Chapter one

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p.21 n.1 For the graffito, see Heikki Solin and Marja Itkonen-Kaila, eds., Graffiti del Palatino I: Paedagogium (Helsinki: Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae, 1966), 210-212, 246, and discussion in Peter Keegan, “Reading the ‘Pages’ of the Domus Caesaris: Pueri Delicati, Slave Education, and the Graffiti of the Palatine Paeidagogium,” in Roman Slavery and Roman Material Culture, ed. Michelle George (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 69-98; Felicity Harley-McGowan, “The Alexamenos Graffito,” in The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries, ed. Chris Keith et al. (London: T&T Clark, 2019), 105-140; Tyler Schwaller, “Picturing the Enslaved Christ: Philippians 2:6-8, Alexamenos, and a Mockery of Masculinity,” JECH 11.1 (2021): 38-65. For the earliest discussion and initial identification of the graffito, see Raffaele Garrucci, Un crocifisso graffito da mano pagana nella casa dei Cesari sul Palatino (Rome: Copi tipi della civiltà, 1856), who provides a line drawing. Tertullian refers to non-Christians describing Jesus as asinine: Tertullian, Ad Nat. 1.14.1-4. On mistreatment of donkeys: Apuleius, The Golden Ass. On the schoolroom, see Maria Antonietta Tomei, The Palatine (Milan: Electa, 1998), 58. Whatever function we designate to the space of the schoolroom, it is tied to enslavement. As Keegan puts it, “All views, though, require the structure to be occupied by a significant proportion of enslaved and manumitted persons,” in “Reading,” 72. 

      On crucifixion in general, see John Granger Cook, “Crucifixion as Spectacle in Roman Campania,” NovT 54.1 (2012): 68-100. On crucifixion and enslavement in particular, see Martin Hengel, The Cross of the Son of God,Containing the Son of God, Crucifixion, the Atonement (London: SCM Press, 1986), 143-55, and Wenhua Shi, Paul’s Message of the Cross as Body Language (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 28-31.

p.22 n.1a “The images of crucifixion that decorated the bowls…” For a discussion of representations of the crucifixion on household objects, see Robin M. Jensen, The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 74-96, and Harley-McGowan, “The Alexamenos Graffito.” For other roughly contemporaneous examples, see a late second/early third-century graffito from Puteoli first published by Margherita Guarducci, “Iscrizioni greche e latine in una taberna a Pozzuoli,” in Acta of the Fifth International Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, Cambridge, 1967 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971), 219-23, and a similarly dated Christian bloodstone amulet in the British Museum (inv. 1986,0501.1) discussed by Harley-McGowan.

p.23 n.2 For the use of the name “Alexander” among Jews in Rome, see David Noy, Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe. Volume 2: The City of Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 514. On the Roman naming practices for enslaved “home-born” children, see Christer Bruun, “Greek or Latin? The Owner’s Choice of Names for vernae in Rome,” in M. George, Roman Slavery and Roman Material Culture, Toronto: University of Toronto Press (2013), 19-42. For an example of a captive from Jerusalem becoming an overseer in the imperial household, see Titus Flavius Acraba, an imperial freedman possibly enslaved and later manumitted by Titus (CIL 6.8962). The tunic, especially the one worn by the crucified figure, has been a sticking point in the conversation. It may simply refer to a utilitarian garment worn by men, women, enslaved and formerly enslaved. See discussion in Harley-McGowan, “The Alexamenos Graffito,” 137.  For those enslaved in 70 C.E., see Josephus, J.W. 6.9.3. On the price of enslaved workers after the Bar Kokhba revolt, see Catherine Hezser, Jewish Slavery in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 253.

p.23 n.3 “first century manual cautioned readers to be on their guard” In Ibn Butlan, General Treatise, likely adapted from Rufus of Ephesus’s On the Purchase of Slaves, in Simon Swain, Economy, Family and Society from Rome to Islam: A Critical Edition, English Translation, and Study of Bryson’s Management of the Estate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 271.

p.23 n.3a “visually distinctive red wavy locks” The physiognomist Polemo associated red hair with northern tribes and described it as being correlated with animalistic character, immodesty, and envy. See Robert Hoyland, “A New Edition and Translation of the Leiden Polemon,” in Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam, ed. Simon Swain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 329–463.

p.24 n.4 On the development of the category of race, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew S. Curran, eds., Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022). Walter Scheidel estimates that at least 100 million people were trafficked throughout the Roman empire: “During the millennium from the emergence of the Roman empire to its eventual decline, at least 100 million people—and possibly many more—were seized or sold as slaves throughout the Mediterranean and its hinterlands. In terms of duration and sheer numbers, this process dwarfs both the transatlantic slave trade of European powers and the Arabic slave trade in the Indian Ocean ... The modern observer must wonder how to do justice to the colossal scale of human suffering behind these bland observations,” in Walter Scheidel, “The Roman Slave Supply,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. 1: The Ancient Mediterranean World, ed. Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 287–310 [309].

p.24 n.5 Pseudo-Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, Places 23; On Greekness and paideia: Isocrates, Panegyricus 50. “Toga-Wearing Race”: Suetonius, Augustus 40.5. On Jews worshipping donkeys: Josephus, Against Apion 2.79. On Jews “born to be slaves”: Cicero, On the Consular Provinces 5.10. On antisemitism among ancient Greeks and Romans, see Zvi Yavetz, “Latin Authors on Jews and Dacians,” Historia 47.1 (1998): 77–107.

p.25 n.6 Emma Dench, “Race,” in A Cultural History of Western Empires in Antiquity, ed. Carlos Noreña (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 201–222. On the fiscus Iudaicos that taxed circumcised men, see Martin Goodman, “Nerva, the Fiscus Judaicus and Jewish Identity,” JRS 79 (1989): 40–44, and Goodman, “The Meaning of ‘Fisci Iudaici Calumnia Sublata’ on the Coinage of Nerva,” in Studies in Josephus and the Varieties of Ancient Judaism, ed. S. J. D. Cohen and J. Schwartz (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 81–89; M. Heemstra, The Fiscus Judaicus and the Parting of the Ways (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), and Heemstra, “The Interpretation and Wider Context of Nerva’s Fiscus Judaicus Sestertius,” in Judaea and Rome in Coins, 65 BCE–135 CE, ed. D. M. Jacobson and N. Kokkinos  (London: Spink & Son, Ltd., 2012), 187–201. The concept of diaspora is a complicated one. I am here influenced by Arthur Francis Carter, Jr., “Diaspora Poetics and (re)Constructions of Differentness: Conceiving Acts 6.1-8.40 as Diaspora.” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2016). 

p.25 n.7 Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Molly Jones-Lewis, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2020). 

p.25 n.8 On hostages: Theophrastus, Economics 1.5.6 (Note that this text circulates under Aristotle’s name as Economics 1.1344b), compare Varro, Rust. 1.17.5. On the demand for “home-born” enslaved children, see Harriet Flower, “The Most Expensive Slave in Rome: Quintus Lutatius Daphnis,” Classical Philology 117.1 (2022): 99-119. On the natal alienation of enslaved people, see Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 13. There is inscriptional evidence that enslaved children did know who their parents were, and that enslaved people would use their meagre resources to erect tombstones for their children when they died. See Ulrike Roth, “Anything But Enlightened: Child Slavery in the Roman World,” The Historian 146 (Summer 2020): 30–33. Roth notes that “of the roughly 1,000 Latin tombstones of enslaved children (up to 15 years of age) that survive from across the Roman Empire, one third were commissioned by the children’s parents, much as for free (that is: freeborn) children,” 33. Some scholars have argued that enslaved parents may have been responsible for naming their biological offspring. The evidence on this is limited; see E. Hermann-Otto, Ex ancilla natus (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994).

p.26 n.9 On the sources of enslaved people, see Walter Scheidel, “Quantifying the Sources of Slaves in the Early Roman Empire,” JRS 87 (1997): 156–69; Scheidel, “The Roman Slave Supply.”

p.27 n.10 On Melior, see T. E. Kinsey, “Melior the Calculator,” Hermes 107.4 (1979): 501, and Hella Eckardt, Writing and Power in the Roman World: Literacies and Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 130. The Melior inscription hints at sexual exploitation as well. Several scholars have doubted the accuracy of the inscription and have questioned whether a thirteen-year-old truly wrote mathematical treatises. See discussion in Melissa Kutner, “Numeracy,” in Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean, 100 BCE–300 CE, ed. Coogan, Howley, and Moss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

      Note that we do not have the inscription itself. It is known from a 1646 letter sent to Cardinal Francesco Barberini by Lucas Holstentius. See Agnès Béranger, “Les ‘Calculatores,’” XI congresso internazionale di epigrafiagreca e latina: Roma, 18-24 settembre 1997 (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 1999), 1.639-47 [645].

p.27 n.11 Donkey and mill inscription: The donkey and mill inscription is from Room 8, north wall of the paedagogium. The inscription reads: “work, little ass, as I have worked, and you will profit by it” (labora, aselle,quomodo ego laboravi, /et proderit tibi). See Solin and Itkonen-Kaila, Graffiti, 1.289. A brilliant reading of this graffito as being subversive can be found in Sandra R. Joshel and Lauren Hackworth Petersen, eds., The Material Life of Roman Slaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 144.

p.28 n.12 Enslaved uniforms: Seneca, On Mercy 1.24.1. Ointment: This is alluded to in Petronius, Sat. 75.8. On thepeculium and the complicated question of whether enslaved workers kept it once they were manumitted, see Ulrike Roth, “Peculium, Freedom, Citizenship: Golden Triangle or Vicious Circle? An Act in Two Parts,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Supplement No. 109: By the Sweat of Your Brow: Roman Slavery in Its Socio-Economic Setting (2010): 91-120. Roth challenges the assessment of earlier generations that the opportunities for manumission in the Roman system set it apart from other ‘slave systems.’ Instead, she emphasizes both the exploitation of freedmen and the iterative process.

