on this question has noted that ideologies about racism, race and otherness do not have to manifest identically across history in order to serve as useful analytical tools for thinking about enslavement. On this point, see Javal Coleman, “Call It What It Is: Racism and Ancient Enslavement,” Society for Classical Studies Blog, Dec 31, 2021, and Samuel O. Flores, “Teaching Ancient Slavery in the South,” Society for Classical Studies Blog, November 23, 2018. 

 For the relationship between enslavement in the Roman period and enslavement in the contemporary world see Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery as Moral Problem: In the Early Church and Today (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011).

p.15 n.5c “attempted to dehumanize enslaved people” Just because rhetoric and language attempted to dehumanize people does not mean that it ever succeeded. On unrealized dehumanization, see Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

p.16 n.6 Jamaica Kincaid, “In History,” Callaloo 20.1 (1997): 1-7. To use the words of Esau McCaulley, in a plenary address to the British New Testament Society, the language of slavery “sits in the soul” of black and brown readers of the Bible. See Esau McCaulley, “Finding Onesimus: Who has the Right to Speak to an Enslaved Person’s Hope?,” British New Testament Conference, August 18, 2022.