Chapter Four

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p.115 n.a “Thomas was absent when the resurrected Jesus first appeared to the disciples in the upper room and was, understandably, skeptical about the claims of his friends” John 20:24-28. Arguably, Thomas’s skepticism is perhaps more relatable to modern readers. Any reader of ancient wonder literature (paradoxography) is familiar with postmortem apparitions and conversations with the dead. See Gregory Riley, Resurrection Reconsidered: Thomas and John in Controversy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 63-68; Deborah Prince, “The ‘Ghost’ of Jesus: Luke 24 in Light of Ancient Narratives of Post-Mortem Apparitions,” JSNT 29.3 (2007): 287–31. Many in antiquity were skeptical about such stories, but their positions were only sometimes associated with what we call “atheism.” On the latter, see Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (New York: Knopf, 2015).

p.116 n.1 The Acts of Thomas is one of a cluster of second-century apostolic acts that circulated among early Christians. Translations adapted from Han J. W. Drijvers, “Acts of Thomas—Introduction and Translation,” in New Testament Apocrypha, Volume Two: Writings Relating to the Apostles, Apocalypses and Related Subjects, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher, trans. Robert McLean Wilson (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992), 322–410. For more information on manuscripts, translations, and bibliography, see Jonathan Henry, “Acts of Thomas,” e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha. On pepper and India, see Elizabeth Ann Pollard, “Indian Spices and Roman ‘Magic’ in Imperial and Late Antique Indomediterranea,” Journal of World History 24.1 (2013): 1-23. Ironically, many “luxury” Indian exports were commonplace in their context of origin. I am grateful to Divya Kumar-Dumas for this observation.

p.116 n.1a “Channeling Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane” Compare Mark 14:36; Luke 22:42.

p.117 n.1b “following the footsteps of Alexander the Great” As Apollonius of Tyana did in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana. For a comparison of Apollonius and Thomas, see Kendra Eshleman, “Indian Travel and Cultural Self-Location in the Life of Apollonius and the Acts of Thomas,” in Journeys in the Roman East: Imagined and Real, ed. Maren R. Niehoff (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 183–202. We should note that the Acts of Thomas recounts a largely fictionalized journey and that speculating about the route that Thomas took is a thought experiment. Post-Jewish War, it may have been easier to take the route through the Persian Gulf. From Jerusalem, the route would have run overland to Basra, then by sea to Karachi. On the commercial sea route, see Albrecht Dihle, Umstrittene Daten: Untersuchungen zum Auftreten der Griechen am Roten Meer (Cologne: Opladen, 1965), 16–17, 20–23, and Dihle, “The Conception of India in Hellenistic and Roman Literature,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, No. 10 (190) (1964): 15–23; Kendra Eshleman, “Indian Travel”; Nathanael J. Andrade, The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity: Networks and the Movement of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 94–136, who suggests that confusion of ‘India’ with the trading ports of the Red Sea and south Arabia may mean that Christianity travelled to India later than expected. On the debate between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, see Eivind H. Seland, “Persian Gulf or Red Sea? Two Axes in Ancient Indian Ocean Trade, Where to Go and Why,” World Archaeology 43.3 (2011): 398–409, and Seland, “Trade and Christianity in the Indian Ocean during Late Antiquity,” JLA 5.1 (2012): 72–86. 

p.118 n.1c “the otherwise unknown royal city of Andrapolis” This possibly fictional city should be distinguished from Andropolis, Egypt. For the view that the city mentioned in the text was not in India, see George Huxley, “Geography in the ‘Acts of Thomas,’” GRBS 24.1 (1983): 71–80.

p.118 n.1d “There were no mental maps to orient himself” Ptolemy lived in the second century C.E., whereas Thomas fictively traveled in the first (even if his story was written later). On mapping knowledge as a particularly Roman preoccupation, see Jason König and Tim Whitmarsh, “Ordering Knowledge,” in Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire, ed. Jason König and Tim Whitmarsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3–40. For Ptolemy, see Alexander Jones, Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). It is worth noting that Ptolemy may not have been the inventor of latitude and longitude, but rather a systematizer of existing mathematical systems of knowledge. For the influence of Ptolemy on later Pacific cartography, see Lawrence C. Wroth, “The Early Cartography of the Pacific,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 38.2 (1944): 87–231, 233–68.

p.118 n.1e “With no enslaver from which to derive a modicum of protection” On abuse, see the Parable of the Vineyard (Matt. 21:33–46). Technically, Thomas has a local enslaver, but he also (quite fascinatingly) has two enslavers, one human and one divine. 

p.118 n.1f “Flutists were sexualized in antiquity and the apostle demurely averted his eyes” On this, compare Petronius, Sat. 68. The term flute here does not quite capture the meaning of the original language. 

p.118 n.2 This point is made by Jennifer Glancy, “Slavery in Acts of Thomas,” JECH 2.2 (2012): 3–21. On enslavement in Jewish and Christian pseudepigrapha and apocrypha, see Ronald Charles, The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts (New York: Routledge, 2021). My reading of this story follows that of Glancy, in Slavery in Early Christianity, 13, 96–98.