p.29 n.13 On the jobs performed by enslaved children, see Christian Laes, “Child Slaves at Work in Roman Antiquity,” Ancient Society 38 (2008): 235-83; Roth, “Anything But Enlightened.” Material evidence for the work of enslaved children suggests a variety of roles. For waiting at table, see Dig. 33.7.12.32. As bathhouse attendants, see Pliny, NH33.40. As sexual objects, see Suetonius, Nero 28; Seneca, Ep. 95.24; Tertullian, Apol. 13. On folding clothes, see 14-year-old Iucunda (vestiplica) in Italy (Abruzzi), CIL IX, 3318. For children as ‘public slaves,’ see 15-year-old Secundula (serva publica) crossing gender lines to perform this task, AE 1972, 737; Secunda CIL XI, 2656.  For literate enslaved children, see 15-year-old Rufus (tabularius) in what is now modern Lyon, CIL XIII, 1823. For potential sex workers, see 12-year-old Septentrio in Narbonne, CIL XII, 188. For weavers, see Nike PSI 241.

p.29 n.14 “Crippled slave”: Hieronymus of Rhodes, fr. 19. Hadrian: Galen, De propriorum animi cuiuslibet affectuum dignotione et curatione 5.17.15. Graffiti might have served as an outlet for enslaved frustration; see Keegan, “Reading,” 88.

p.30 n.15 Libanius, Ep. 131. On the physical demands of bookwork, see Carolyn Marvin, “The Body of the Text: Literacy’s Corporeal Constant,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80.2 (1994): 129–149 [132].

p.30 n.16 Pliny, Ep. 8.1. From the reign of Claudius onwards, enslavers killing sick enslaved workers became illegal. This was not a humanitarian intervention but a practical one. 

p.31 n.17 Galen, Hipp. Epid. I. 102.29. The language of emotional labor was coined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Compare here the fears of the unjust steward in Luke 16:1-13. Galen first learned about the effects of stress firsthand while working as a physician to gladiators in Pergamum. There are numerous stories of enslaved secretaries and notaries receiving harsh punishments—ranging from amputation to crucifixion—for doing their jobs incorrectly. 

p.31 n.17a “might also have been targeted by spurned wives…” For the punishment of innocent enslaved workers, see the struggle between St. Monica and her mother-in-law in Augustine, Confessions, 9.9.20 (here “enslaved” is translated as “servant”). See discussion in Jennifer A. Glancy, “The Mistress-Slave Dialectic: Paradoxes of Slavery in Three LXX Narratives,” JSOT 72 (1996): 71-87. On the complicity of women in enslaving violence, see Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). 

p.31 n.17b “Gladiators encapsulated the problem perfectly.” Some gladiators apparently volunteered, but most were enslaved, prisoners of war, or criminals. An inscription from Pompeii (CIL 4.2508) reveals that, at one show, nineteen enslaved and six free men participated in the games, for example. Broadly speaking, all gladiators were socio-legally marginalized. On the social status of gladiators in various regions, see Luciana Jacobelli, Gladiators at Pompeii (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003); V. M. Hope, “Fighting for Identity: The Funerary Commemoration of Italian Gladiators,” in The Epigraphic Landscape of Roman Italy, ed. A. Cooley (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2000), 93-113.

p.31 n.18 Fear: John Chrysostom, Homily on Acts 12.4 (PG 60.104); Homily on 1 Timothy 16.2 (PG 62.590); Chris de Wet, Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 170-219; Blake Leyerle, The Narrative Shape of Emotion in the Preaching of John Chrysostom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 112-49. 

p.32 n.19 On “carceral mechanisms,” see Sandra R. Joshel, “Geographies of Slave Containment and Movement,” in Roman Slavery and Roman Material Culture, ed. Michele George, 99-128. She here draws upon the work of Camp, Closer to Freedom. On rebellion, see Keith Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World, 140 B.C.-70 B.C.(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). On the problematic status of rebellion in conversations about enslavement, see Noel Lenski, “Ancient Slaveries and Modern Ideology,” in Lenski and Cameron, What is a Slave Society?, 106-48. On the punishment of lower-status people in the Roman empire, see Julia Hillner, Prison,Punishment, and Penance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 51.

p.32 n.20 “From a young age elite children were taught to use crucifixion as a threat …” Colloquium Harleianum 18a in Eleanor Dickey, Learning Latin the Ancient Way. Latin Textbooks from the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 55. “Enrolled in different curricula” See the work of Martin Bloomer, who writes, “The boy was learning to command: he was rehearsing the role of slave owner, father, advocate, all the roles of the paterfamilias,” in W. Martin Bloomer, “Schooling in Persona: Imagination and Subordination in Roman Education,” Classical Antiquity 16.1 (1997): 57-78. 

     The same process of schooling the enslaving class in domination—physical and sexual—was reflected in the architecture of Louisiana plantations. Here the construction of garçonnières, purpose-built structures where young men could learn mastery whilst out of sight of freeborn white women, created a “portal to becoming a full enslaver-patriarch.” See Andrea Livesey, “Learning Slavery at Home: Garçonnières and Adolescent Enslavers in Rural Louisiana 1806-1861,” Journal of Global Slavery 6.1 (2021): 31-54 [33]. 

p.33 n.21 Pliny, NH 35.58.201; Tacitus, Ann. 12.53.4, and discussion in Rose MacLean, Freed Slaves and Roman Imperial Culture: Social Integration and the Transformation of Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 107-11.

p.33 n.21a “as a duty (officium) to provide sexual services” Seneca the Elder refers to a saying of Haterius: “Losing one’s virtue is a crime in the freeborn, a necessity in a slave, a duty for the freedman” (Declamations 4 pr.10, trans. Winterbottom).

p.34 n.22 Scent of enslavement: Valerius Maximus 6.2.8. Re-enslavement: Suetonius, Claudius 25.1; Cassius Dio, Roman History, 60.13.2; Tacitus, Ann. 13.26-7; Dig. 25.3.6.1. The evidence for re-enslavement is complicated but it is clear that many of the enslaving class thought about it. See Henrik Mouritsen, The Freedman in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Rose MacLean, Freed Slaves and Roman Imperial Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

    Epaphroditus: Tacitus, Ann. 15.55; Suetonius, Nero 49; Dom. 14. The proximate causes for Epaphroditus’s execution are unclear. This narrative is relayed to us by those who were hostile to Domitian. On the sliding scale of enslavement and freedperson status, see Mouritsen, who writes: “If manumission merely converted slave labour into free labour, it became a part of a different system of rewards—one where manumission did not mark the end of a process but represented a point on a broad continuum of incentives that covered the entire working life of a slave/freedman. The apparent expectation of continuity raises the question of how this was achieved in practice and puts the focus on the ties which bound the freedman to his patron…The change in status therefore required new incentives and forms of control to enhance performance and ensure loyalty” (Freedman, 152). On the continued legal and economic dependence of freedpeople on their former enslavers, see Wolfgang Waldstein, Operae libertorum. Untersuchungen zur Dienstpflicht freigelassener Sklaven (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1986), and Pedro López Barja de Quiroga, “La dependencia económica de los libertos en el Alto Imperio Romano,” Gérion 9 (1991): 163-74.

p.34 n.23 Pliny, Ep. 7.29; 8.6.2. Recently, Erik Gunderson has argued that during the reign of Domitian, when literary standards and work were brought under the imperial aegis, elite authors Martial and Statius came to frame their work as derivative of imperial standards and coopted the cultural scripts of servile posture and work. This posture, ultimately, only served their carefully negotiated position as freeborn elites whose iudicum (judgment) guaranteed their superiority to imperial freedman ‘peers.’ It also highlights the ways in which, at the end of the first century and during a period when Jesus followers first wrote the Gospels, the aesthetics of servility and authorship were constantly being negotiated against a political backdrop. See Erik Gunderson, The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius: Martial’s ‘Epigrams,’ Statius’ ‘Silvae,’ and Domitianic Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

p.35 n.24 Manumission at the age of thirty was a result of the lex Aelia Sentia of 4 C.E. This applied predominantly to men. Some imperial freedmen may well have been manumitted later in life. In his work assembling the relevant evidence, Nicholas Tran notes that most imperial couriers (tabellarii) were freedmen or enslaved people, and they were, on average, freed at about the age of forty. See Nicolas Tran, “Les tabellarii Caesaris nostri de Narbonne et les collèges d’esclaves impériaux dans le monde Romain (CIL, XII, 4449),” Cahiers du Centre Gustave Glotz 26 (2015): 109-125 [117]. Tran notes that many such workers in the guild had been promoted to managerial posts by this stage. Tran does not specify which locations were included in his statement, but had earlier mentioned Rome, Narbonne, Ephesus, Carthage, and Rome.

     Women were not usually manumitted until they were in their 40s and their child-bearing years were over. On gender and manumission, see Matthew J. Perry, Gender, Manumission, and the Roman Freedwoman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). “Expelled to Freedom”: Lucian’s The Dependent Scholar pictures Greek intellectuals under the patronage of Roman elites as captives in their households and describes both the physical hardships of their lives and the way in which worn out intellectuals were cast out of the home penniless once they were past their prime (40–42).

p.35 n.24a “On a global scale there were many different ambiguous situations of bondage that do not neatly fit into the division of enslaved and free.” We can find examples of grey space in ancient Greek slavery. On freedpersons, see, for example, Mirko Canevaro and David M. Lewis, “Khoris oikountes and the Obligations of Freedmen in Late Classical and early Hellenistic Athens,” Incidenza dell’Antico 12 (2014): 91–121. On the blurriness of manumission and sale/dedication to deities in the Eastern Mediterranean, see Deborah Kamen, “Manumission, Social Rebirth, and Healing Gods in Ancient Greece,” in Slaves and Religions in Graeco-Roman Antiquity and Modern Brazil, ed. Stephen Hodkinson and Dick Geary (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 174-194; Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz, Not Wholly Free: The Concept of Manumission and the Status of Manumitted Slaves in the Ancient Greek World (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 69–70; Sara Zanovello, “L’affrancamento mediante πρᾶσις ὠνή nelle iscrizioni di Delfi,” Rivista di Diritto Ellenico 4 (2014): 179–219. On the variation from a global perspective, see, for example, the discussions of asymmetrical dependency explored in Slaves and Slave Agency in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Stephan Conermann and Gül Sen (Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2020). For important attempts to revisit the models of slavery using a global framework, see Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery, ed. Jeff Flynn-Paul and Damian Pargas (Studies in Global Slavery 4; Leiden: Brill, 2018), and Lenski and Cameron, What Is a Slave Society?

p.36 n.25 “Anyone who got into debt…” There is some debate about how often debt-related self-enslavement happened. On this question, see Monika Trümper, Graeco-Roman Slave Markets: Fact or Fiction? (Oxford: Oxbow, 2009). On the demographics of slavery in general, see Scheidel, “Quantifying the Sources of Slaves.”

p.36 n.25a “Certainly, a high-status enslaved worker in a wealthy household would have had greater food and housing security than the freeborn poor.” All lower-status people navigated complicated but highly individualized structures of power that marginalized and disenfranchised them. What we can and should say is that every aspect of marginalized identity that made one vulnerable in antiquity was rendered more precarious by enslavement. The marginalization that disability, language barriers, age, poverty, gender, education, sexuality, racial and ethnic difference, and immigrant status conferred upon people was only intensified by enslaved status. We can root around in the intestines of Roman oppression for exceptions to prove our own cleverness, but only after we render as full an account as possible of the violence of ancient structures of power. 

     On the intersectional implications of ancient slavery see the essays collected in Beyond Slavery Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies, ed. Bernadette Brooten with the assistance of Jacqueline L. Hazelton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

p.36 n.25b “If being an influential writer is just a question of volume, then Pliny the Elder, the prolific author of the encyclopedic…” See Aude Doody, Pliny’s Encyclopedia: The Reception of the Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On the harvesting of enslaved people’s knowledge, see Padilla Peralta, “Epistemicide.”

p.37 n.26 Pliny, Ep. 6.16.

p.37 n.26a “one recent estimate suggests that only about ten percent of the population of the Roman empire was able to read and write fluently” See Harry Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 2–41, who draws upon earlier influential studies like that of William Harris. A variety of literacy rates have been proposed and those vary based on whether we are talking about the Roman empire in general, urban centers, Rome, or ancient Judaism. For an overview of the discussion of literacy, see Chris Keith, Jesus against the Scribal Elite: The Origins of the Conflict, 2nd rev. ed. (London: T&T Clark, 2020), 20–26. 

p.39 n.27 On gender and comportment: Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). On foreign language and identity: Olivia Elder, “Citizens of the Wor(l)d? Metaphor and the Politics of Roman Language,” JRS 112 (2022): 79–104. 

     On the education of enslaved workers, see Keegan, “Reading.” Speech was not only associated with gender and social status, it also intersected with ethnic otherness and ability. Obscene speech was sometimes associated with mental illness; see Hippocrates, Epidemics 3.17.11; 4.15, Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, Gossip and Gender: Othering of Speech in the Pastoral Epistles (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 180–82, and Jeremy Hultin, The Ethics of Obscene Speech in Early Christianity and Its Environment (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 13–14. Speech impediments were tied to excessive moisture and heat in the body. See Christian Laes, Disabilities and the Disabled in the Roman World: A Social and Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 133–35, 144. 

     We might compare the weightiness of self-presentation to James Baldwin’s observation that “To open your mouth in England is (if I may use black English) to ‘put your business in the street’: You have confessed your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future.” In “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985 (Boston: Beacon, 2021), 693–96 [694].

p.40 n.27a “slave schools” UPZ I.148. For a school from the Ptolemaic period in which enslaved Greeks follow classes on Egyptian medicine, see discussion in R. Rémondon, “Problèmes du bilinguisme dans l’Égypte Lagide,” Chronique d’Égypte 39 (1964): 126–46, and Cribiore, Gymnastics, 25.

p.40 n.28 On the names of Palatine children, see discussion in Keegan, “Reading,” 79-80. Nepos, Att. 13. Atticus’s footmen are called pedisequi (footmen), and, in the imperial family (familia Caesaris), may have shared the same status as nomenclatores (people who remembered names) and tabellarii (messengers). On this, see P. R. C. Weaver, Familia Caesaris: A Social Study of the Emperor’s Freedmen and Slaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Compare Galen on the need to invest in scribes and book production, in On Affections and Errors 48, Kühn 1.32.

p.41 n.29 P. Oxy IV.724. For a full treatment of ancient shorthand, see Hans C. Teitler, Notarii and Exceptores: An Inquiry into Role and Significance of Shorthand Writers in the Imperial and Ecclesiastical Bureaucracy of the Roman Empire (from the Early Principate to c. 450 A.D.) (Leiden: Brill, 1985); Candida R. Moss, “The Secretary: Enslaved Workers, Stenography, and the Production of Early Christian Literature,” JTS 74.1 (2023): 20–56.

p.41 n.29a “Chicken scratch” The image of handwriting as chicken scratch comes from Plautus, Pseudolus 11.29–30.

p.42 n.30 On Caesar: John Robert Gregg, “Julius Caesar’s Stenographer,” Century Magazine (May 1921), 80–88. On Bar Kochba shorthand, see Mur. 164; Pierre Benoit, Józef T. Milik, and Roland de Vaux, eds., Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, Vol. 2: Les Grottes de Murabba‘ât (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), 1.275–277 and plates CIII-CV. 

p.42 n.31 For Tiro, see Jerome, Orig. 1.22. For a freedman of Maecenas, see Dio Cassius, Hist. 55.7.6. For the view that the Romans copied the system of tachygraphy from the Greeks, see H. J. Milne, Greek Shorthand Manuals (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1934), 1. For the opinion that it was developed by enslaved Romans, see H. Boge, “Die Tachygraphie--eine Erfindung römischer Sklaven: Neues zur antiken Schnellschrift und zur Frage der Priorität ihrer Erfindung,” in Altertumswissenschaft mit Zukunft, dem Wirken Werner Hartkes gewidmet, ed. H. von Scheel (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1973), 52–68. 

On shorthand signs and writers, see H. J. Milne, Greek Shorthand Manuals (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1934), to be read with Sofía Torallas Tovar and Klaas A. Worp, To the Origins of Greek Stenography (P. Monts. Roca I). Orientalia Montserratensia 1 (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2006). 

p.43 n.31a “…there are rarely spaces between words...” There were workarounds to some of these problems (like paragraph breaks and diacritics), which we will discuss in the next section of the book. Even now, we should consider the possibility that enslaved workers were the ones developing these technologies of non-linear access and reference. See Chapter Five.

p.44 n.32 For voluntary associations paying copyists fees and leasing space for documents, see IEph 1687 (31 BCE); IErythrai 122 (100 BCE); IPriene 111 (100 BCE); SEG 32:1149. For archives, see IKyme 13.79 (130 BCE); IPriene108.222 (129 BCE); and discussion in Richard Last and Philip A. Harland, Group Survival in the Ancient Mediterranean: Rethinking Material Conditions in the Landscape of Jews and Christians (London: T & T Clark, 2020), 89–91.

p.45 n.33 On writing technologies, see Georgios Boudalis, The Codex and Crafts in Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Bruce Holsinger, On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023); Anna Willi, Manual of Roman Everyday Writing. Volume 2: Writing Equipment (Nottingham: LatinNow ePubs, 2021).

p.46 n.34 “one houseguest in fourth-century Egypt” P. Oxy 56.3860.

p.46 n.34a “Today, roughly a third of the global population have some form of visual impirment”: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/blindness-and-visual-impairment. We should not assume that more people had vision loss in antiquity than in the present. Extended life expectancy today means that the problems associated with blindness and visual impairment are increasing. See Peter Ackland, Serge Resnikoff, and Rupert Bourne, “World Blindness and Visual Impairment: Despite Many Successes, the Problem is Growing,” Community Eye Health 30 (100) (2017): 71–73. I am grateful to Nicolette D’Angelo for this observation.

p.46–47 n.34b “Archaeologists who excavated the ancient healing shrines in Greece or Turkey found dismembered clay limbs, heads, and torsos…” For the evidence of the production of anatomical votives, see Jessica Hughes, Votive Body Parts in Greek and Roman Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Hughes draws upon van Straten’s tables of body parts from the Athenian inventories, in which there are more than twice as many eye(s) than any other body part. See F. T. van Straten, “Gifts for the Gods,” in Faith, Hope, and Worship: Aspects of Religious Mentality in the Ancient World, ed. H. S. Versnel (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 65-151.

p.47 n.35 For a full treatment on the intersection of enslavement, disability, and writing, see Candida R. Moss, “Disability,” in Jeremiah Coogan, Joseph A. Howley, and Candida R. Moss, Writing, Enslavement, and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Jane Draycott, Prosthetics and Assistive Technology in Ancient Greece and Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 154-168.

p.47 n.36 “Vision was superior”: Quintilian, Inst. 1.12.11. Cicero, Tusc. Dis. 5.112-113. On child lectores in Christianity: Cyprian, Ep. 38.1.2; Augustine, Sermon 352. Some rabbinic authors suggest that blind scholars were more intellectually qualified than their able-bodied peers; see Julia Watts Belser, “Reading Talmudic Bodies: Disability, Narrative, and the Gaze in Rabbinic Judaism,” in Disability in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Sacred Texts,Historical Traditions, and Social Analysis, ed. Darla Schumm and Michael Stoltzfus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 5-27; Julia Watts Belser and Lennart Lehmhaus, “Disability in Rabbinic Judaism,” in Disability in Antiquity, ed. Christian Laes (New York: Routledge, 2017), 434-52.