p.120 n.3 Multiple messengers: Cicero, Att. 2.19.5. Greek translator: Plutarch, Themistocles 6.2. His status as enslaved may well have been compounded by his status as translator and, perhaps, also as ethnic other. Alexander: Pseudo-Callisthenes, The Alexander Romance 1.37. Puetoli: This story is recounted in Cicero, Against Verres 5.154. 

p.120 n.4 Ovid, Met. 9.568-581. See discussion in Chris Londa, “Letters,” in Writing, Enslavement, and Power, ed. Coogan, Howley and Moss, forthcoming. Londa notes that at every stage, the fear of the enslaved courier is registered. For other examples of the dangers faced by enslaved couriers, see Josephus, Life of Flavius Josephus, 48–51, and Peter M. Head, “Named Letter-Carriers Among the Oxyrhynchus Papyri,” JSNT 31.3 (2009): 279–299 [217].  On the divorce certificate: M. Git 2. 3 and T. Git. 2:4, and see discussion in Hezser, Jewish Slavery, 65. 

p.120–21 n.4a “In the parables of Jesus, kings, landowners, and powerful men…” On these stories, see Chapter Eight, and discussions in Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 102-39; Mary Ann Beavis, “Ancient Slavery as an Interpretive Context for the New Testament Servant Parables with Special Reference to the Unjust Steward (Luke 16:1–8),” JBL111.1 (1992): 37–54; Elizabeth Dowling, “Slave Parables in the Gospel of Luke: Gospel ‘Texts of Terror’?,” Australian Biblical Review 56 (2008): 61–68; Mitzi Smith, Insights from African American Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017); Jon Hatter, “Slavery, the Enslaved, and the Gospel of Matthew.” (PhD diss., Loyola University Chicago, 2021). On the violation of the enslaved workers in parables, we should note that the English translation of the Greek term for mockery/mistreatment (hubrizo in Greek) used in Matt. 22:6 obscures the sexual connotations of the mistreatment of the enslaved worker abroad.

p.121 n.5 Enslaved messengers: P. Duk. Inv. 609 and TPSulp. 48. On travel and Christianity, see Timothy Luckritz Marquis, Transient Apostle: Paul, Travel and the Rhetoric of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). For the calculation of fifty miles a day, see John H. Nicholson, “The Delivery and Confidentiality of Cicero’s Letters,” Classical Journal 90.1 (1994): 33–63 [34]. This calculation is based on an analysis of Cicero’s letters. On enslaved literate messengers in maritime commerce, see Jean Andreau, “Les esclaves ‘hommes d’affaires’ et la gestion des ateliers et commerces,” in Mentalités et choix économiques des Romains, ed. Jean Andreau, Jérôme France, and Sylvie Pittia (Bordeaux: Ausonius, 2004), 111–27; Tran, “The Work Statuses of Slaves and Freedmen,” 670–76. 

p.122 n.5a “They were expected to travel simply—no staff, change of clothes, or money was permissible —” For the understanding that disciples’ attire and belongings portrayed them as Cynic-Stoic philosophers, see Adela Collins, Mark: A Commentary (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2007), 299–302.

p.122 n.6 Did. 11.3-12; 12:1-5. The Didache has been dated to between the late first and mid-second century. On the relationship between the Did. and the canonical New Testament works, see Christopher M. Tuckett, “Didache,” in The Reception of the New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers, ed. Andrew F. Gregory and Christopher M. Tuckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 83–128. Compare Herm. Man. 11.12, in which false prophets were characterized using many of the negative traits attributed to “bad slaves”: being talkative, deceptive, impudent, and attracted to luxury.

p.123 n.6a “Alexander was a genuine ancient celebrity whose portrait graced local coins” For the coins of Alexander of Abonoteichus, see discussion in Liv Mariah Yarrow, “Antonine Coinage,” in The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage, ed. William E. Metcalf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 423–454 [445–46]. See also Peter Thonemann, Lucian: Alexander or the False Prophet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), who argues that this text is addressed to the same Celsus who criticized Christianity.

p.124 n.6b “rather than the southern route, which Burrhus surely thought would have been vastly more convenient” It is likely that Burrhus was from Ephesus or its environs. Though residents of both Smyrna and Ephesus sponsored his trip, Ignatius requests of the Ephesians that Burrhus be permitted to stay in Smyrna with him (Ign. Eph. 2.1). If Burrhus was from Ephesus, then the southern road that led to Smyrna through Ephesus would have been easier to access. It is possible that Burrhus only located Ignatius and his party in Smyrna; if that is the case, then he still had to navigate the presumably unfamiliar city. As Peter Head notes in forthcoming work, we know very little about the actual journeys of letter carriers. For a similarly complex issue involving the route of travel, see Cicero, Att. 3.8, in which Marcus is unsure of his brother’s route, and Att. 9.16.4, where he is concerned about the impact of weather on the delivery of a letter. I am grateful to Peter Head for allowing me to read his work prior to publication. There are some (for example, Randolph Richards) who argue that Burrhus was only the emissary, not the secretary. See E. Randolph Richards, “Silvanus Was Not Peter’s Secretary: Theological Bias in Interpreting δια Σιλουανοῦ …εγραψα in 1 Peter 5:12,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 43.3 (2000): 417–32.