     “Scientific studies have shown” See John Plass, Emmanuel Guzman-Martinez, et al., “Lip Reading without Awareness,” Psychological Science 25.9 (2014): 1835-37.  I am grateful to Meghan Henning for mentioning this to me. On “choreographed hand gestures,” see more in Chapter Six.

p.47 n.36a “Mobility impairments, like those caused by arthritis” Osteoarchaeological evidence reveals a high incidence of arthritis among the ancient population. A study of human remains from the northern part of the Kharga Oasis in Egypt, for example, reveals that three quarters of those over the age of thirty suffered from the condition. See Roger Bagnall and Paola Davoli, “Archaeological Work on Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, 2000-2009,” American Journal of Archaeology 115.1 (2011): 103-57 [139], summarizing the work of Françoise Dunant. A study of arthritis based on human remains at a Roman cemetery near Poundbury, Dorset, concluded that osteoarthritis was present in 66% of skeletons of all age groups; see A. K. Thould and B. K. Thould, “Arthritis in Roman Britain,” British Medical Journal 287.6409 (Dec. 24-31, 1983): 1909-11. 

     In Isthmia (ancient Greece), severe arthritis was found in both hands of an elderly man (T14 67-002A) and the thumbs of a woman in her late 40s (NEG 69-007A). See Joseph L. Rife, Isthmia IX: The Roman and Byzantine Graves and Human Remains (Princeton, NJ: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2012). In the case of the woman,Rife notes that “Arthritic changes to the joints probably developed from the continued use of both thumbs in activities that involved pressing them forcefully against an object and then releasing them independent of the other fingers, such as when clasping something to the palms or driving something downward with the thumb tips,” 389. This sounds like a reasonable description of navigating book rolls or, equally, weaving. We should note that arthritis affects women earlier in life. We might assume that the girls with “beautiful handwriting” gifted to Origen by Ambrose would have had to leave bookwork earlier in life. Tony Waldron summarizes his exhaustive survey of the osteoarchological evidence by concluding that “osteoarthritis is uncommon under the age of about 40, but the incidence and prevalence increase considerably thereafter,” in Tony Waldron, Palaeopathology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 31.

p.48 n.37 Suetonius, Galba 21; Fronto, ad Amicos 2.3.1. In a handbook on rhetoric and education, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian obliquely refers to accommodations for visual impairments by noting that people with vision loss can write more clearly using papyrus rather than wax tablets. This was because of the contrasting color of dark ink against a light background (Inst. 10.3.31-33). For Florentius’s text, see, for example, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Manuscript 80. On medieval copyists, see Catherine Brown, “Scratching the Surface,” Exemplaria 26.2-3(2014): 199-214.

p.48 n.38 On the effects of bookwork on a person: Seneca Ep. 15.6, where he warns Lucilius to use scribes and readers and stop “always bending over [his] books and tablets.” See also Celsus, On Medicine Pr. 6 and 1.2.1. I am grateful to Claire Bubb for the references to Celsus. 

     “Scientists call this phenomenon skill decay.” The literature on skill decay is vast. See, for example, Laura Gonzalez and Suzan Kardong-Edgren, “Deliberate Practice for Mastery Learning in Nursing,” Clinical Simulation in Nursing 13.1 (2017): 10-14; J. M. Childs and W. D. Spears, “Flight-Skill Decay and Recurrent Training,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 62.1 (1986): 235–42.

p.49 n.39 Seneca, Ep. 27. Compare the enslaved worker of Habinnas in Petronius, Sat. 68-70. Calvisius sets the limits of acceptability for us by outsourcing excessive intellectual work to his enslaved workers. On having enslaved workers memorize philosophy and drama, see Plutarch, Table Talk 7.8, 711B–C.

p.50 n.a “dusty journey up from Jerusalem to Damascus in Syria” The story is told several times in Acts 9:1–19, 22:6–21, and 26:12–18. It is unclear if his companions all saw the light and/or heard both sides of the otherworldly conversation. On the date of Acts, see Clare K. Rothschild, Luke-Acts and the Rhetoric of History: An Investigation of Early Christian Historiography (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), and Shelly Matthews, “Does Dating Luke-Acts in the Second Century Affect the Q Hypothesis?,” in Gospel Interpretation and the Q-Hypothesis, ed. Mogens Müller and Heike Omerzu (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 245­–66.

p.51 n.b “And a plausible guess is that they were enslaved attendants” The language of fellowship (koinonia) is balanced by their stereotypically servile actions as “eavesdroppers.”

p.51 n.1 On Jews as enslavers, see Catherine Hezser, “Slavery and the Jews,” in Bradley and Cartledge, The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. 1, 438-55; Hezser, Jewish Slavery in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001); Hezser, “The Impact of Household Slaves on the Jewish Family in Roman Palestine,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 34 (2003): 375-424; Hezser, “‘The Slave of a Scholar is Like a Scholar’: Stories about Rabbis and Their Slaves in the Babylonian Talmud,” in Creation and Composition: the Contribution of the Bavli Redactors (Stammaim) to the Aggadah, ed. Jeffrey L. Rubenstein (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 181–200.

p.52 n.2 Sarah E. Rollens, “Rethinking the Early Christian Mission,” in The Gospels and Their Receptions: Festschrift Joseph Verheyden, ed. Henk Jan de Jonge, Mark Grundeken, John Kloppenborg, and Christopher Tuckett (Leuven: Peeters, 2022), 557–578, and Cavan Concannon, “Economic Aspects of Intercity Travel among the Pauline Assemblies,” in Paul and Economics: A Handbook, ed. Thomas R. Blanton IV and Raymond Pickett (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017), 333–60.

p.54 n.3 On associations of Roman citizens, see Sailakshmi Ramgopal, “Mobility,” in A Cultural History of Western Empires in Antiquity, ed. Carlos F. Noreña (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 131­–152. See discussion of early Christians as organized following the model of voluntary associations see John S. Kloppenborg, Christ’s Associations: Connecting and Belonging in the Ancient City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) and discussion below.

p.55 n.3a “here too, in the warm homes of Christ followers we hear their soft footsteps” So, Jennifer Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 45: “domestic slaves would have tended to [their] needs, from washing [their] feet upon entering the household to preparing food for communal meals.” 

p.55 n.4 Ulrike Roth, “Paul and Slavery: Economic Perspectives,” in Paul and Economics: A Handbook, ed. Thomas R. Blanton IV and Raymond Pickett (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017), 155–82.

p.56 n.5 On Ephesus’ fishermen: IEph 20 Cf. PSI VIII 901; four freedwomen: AE 1975.179.

p.56 n.6  Luke 8:3.

p.57 n.7 On Paul and citizenship, see Calvin J. Roetzel, Paul: The Man and the Myth (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 19–22. Paul’s claim to citizenship appears, quite suddenly, in Acts 22:22-29, 25:6–12. See also Richard A. Horsley, “Paul’s Shift in Economic ‘Location’ in the Locations of the Roman Imperial Economy,” in Paul and Economics, ed. Blanton and Pickett, 89–124.

p.58 n.8 Paul and work, see Todd D. Still, “Did Paul Loathe Manual Labor? Revisiting the Work of Ronald F. Hock on the Apostle’s Tentmaking and Social Class,” JBL 125.4 (2006): 781–95. On Greco-Roman voluntary associations and early Christianity, see John S. Kloppenborg, Christ’s Associations: Connecting and Belonging in the Ancient City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). The refusal of compensation assimilated Paul and his peers to those philosophers who refused remuneration, allowing them to distinguish themselves from both establishment medics and silver-tongued charlatans. In this way, they both imitated and subverted the more recognizable and profitable forms of Greco-Roman medicine. Yet all the Apostles were willing to accept donations that were ostensibly on behalf of others, and here they teeter on the edge of their self-proclaimed moral high ground. According to Acts, Peter accepted (and seems to have expected) donations, but this money was redistributed to those who needed it. Paul refused money from the Corinthians (2 Cor 11:8), but only because of the gifts he received from other assemblies. His work among the cash-strapped Thessalonians was sponsored by a series of charitable donations that he received from the Philippians. To Paul, the donations that supported him were not payment--at least certainly not to him, a mere servile emissary of God overseeing the dissemination of God’s message. In his mind, if the Philippians accrued “credit” with anyone, then it was with God, Paul’s patron and enslaver (Phil. 4:15–19). On Paul as administrator and overseer figure, see John K. Goodrich, Paul as an Administrator of God in 1 Corinthians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Goodrich, “Overseers as Stewards and the Qualifications for Leadership in the Pastoral Epistles,” ZNW 104.1 (2013): 77–97.

p.58 n.9 Emerson B. Powery, “Reading with the Enslaved: Placing Human Bondage at the Center of the Early Christian Story,” in Bitter the Chastening Rod: Africana Biblical Interpretation after Stony the Road We Trod in the Age of BLM,SayHerName, and MeToo, ed. Mitzi J. Smith, Angela N. Parker, and Ericka S. Dunbar Hill (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2022), 71–90. 

p.59 n.9a “If we categorize the apostles as medical specialists” To look at what Jesus and his first followers did through ancient eyes is difficult: much of the evidence comes from later, when devastating wars, profound social shifts, and important intellectual movements changed the cultural and political landscape. We have no alternative, however, than to look through the tissue of these later narratives. Jesus was not the only religious figure who dispatched others to advertise his teachings. The second-century satirist Lucian wrote that a certain Alexander, the founder of the popular (and, in Lucian’s view, fraudulent) cult of the serpent Glycon, sent emissaries abroad to advertise the shrine’s miraculous success and attract tourists. The messengers of Christ were similar but unmoored; they were mobile repositories of power who were perpetually in motion. 

     In many ways, Jesus and the Twelve resemble traveling doctors. All kinds of early Christian texts depict them healing the sick, casting out demons, and even raising the dead. These public displays of power and proficiency were a way to publicize one’s cause; intellectual debates, miracles, healthcare, and fortune-telling all took place out in the open, in the marketplaces and streets of the cities. Using the term “doctor” to describe the apostles might have offended the sensibilities of the official civic physicians who worked in Alexandria, but even the most affluent physicians participated in public medical contests that appeared, to many onlookers, a great deal like miracles. Though the label of wonderworker was one that Galen tried to avoid, anyone in the medical profession was vulnerable to that characterization. The work of Jesus and his disciples, thus, lay at the intersection of medicine and marvel, and it also crossed the threshold between public performance and private consultation. Jesus is not only shown healing in public; he was called to bedside consults in the houses of a centurion (Matt. 8:5) and a synagogue leader (Luke 8:41). 

     For discussion, see Wendt, At the Temple Gates, 114–45; Giovanni Battista Bazzana, “Early Christian Missionaries as Physicians: Healing and its Cultural Value in the Greco-Roman Context,” NovT 51.3 (2009): 232–51. For early Christian artwork depicting Jesus as a doctor, see Lee M. Jefferson, Christ the Miracle Worker in Early Christian Art (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014). For the literary depiction of Jesus and his apostles as wonderworkers, see Robyn Faith Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), and Walsh, Popularizing Jesus: The Gospels as Roman Literature, forthcoming. We might, as some have done, think of ancient healthcare as a two-tier medical system with properly trained doctors catering to the wealthy and lower-status medics administering to the poor. We could go further and talk about the distinctions between medical specialists in major cities and generalists in rural areas, or the differences between doctors and magicians, or between Roman and foreign medicine. Such distinctions have utility, but they also entrench rhetorical and socioeconomic divisions that obscure the public nature of ancient healthcare. Regardless of status, physicians were still dependent on public perception. See Vivian Nutton, AncientMedicine (New York: Routledge, 2004), 92. 

     In the most affluent and cosmopolitan cities of the empire, Jesus’s delegates would have found themselves competing with other religious and medical experts. We catch whispers of them in biblical stories: some are casting out demons in Jesus’s name, as in Luke 9:49 and Acts 19:13. Jesus himself was apparently unconcerned about these rivals, but sharper divisions are reflected in later tradition. When Peter landed in Rome, he found himself embroiled in a contest—which he inevitably won—with the magician Simon Magus (as told in the Acts of Peter). The narrative of these events comes from a period in the second century when Rome was flooded with divinatory experts and self-described doctors, and, consequently, it is difficult to know if it accurately depicts the religious and medical landscape of the mid-to-late first century. But these images of apostles facing off against the magico-medical celebrities of their day place the work of the apostles in a particular professional niche.

     In his own letters, Paul focused on his role as an authoritative interpreter of scripture. In founding his assemblies, he catered primarily to a Gentile audience, albeit one that included Gentiles who admired Jewish religious practices, frequented synagogues, and supported diaspora Jewish assemblies. In these contexts, Paul’s ties to the Jerusalem Temple and his credentials as a Pharisee helped him to position himself as an authority on things like law observance, circumcision, and proper diet. On Paul as a divinatory authority figure, see Jennifer Eyl, Signs, Wonders,and Gifts: Divination in the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). On Paul in general and the sometimes blurry line between ‘Jews’ and ‘Gentiles,’ see Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagan’s Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

     Later, in the crowded religious marketplace of second-century Rome, many leveraged their specifically Judean identity to present themselves as expert interpreters of the law, astrologers, exorcists, prophets, and dream interpreters. In a late first-century text by Juvenal, we catch sight of a (caricatured) Judean “high priestess” who is an intermediary for heaven and an interpreter of the laws of Jerusalem. We might be suspicious of these claims, but for a Roman merchant or artisan, stressed by financial or romantic woes and familiar with Jewish practices only through hearsay, a horoscope drawn up by an ‘exotic’ priestess might have held some appeal. A comparison with Paul might seem inappropriate, but to an outsider, he made some equally potent claims: he professed to have had a vision of the risen Christ (1 Cor. 15:8) and to have been entrusted with the ability to interpret “the oracles of God” and “myster[ies]” (Rom. 3:1-2; 11:25). That he could compellingly interweave his interpretation of the Hebrew Bible with a philosophically informed ethical program made his message more authoritative, but not categorically different. See Juvenal, Sat. 6.548-52. On Paul: Heidi Wendt, At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). The vision of the third heaven referred to in 2 Cor. 12 may be another example of Paul’s visionary experiences. Certainly, some early Christian readers believed that Paul was referring to himself, and many modern interpreters agree. On the reception of this passage, see Vernon K. Robbins, “The Legacy of 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 in the Apocalypse of Paul,” in Paul and the Corinthians: Studies on a Community in Conflict, ed. T. J. Burke and J. K. Elliott (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 327–339, and James Buchanan Wallace, Snatched into Paradise (2 Cor. 12:1-10): Paul’s Heavenly Journey in the Context of Early Christian Experience (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011).

p.59 n.10 Quinquatrus: Ovid, Fast. 3.809-21. 

p.59 n.11 Celsus is preserved in Origen, Cels. 3.55. Laundering clothes is the image for the salvation of martyrs in Revelation 7:14;  and Jesus’s clothes are bleached better than any launderer could have accomplished at the Transfiguration in Mark 9:3; Christians are identified as fullers in Pliny, Ep. 10.96; Justin Martyr’s school is mentioned in Acts of Justin A.3. As many scholars have noted, Celsus intends to insult Christianity and its adherents, but this does not mean that his analysis of Christian socioeconomics was wrong. After all, his comments about artisans were intended as a similarly damning indictment of the group.

p.60 n.12 On porters (saccarii) in Roman ports, see Nicolas Tran, “La mention épigraphique des métiers artisanaux et commerciaux en Italie centro-méridionale,” in Vocabulaire et expression de l’économie dans le monde antique, ed. Jean Andreau and Véronique Chankowski (Bordeaux: Ausonius, 2007), 119–41 [124]. The enslaved workers may have been rented. See Petronius, Sat. 117.11, and Protagoras in Gellius, NA 5.3.1–6. 

    On warehouse managers: TPSulp. 46 and 44. Giovanni Becatti, Scavi di Ostia, Vol. 4, Mosaici e pavimenti marmorei. 2 vols. (Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1961), 2:35-37, no. 58, plates 187–88. See also Nicolas Tran, “The Work Statuses of Slaves and Freedmen in the Great Ports of the Roman World (First Century BCE-Second Century CE),” trans. Ethan Rundell, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 68.4 (2013): 999–1025.

    On co-ownership by voluntary associations, see Cleon, a tri-lingual worker enslaved to salt-farmers near Cagliari in Sardinia (CIL I2 2226), and a legal ruling in Dig. 2.4.10.4 that presumes that corporate entities could “own” enslaved people. See also CIG 3071, in which a wealthy man bequeathed enslaved people to assist with the dedication of a sanctuary gifted by him to his associates in Pergamum. For co-ownership in Egypt, see P. Oxy. 44.3197. For co-ownership by Jews, see Hezser, Jewish Slavery, 290, who cites A. E. Cowley, Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), no. 28. On early Christians pooling resources, see Acts 4:32. See also Ulrike Roth, “Paul, Philemon, and Onesimus,” ZNW 105.1 (2014): 102–130.

p.60 n.13 Quote on “pauperizing” from Roth, “Paul and Slavery,” 164. There is a fierce debate about the social location of early Christians and their distribution (or lack thereof) across a wide range of social locations. The most well-known contribution is that of sociologist Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). New Testament Scholars have been influenced by Steven J. Friesen, “Poverty in Pauline Studies: Beyond the So-called New Consensus,” JSNT 26.3 (2004): 323–61. This piece, in turn, was influenced by the work of Justin Meggitt. For a survey of the twists and turns of the scholarly debate, see Timothy A. Brookins, “Economic Profiling of Early Christian Communities,” in Blanton and Pickett, Paul and Economics, 57–87.

p.61 n.13a “In 70 C.E., after a bitterly hot summer and an eight-month siege, Jerusalem fell” See Josephus, Jewish War. He writes that “almost 100,000” were enslaved and later gives the more precise figure of 97,000.

p.62 n.14 “Later Christian writers liked to imagine that their religious forefathers” Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.5.3; Epiphanius, Panarion 29.7.7-8; Epiphanius, On Weights and Measures 15.

p.63 n.15 Pompey (63 BCE). Cassius (52-51 BCE) enslaved thirty thousand Jews at Tarichea (Josephus, J.W. 1.8.9) and later enslaved four cities (Josephus, J.W. 1.11.2; Ant. 14.11.2). Gaius (4 BCE) enslaved those who resisted in the Galilee (J.W. 2.5.1). Claudia Aster: CIL X 1971. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, roughly 4,000 Jews were shipped to Sardinia by Tiberius in 19 C.E. Prior to the siege of Jerusalem, Titus allegedly enslaved 2,130 women and children from Japha in the Galilee (J.W. 3.7.31). See discussion in Hezser, Jewish Slavery, 229; Ephraim E. Urbach, “The Laws Regarding Slavery as a Source for Social History of the Period of the Second Temple, the Mishnah and Talmud,” in Papers of the Institute of Jewish Studies, University College London, Vol. 1, ed. J. G. Weiss (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1964), 1–94 [31]; Gideon Fuks, “Where Have All the Freedmen Gone? On an Anomaly in the Jewish Grave-Inscriptions from Rome,” Journal of Jewish Studies 36 (1985): 25–32.

     Enslaved Judeans make cameos in the writings of the late first- and second-century authors Josephus, Petronius, Suetonius, and Lucian. On Paul as a religious expert akin to those enslaved and trafficked, see Wendt, At the Temple Gates.

p.63 n.16 On the titles of the Gospels, see Annette Yoshiko Reed, “ΕΥΑΓΓΕΛΙΟΝ: Orality, Textuality, and the Christian Truth in Irenaeus’ Adversus Haereses,” VC 56.1 (2002): 11–46. On anonymity and its power, see Tom Geue, Author Unknown: The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019). For the view that the titles (as opposed to a tradition about authorship) of the Gospels date to the time of their earliest circulation, see Simon J. Gathercole, “The Titles of the Gospels in the Earliest New Testament Manuscripts,” ZNW 104 (2013): 33–76, and Gathercole, “The Alleged Anonymity of the Canonical Gospels,” JTS 69.2 (2018): 447–76. On elite notions of Roman authorship and the erasure of assistants, see Joseph Howley, “Visible Erasure: Writing Personnel and Equipment in Latin Verse,” forthcoming. On the “unmastered” form of the Gospels, see Robyn Walsh, “IVDEA DICTA: The Gospels as Imperial ‘Captive Literature,’” in Class Struggle in the New Testament, ed. Robert Myles (Minneapolis: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2019), 89–114. Walsh defines imperial Captive Literature as “works that reflect on the places and persons in conflict with and subjugation to the empire.” I would add some ambiguity to this and suggest that the composition of such literature deliberately exploited the memories and minds of enslaved works and perhaps also represents, in fragmentary form, their interventions. 

p.64 n.16a “Graffiti from the back alleys and brothels of Pompeii, places not usually frequented by elites…” On this graffito, see Kristina Milnor, Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

p.64 n.16b “best known in antiquity for its hot springs and the cult of the Syrian goddess Atargatis” The cult of the Syrian goddess Atargatis made Hierapolis a major pilgrimage site. See J. L. Lightfoot, ed. and trans., Lucian: On the Syrian Goddess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

p.65 n.17 Papias is cited in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.15 (trans. Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers LCL).

Christian tradition often identifies Mark with a man called John Mark, mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles as an assistant or “helper” to Paul and Barnabas, but there is nothing in the New Testament that describes John Mark (or any other Mark) as an author (though 1 Peter references a Mark to whom Peter dictated the letter. This composition almost certainly exploited a pre-existing tradition that linked Peter and Mark). 

p.65 n.18 Throughout the Gospel, we find not just the use of Aramaic words and phrases, but also vestiges of Aramaic. On Mark’s knowledge of Aramaic: Mark 5:41; 7:11, 34; 14:36; 15:22, 34. Latinisms in Mark include 4:21 (modius); 12:14 (census); 12:42 (quadrans); 15:15 (flagellare); and 15:16 (praetorium). Though I do not believe that Mark was influenced by Aramaic sources, it is worth noting Maurice Casey, Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

p.66 n.19 For a more detailed exposition of my argument here, see my “Fashioning Mark: Early Christian Discussions about the Scribe and Status of the Second Gospel,” NTS 67.2 (2021): 181–204. For the papyrological evidence for translators and their social status, see Rachel Mairs, “Hermēneis in the Documentary Record from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt: Interpreters, Translators and Mediators in a Bilingual Society,” Journal of Ancient History 7.2 (2019): 1–53.

p.67 n.20 Aulus Gellius, NA 1.7.1; 13.21.16-17; James E. G. Zetzel, “Emendavi ad Tironem: Some Notes on Scholarship in the Second Century A.D,” HSCP 77 (1973): 225–43.

p.67-68 n.20a “Whoever wrote the Gospel turned a Galilean message into written Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean.” Koine was formed through the language contact generated by movement, displacement, trade, and conquest. As such, and as the common dialect of displaced people, it was an appropriate medium for the movement of the Jesus message. It’s worth noting that the register of Mark’s Greek is also unsophisticated and that this was not always the case with koine (compare here Strabo and Plutarch). The rise of koine is often associated with Alexander the Great and his sprawling Greek-speaking empire. On the history of the Greek language, see Stephen Colvin, A Brief History of Ancient Greek (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).

p.69 n.20b "the apostle Paul–the onetime Pharisee..." Although, as Paula Fredriksen has shown, he never ceases to be a Pharisee. See Paula Fredriksen, "Paul, the Perfectly Righteous Pharisee," in Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine, The Pharisees (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021), 112–135 [112–113].

p.69 n.20c “We don’t know the charges that had led to Paul’s imprisonment…” On chastity in early Christianity, see Virginia Burrus, Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of Apocryphal Acts (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1987); Elizabeth A. Castelli, “Virginity and its Meaning for Women’s Sexuality in Early Christianity,” in A Feminist Companion to Patristic Literature, ed. Amy-Jill Levine with Maria Mayo Robbins (London: Continuum, 2008), 72–100. 

     On food sacrificed to idols, see Alex T. Cheung, Idol Food in Corinth: Jewish Background and Pauline Legacy (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999); John Fotopoulos, “Arguments Concerning Food Offered to Idols: Corinthian Quotations and Pauline Refutations in a Rhetorical Partitio (1 Corinthians 8:1–9),” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 67.4 (2005): 611–31; David Horrell, “Idol-Food, Idolatry, and Ethics in Paul,” in Idolatry: False Worship in the Bible, Early Judaism and Christianity, ed. Stephen C. Barton (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 120–40; Emma Wasserman, “‘An Idol is Nothing in the World’ (1 Cor 8:4): The Metaphysical Contradictions of 1 Corinthians 8:1–11:1 in the Context of Jewish Idolatry Polemics,” in Portraits of Jesus: Studies in Christology, ed. Susan E. Myers (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 201–27.

p.70 n.20c “If he was lucky, they would hurl only abuse.” On the mocking of prisoners, see Mark 14:65; 4 Maccabees 6:1-30; Plutarch, Life of Pompey 24.7-8. Degrading and mocking condemned prisons was a favorite pastime of Roman authorities, with forms of humiliation ranging from public rape, to forced nudity, to role-playing. Instances of guards heckling inmates are transhistorical. For a modern example, see Harriet Kryzykowski’s testimony narrated in Eyal Press, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2021), 24. 

    On the archaeology of Roman prisons, see Mark Letteney and Matthew Larsen, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming), who discuss the lunate windows through which food and other objects were passed. In the first century C.E., Columella specified that enslaved laborers who were chained should be kept “in an underground prison, as wholesome as possible, receiving light through a number of narrow windows built so high from the ground that they cannot be reached with the hand.” (On Agriculture 1.6.3).

     On Paul’s experience of incarceration, see Matthew Larsen, Early Christians and Incarceration: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

 On prisons in antiquity, see Cécile Bertrand-Dagenbach, Alain Chauvot, Jean-Marie Salamito, and Denise Vaillancourt, Carcer: prison et privation de liberté dans l'Antiquité classique: actes du colloque de Strasbourg (5 et 6 décembre 1997) (Paris: De Boccard, 1999); Cécile Bertrand-Dagenbach, Alain Chauvot, Jean-Marie Salamito and Denise Vaillancourt, Carcer II. Prison et privation de liberté dans l'Empire romain et l'Occident médiéval. Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg, décembre 2000 (Paris: De Boccard, 2004); Valerio Neri, “Chiesa e carcere in età tardoantica,” in Carcer II. Prison et privation de liberté dans l’Empire romain et l’Occident médiéval, Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg (décembre 2000), ed. Cécile Bertrand-Dagenbach, Alain Chauvot, Jean-Marie Salamito, and Denise Vaillancourt (Paris: De Boccard, 2005), 243–56; T. J. Cadoux, “The Roman Carcer and Its Adjuncts,” GR 55.2 (2008): 202–21; Hillner, Prison; Matthew D. C. Larsen, “Carceral Practices and Geographies in Roman North Africa: A Case Study,” SLA 3.4 (2019): 547–80; L. Stephanie Cobb, “From Prison to Palace: The Carcer as Heterotopia in North African Martyr Accounts,” in Desiring Martyrs, ed. Harry O. Maier and Katharina Waldner (Berlin: De Gruyter: 2020), 137–54; Julia Hillner, “Female Crime and Female Confinement in Late Antiquity,” in Social Control in Late Antiquity, ed. Kate Cooper and Jamie Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 15–38; Mark Letteney and Matthew Larsen, “A Roman Military Prison at Lambaesis,” SLA 5.1 (2021): 65–102.

p.72 n.21 Porphyry, On the Life of Plotinus, 8.  For a different interpretation, see Jeremiah Coogan, “Transforming Textuality: Porphyry, Eusebius, and Late Ancient Tables of Contents,” SLA 5.1 (2021): 6-27.

p.73 n.22 On outdoor education, see Raffaella Cribiore, Writing, Teachers, and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 18, 25. A mural from Pompei depicts students learning outdoors while passers-by glance at their work over their shoulders. 

There may be some evidence for (potentially enslaved) scribes who specialized in prison transcription. The Zeno archive (whose texts represent the work of a very large number of enslaved workers) contains several prison letters written in the same hand, which Larsen and Letteney suggest may be indicative of a single scribe: “It is possible that these requests to Zeno were all written by the same person. It is certain that they were produced at least by writers with remarkably similar training, analogous formats for such letters, and who even use identical stock phrases to render a prisoner’s pleas. In either case, the similarities suggest that these letters are not written by prisoners,” in Larsen and Letteney, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration, forthcoming. On the representation of enslaved people in the Zeno archive, see Roger Bagnall, Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 55–61.

p.73 n.22a “Paul had plenty of time to prepare—in his head—what he would say in advance” On mental preparation, see Quintilian, Inst. 10.3.19–20, and his student Pliny, Ep. 9.36.2, with discussion in Sean Gurd, Work in Progress: Literary Revision as Social Performance in Ancient Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 10. In literary accounts, enslaved workers sit at the feet of their enslavers. In the scenario I have imagined, the scribe would have looked down upon the indistinct figure of Paul below. The spatial dynamics may have flipped the conventional arrangement of power and “invert[ed] the perspective”; see G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 149. 

p.74 n.23 Market square vendors: See P. Oxy VI. 932 and Roger S. Bagnall and Raffaella Cribiore, Women’s Letters from Ancient Egypt, 300 BC–AD 800 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 62. In some of these ancient missives dictated by women to secretaries, we can even see fatigue setting in; as the letter progresses, the scribe abandons their initial plan to elevate the writing and shifts to the less cumbersome task of taking dictation.

p.76 n.24 Matt. 19:12. On Origen, see Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.8.2 (self-castration) and 6.23.1–2 (Ambrose’s gift). To be read with discussion in Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 42-43.

p.76 n.25 On the Hexapla: Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), and Jeremiah Coogan, “Tabular Thinking in Late Ancient Palestine,” in Knowledge Construction in Late Antiquity, ed. Monika Amsler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023), 57-81.

p.78 n.26 Origen’s hypothesis is reported in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.12–14.

p.78 n.26a “One interpretatively important example from Romans 5:1” Scholars have devoted a great deal of energy to sorting out the ‘original’ reading here and its interpretive consequences. The subjunctive and indicative are, admittedly, different understandings of peace that can be put to different rhetorical and theological ends; however, their differences do not necessarily imply textual interference or ‘corruption.’ The same pronunciation issue involving the subjunctive and the indicative reappears in 1 Cor 15:49. For a discussion of this passage, see Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (2nd ed.; New York: United Bible Societies, 1994), 452.

p.78 n.26b “Collaboration with enslaved workers is invisible to us not only because dependence upon one’s social inferiors was embarrassing…” On the embarrassment caused by dependence on enslaved workers, see the examples in Moss, “The Secretary,” and in Kutner, “Numeracy.” 

p.79 n.27 On tools: Aristotle, Eth. Nic. 1161a30–b6; Varro, Rust. 1.17.1.; Frontinus, Aq. 2. On body parts: Cicero, Ad fam. 16.10.2; Martial, Ep. 1.10; 14.208. On the enslaved worker as a body part: Sarah Blake, “Now You See Them: Slaves and Other Objects as Elements of the Roman Master,” Helios 39.2 (2012): 193–211; Blake, “In Manus: Pliny’s Letters and the Arts of Mastery,” in Roman Literary Cultures: Domestic Politics, Revolutionary Poetics, Civic Spectacle, ed. A. Keith and J. Edmondson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 89–107. On Jewish authors referring to enslaved people as body parts and tools see: Hezser, Jewish Slavery, 277–299 (y. Peah 4:6, 18b and y. Qid. 1:3 60a).

p.79 n.27a “Athletes, surgeons, artists, artisans, and musicians are known for their neuromuscular virtuosity and dexterous fingers…” On neuromuscular skills, see Shinichi Furuya, Takanori Oku, Fumio Miyazaki, and Hiroshi Kinoshita, “Secrets of Virtuoso: Neuromuscular Attributes of Motor Virtuosity in Expert Musicians,” Scientific Reports  5 (2015): 15750. This study concluded that “Neither the age of musical training initiation nor the amount of extensive musical training before the age of twenty was a predictor” of the varying skill levels among the most talented.

p.79 n.27b “Yet in the ancient model, all decisions and skills are credited to the enslaver, who becomes for us the author.” It is worth noting that we often do something analogous in English: when people talk about renovating their homes, they take credit for work that they are (usually) not doing themselves. (This example is adapted from William Fitzgerald, “The Slave, Between Absence and Presence,” in Unspoken Rome: Absence in Latin Literature and Its Reception, ed. Tom Geue and Elena Giusti [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021], 239–49.) This isn’t just about physical labor. Even if we oversee a project and make hundreds of decisions, most of us can’t do all the cognitive work ourselves. Moreover, there are thousands of other decisions, predicated on a familiarity with raw materials, sensory skills, and pure kinesthetic experience that we do not have, that happen behind the scenes and out of sight. I do not wish to elide the transhistorical differences through this comparison: the ethical situations of these ancient and modern phenomena both are and are not comparable.

p.81 n.28 Inscription: ST Sa 35 =Ima. Ita. CIL 12.3556a. My analysis owes a great deal to Katherine MacDonald, “Four Footprints, Two Languages, One Tile.” Sandra R. Joshel and Lauren Hackworth Petersen, The Material Life of Roman Slaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 87–88. On bilingual inscriptions, see the groundbreaking study of J. N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

p.82 n.29 “hidden transcript” is from James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); “floating fragments” are discussed in Dan-el Padilla Peralta, “Epistemicide: The Roman Case,” Classica. Revista Brasileira de Estudos Clássicos 33.2 (2020): 151–86 [167].

p.83 n.30 Tax rolls from the Fayum: P. Mich 223.2665. H. C. Youtie, “Callimachus in the Tax Rolls,” in Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress of Papyrology, ed. Deborah Samuel (Toronto: Hakkert, 1970): 545–551. In her classic study of the meaning of boredom-inducing repetitious work, Barbara Garson writes that, in addition to resentment and sabotage, she found “quite the opposite of nonco-operation… Whatever creativity goes into sabotage, a more amazing ingenuity goes into manufacturing goals and satisfactions on jobs where measurable achievement has been all but rationalized out.” In Barbara Garson, All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work (New York: Doubleday, 1975), xi.

p.84 n.31 For the full argument see Candida R. Moss, “Between the Lines: Looking for the Contributions of Enslaved Literate Laborers in a Second-Century Text (P. Berol. 11632),” SLA 5.3 (2021): 432–52. 

p.85 n.32 Exhortation to wakefulness in the New Testament is connected to the Parousia and eschatological expectations. Compare Rom. 13:11–14; Eph. 5:14); Mark 13:35; Luke 12:35–40; Matt. 25:13. On enslaved people (as Christians) staying awake all night for the return of the enslaver, see Luke 12:35–40. On sleep deprivation and enslaved workers, see Mitzi Smith, Insights from African American Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017), 80–97 and Candida R. Moss, “Chronometric Violence: Sleeplessness, Slavery, and the Mechanics of Control,” in The Wakeful Night, ed. Dawn LaValle Norman, Kylie Crabbe, and Sarah Gador-Whyte (Cambride: Cambridge university press, forthcoming).

p.87 n.33 Styloi (Gal. 2:9); Stoicheia (Gal. 4:3, 9). This language of bookwork was pointed out to me by Jeremiah Coogan. Paul himself seems to have embraced the language; in the section written in his own hand, he refers to the stigmata on his own body. The marks are often seen as scars or brands, but they could also refer to written marks (Gal.6:17).

p.87 n.34 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge, 2008; orig. pub. 1938), 3.

p.89 n.1 My rendition follows Mark 2:1-12, but versions of the story are also found in Matt 9:2-8 and Luke 5:17-26. To my knowledge, the only scholar to consider the possibility that the four were enslaved people is Anna Rebecca Solevåg, Negotiating the Disabled Body: Representations of Disability in Early Christian Texts (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018). My reading is distinguished from hers in as much as I see the workers engaged in agentive work.

p.89 n.2 Academic translation and commentary: Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8 (Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries Series; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 215: “And a paralytic was brought to him, carried by four of his friends.”

p.89 n.2b “The sight of a man being carried was common enough in the first century” On the association of wealth and being carried, see Pliny the Elder, who writes, “We walk with the feet of others, we recognize our acquaintances with the eyes of others, rely on others’ memory to make our salutations,” Pliny, NH 29.8.19. 

p.91 n.2c “As cognitive scientists have argued, group labor distributes agency among its members.” My use of the concept of distributed cognition is borrowed from the work of Seraphina Cuomo and Andrew Riggsby. It originates in the field of cognitive science and the work of Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995). Hutchins’s study was based on how the crews of ships distribute cognition among themselves. For the use of this idea among classicists, see Miranda Anderson, Douglas Cairns, Mark Sprevak, eds., Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); Andrew Riggsby, Mosaics of Knowledge: Representing Information in the Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

p.92 n.3 “See through” This phrase is adapted from Joseph A. Howley, Aulus Gellius and Roman Reading Culture: Text, Presence, and Imperial Knowledge in the ‘Noctes Atticae’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 175. 

p.93 n.3a “There are good reasons to think that enslaved co-authors were involved in the composition of all the canonical Gospels.” Matthew is presented by Papias as a translator who translated “according to the best of his ability,” and thus, like Mark, might be assumed to have been servile or assisted by servile workers. On Matthew/Levi’s social status, see Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 6.25, and Jerome, Vir ill. 3. See discussion of this phrase in my “Fashioning Mark,” 187n21, and Mairs, “Hermēneis,” 8. Luke used assistants known as “underlings of the word” in Luke 1:2. “Underlings” is not the usual translation of the Greek term in Luke 1:2, but the more conventional rendering “servant” obscures their unfree status. Tradition maintains that John, the author of the Fourth Gospel, was almost a hundred years old when he wrote his Gospel. We might infer that he would have needed assistance.

p.93 n.4 For an assessment of traditional narratives about the composition of the Gospel of John see Hugo Méndez, “Did the Johannine Community Exist?,” JSNT 42 (2020): 350–374.

p.94 n.5 On Hagar and her reception, see Nyasha Junior, Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). For the connection between Hagar and the experiences of African-American women, see also Renita J. Weems, Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible (San Diego: LuraMedia, 1988); Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993); and Williams, “Hagar in African-American Biblical Appropriation,” in Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Perspectives, ed. Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 171–84; Diana L. Hayes, Hagar’s Daughters: Womanist Ways of Being in the World (New York: Paulist, 1995). 

     There are Jewish incantation bowls and religio-medical amulets on which a sick patient is identified solely matrilineally (by their mother’s name). On this, see Tal Ilan, “Women in Jewish Life and Law,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, Vol. 4: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, ed. Steven T. Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 627–46. Compare b.Yoma 83b-84a; Esther Brownsmith, “That’s What She(?) Said: Gendering Authorship and the Hebrew Bible,” as part of the ‘Books Known Only By Title’ project at the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters on March 3, 2021.

p.95 n.5a “Even as he builds a new set of powerful sympathetic ties with his followers, a sense of kinlessness and alienation remains” I draw here on Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 64–81.

p.96 n.5b “The lofty religious connotations are clear: Jesus is the anointed one, even if the person who anoints him before his death in the Gospel is an anonymous low-status, potentially servile woman” We might see this sort of move as evidence of Mark as a kind of subversive biography that resisted the conventions of more elevated biographies of political leaders and focused on more liminal characters. On this, see David Konstan and Robyn Walsh, “Civic and Subversive Biography in Antiquity,” in Writing Biography in Greece and Rome: Narrative Technique and Fictionalization, ed. Koen De Temmerman and Kristoffel Demoen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 26–44. For a recent overview of Mark as biography, see Helen K. Bond, The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020).

p.97 n.6 Enslaved Mary: Winsome Munro, Jesus, Born of a Slave. The Social and Economic Origins of Jesus’ Message(Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1998); Mitzi J. Smith, “Abolitionist Messiah: A Man Named Jesus Born of a Doulē,” in Bitter the Chastening Rod, ed. Mitzi J. Smith, Angela N. Parker, and Ericka S. Dunbar Hill (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2022), 53-70; Smith, Re-Reading the Lukan Jesus for Liberation: Anointed Abolitionist Born of a Doule Called Mary (Eugene, OR: Cascade, forthcoming). On the mistranslation of doulos in modern Bibles, see Smith, “Abolitionist Messiah”; Clarice J. Martin, “Womanist Interpretations of the New Testament: The Quest for Holistic and Inclusive Translation and Interpretation,” in I Found God in Me: A Womanist Biblical Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Mitzi J. Smith (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015), 19–41. Martin notes that translating doulos as ‘servant’ obscures the fact that “service” was “not a matter of choice” and therefore “minimizes the full psychological weight of the institution of slavery itself” (25). For a reading of Mary as a sex worker, see James N. Hoke, “‘Behold, the Lord’s Whore’? Slavery, Prostitution, and Luke 1:38,” BibInt 26.1 (2018): 43–67.

     “Mediterranean naming conventions identified men as their father’s sons” Roman inheritance law privileges patria potestas, the power of the father (paterfamilias).

     “To the ancient reader, the lack of a patronym is a suggestive social brand that marks him as status-less, illegitimate, servile.” Some have seen allegations of illegitimacy in John 8:41 as well.

p.97 n.7 Celsus: Origen, Cels. 1.28-32; Tertullian, On the Shows 30. The Talmudic traditions relay a number of different spellings for Panthera’s name. On the connection between imperialism, colonialization, sex, and desire, see David J. Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 94–124.

p.99 n.8 On natal alienation, see Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, in which he defines enslavement as “the permanent violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons,” 13. 

p.99 n.8a “Mark’s point, subtly put, is: it was the marginal, fatherless child who was chosen. Jesus was once Ishmael” I should acknowledge that the transition from Ishmael to Isaac at the baptism here may reinscribe the rejection of the enslaved Ishmael and sow the seeds for antisemitism in the future.

p.99 n.8b “In Philippians 2:5–11, a passage some believe was once an ancient hymn, Jesus transitions from the “form of a God” to the form of a “slave” (doulos) at his birth” Winsome Munro sees this passage as evidence that Jesus was enslaved from birth (Jesus, Born of a Slave, Chapter Three). Munro’s argument is important because she calls our attention to the meaning of the language. As Smith and Powery have noted, in every instance that we read enslavement as a metaphor, we should justify this move. For a discussion of the hymnic status of these verses, see Gregory P. Fewster, “The Philippians ‘Christ Hymn’: Trends in Critical Scholarship,” Currents in Biblical Research 13.2 (2015): 191–206.

p.100 n.9 On the relationship between the death of Jesus and biographies of Aesop, see Adela Yarbro Collins, “Finding Meaning in the Death of Jesus,” The Journal of Religion 78.2 (1998): 175–96. 

p.101 n.10 Phaedrus, Fab. 3 prologue 43–47, where Phaedrus writes that whereas Aesop had built a footpath, he had constructed a highway. On the importance of Aesop, see Leslie Kurke, Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition,Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). On the Life of Aesop, see Jeremy B. Lefkowitz, “Reading the Aesopic Corpus: Slavery, Freedom, and Storytelling in the Life of Aesop,” in Slaves and Masters in the Ancient Novel, ed. Stelios Panayotakis, Michael Paschalis, and Costas Panayotakis  (Eelde: Barkhuis, 2019), 233–58. On the social status of Phaedrus, which has been contested, see E. Champlin, “Phaedrus the Fabulous,” JRS 95 (2005): 97–123. On Babrius, see Maria Jagoda Luzzatto and Antonio La Penna, eds., Babrii Mythiambi Aesopei (Leipzig: Teubner, 1986). On the fables and their relationship to the parables of Luke, see Justin David Strong, The Fables of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke: A New Foundation for the Study of Parables (Leiden: Brill Schöningh, 2021).

p.101 n.11 Quote is from Babrius, Fab. 47. On parables and fables, see Mary Ann Beavis, “Parable and Fable,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 52.3 (1990): 473–98. 

p.102 n.12 On popular morality and the social origins of fables, see Teresa Morgan, Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). A better choice of language here for an “authorless” text might be “less authored.” It is not that Phaedrus and Mark were not authored; it is that their status prevented them from being strong authors. As a consequence, according to the conventions of Roman literary culture, their texts were even more open to revision than usual.  

p.103 n.13 On the selection of overseers, see Columella, De re rustica 1.2-9. I am grateful to Joseph Howley for conversations about this. See also Grant Nelsestuen, “Overseeing res publica: The Rector as Vilicus in De Re Publica 5,” Classical Antiquity 33.1 (2014): 130–173; Arjan Zuiderhoek, “Sorting out Labour in the Roman Provinces: Some Reflections on Labour and Institutions in Asia Minor,” in Work, Labour, and Professions in the Roman World, ed. Koenraad Verboven and Christian Laes (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 20–35.

p.104 n.14 On the history of this text, Hilary of Poitiers, and the forged manuscript of Hilary’s work, see Kevin Madigan, The Passions of Christ in High-Medieval Thought: An Essay on Christological Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

p.104 n.15 On the problem of managing estates from a distance, see Columella, De re rustica 1.2.1-2.

p.105 n.16 Courageous interpreters: See Munro, Jesus, Born of a Slave, and Smith, Re-Reading the Lukan Jesus.

p.105 n.17 Ancient funerary inscription: ILS 7479, discussed in Jane Gardner, “Slavery and Roman Law,” in Bradley and Cartledge, The Cambridge World History of Slavery, 1.420, and Laura Nasrallah, Archaeology and the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 44n14.

p.106 n.18 See Tom Geue, “Rush Job: Slavery and Brevity in the Early Roman Principate,” Cambridge Classical Journal 68 (2022): 83-111. Here, scholarship on ancient slavery takes its leave from scholarship on modern slavery. For the latter, see Walter Johnson, “Possible Pasts: Some Speculations on Time, Temporality, and the History of Atlantic Slavery,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 45.4 (2000): 485-99. On meandering, see Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 

p.107 n.19 In this case, crucifixion turned victims into the letter tau or ‘T.’ The association between the letter tau and crucifixion is an ancient one; see the conclusion to Lucian, The Consonants at Law. Violence, as geographer James Tyner has written, “is a social and spatial practice”; see James A. Tyner, Space, Place, and Violence: Violence and the Embodied Geographies of Race, Sex, and Gender (London: Routledge, 2011), ix. Important re-readings of the crucifixion, which appropriately place it in the context of enslavement, include Mitzi Smith, “‘He Never Said a Mumbalin’ Word’: A Womanist Perspective of Crucifixion, Sexual Violence and Sacralized Silence,” in When Did We See You Naked? Jesus As a Victim of Sexual Abuse, ed. Jayme R. Reaves, David Tombs, and Rocio Figueroa (London: SCM Press, 2021), 44–66, and Allen Dwight Callahan, “God’s Only Begotten Thug,” in Smith, Parker, and Dunbar Hill, Bitter the Chastening Rod, 39–52.

p.107 n.20 During the Roman Republic, slaveholders could torture and kill their enslaved workers without censure. An inscription from Puteoli reveals that enslavers could contract professional torturers—often enslaved workers themselves—to flog and crucify at a standard rate equivalent to about half a soldier’s daily wage. By the imperial period and the time of Jesus, slaveholders’ ability to kill with impunity had begun to be regulated, but it was still possible for enslaved people to be condemned for minor infractions, most commonly theft. For crucifixion and humor, see Amy Richlin, Slave Theater in the Roman Republic: Plautus and Popular Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 83.

p.108 n.21 Pagan critics on the death of Jesus: Origen, Cels. 7.53–55.

p.109 n.22 Jon Sobrino, Jesus in Latin America (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2004); James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011); M. Shawn Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018). 

p.109 n.23 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2003), 108. On “willingness to speak the bloody truths about their mistreatment,” see Luis Menéndez-Antuña, “The Book of Torture. The Gospel of Mark, Crucifixion, and Trauma,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 90.2 (2022): 377-95. On veiling and unveiling, see Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser (2d ed; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 83–102 [91].

p.110 n.23b “It tells an unthinkable history in which marginalized enslaved death overpowers even a celestial event” The concept of “unthinkable history” comes from Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

p.110 n.24 See Maureen Carroll, “‘The Mourning Was Very Good.’ Liberation and Liberality in Roman Funerary Commemoration,” in Memory and Mourning: Studies on Roman Death, ed. Valerie M. Hope and Janet Huskinson(Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2011), 126–49. On the importance of mourning, see Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery; those being trafficked “confronted a dual crisis: the trauma of death, and the inability to respond appropriately to death,” 152.

p.111 n.25 Wil Gafney, “Of Gods, Men, and Kings,” a sermon published on February 6, 2018. 

p.112 n.26 On Jesus as enslaver and enslaved, see Katherine Shaner, “Enslavement in Early Christianity,” Special Panel at the New England/Eastern Canada Regional Meeting of The Society of Biblical Literature, March 19, 2022.