p.124 n.7 There are legitimate questions to be asked about whether Ignatius’s journey has been fictionalized. On this, see Yonatan Moss, “‘From Syria All the Way to Rome’: Ignatius of Antioch’s Pauline Journey to Christianity,” in Journeys in the Roman East: Imagined and Real, ed. Maren R. Niehoff (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 409–421. Any reconstruction of Ignatius’s journey faces two problems: the complexity of the literary tradition from which it is extrapolated and the various routes he may have taken from Antioch to Smyrna. On the former issue, see Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch, 3–7. See also Theodor Zahn, Ignatius von Antiochien (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1873). For challenges to the scholarly consensus, see particularly the work of Reinoud Weijenborg, Les lettres d'Ignace d'Antioche, étude de critique littéraire et de théologie. Mis en français par Barthélemy Héroux (Leiden: Brill, 1969); Josep Rius-Camps, The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius, the Martyr (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1980); Robert Joly, Le dossier d'Ignace d'Antioche (Bruxelles: Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1979). Joly’s reconstruction has not yet dislodged the work of Lightfoot. A detailed discussion of Joly’s hypothesis is found in C. P. H. Bammel, “Ignatian Problems,” Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 33.1 (1982): 62–97.

    It’s possible that the soldiers needed Ignatius to justify the free housing they received while transporting prisoners. The emperor Hadrian specified that soldiers should not receive free lodging unless they were ‘on duty,’ as it were, including “transporting prisoners or wild animals” (SEG 59.1365). Hadrian’s declaration is only relevant if we take a late view of the date of Ignatius’s arrest. See discussion in Larsen and Letteney, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration. On the memory of messengers: Jürgen Blänsdorf, Das Thema der Sklaverei in den Werken Ciceros(Stuttgart: Steiner, 2016), 91, 97. The importance of memory in message-delivery is noteworthy, as memory was highly prized in elite paideia.     On exceptional memory skills in professions that are socially devalued today, see, for example, King Beach, “Becoming a Bartender: The Role of External Memory Cues in a Work-Directed Educational Activity,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 7.3 (1993): 191–204; Joy Stevens, “An Observational Study of Skilled Memory in Waitresses,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 7 (1993): 205–17.

p.124 n.7b “What is clear is that he was able to distinguish himself in Ignatius’s eyes; so much so that his role in the composition and delivery of two extant letters is noted in their conclusions” Burrhus is called an elder (presbyteros) in Ign. Eph. 2.1. That an enslaved worker would also hold a position of authority is not altogether unusual. Ignatius also refers to a bishop named Onesimus, who some have speculated was the enslaved Onesimus discussed in Paul’s letter to Philemon. See Shaner, Enslaved Leadership, 89–91. There is some question about whether Burrhus was a secretary, a letter-carrier, or both. I follow Schoedel in suggesting that he may well have served as both. Certainly, a man of Ignatius’s age is likely to have needed a secretary; see discussion in Chapter One, and William R. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch: A Commentary on the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1985), 45. 

p.125 n.8 “Runaway” The language of running presupposes that slavery is a legitimate social structure. On the use of children as a kind of “hostage” that kept enslaved workers docile, see Chapter One. For a servile worker who wanted to return “home” after serving Paul, see Phil. 2:25–26. The request to stay: Ign. Eph. 2.1. Burrhus as a servile name See Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch, 46. “Word of honor” (Phld. 11.2) “Copy” (Eph. 2.1; 11.2). When Ignatius speaks of Burrhus and Crocus, he consistently refers to the honor that they bring to the Ephesians and Smyrnaeans. He describes them as literate objects, calling them “living cop[ies]” of the love of the Ephesians. The word for “copy” here is exemplarium, a Latin loanword used to describe copies of legal documents (Dig. 31.47). Messengers were regularly pictured as extensions of the presence and character of those who had sent them, but their status as breathing objects evokes the Roman elite practice of describing secretaries as tablets and pens; see Howley, “Visible Erasure,” forthcoming. But we should note that Ignatius uses the same language for the Bishop Onesimus (Ign. Trall. 3.2). Other servile messengers (Onesimus, Fronto, and Euplus) are also named in the account (Eph. 2.1). 

    “The trail goes cold” We know that Burrhus went as far as Troas. One of Ignatius’s correspondents, Polycarp of Smyrna, suggests that he sailed from there to Europe, docking first at Neapolis and stopping in Philippi in Macedonia.

p.125 n.9 On the refreshment supplied by Burrhus and Crocus, see Ign. Eph. 2.1; Smyr. 12.1. Elsewhere, Ignatius uses the language of refreshment to ask that other messengers be “refreshed” with material support like food and lodging (Ign. Rom. 10.2); we can infer that not everyone took on this responsibility from Phld. 11.1. On letter-carriers finding work to support themselves, see P.Oxy. XVIII.2190, in which two enslaved workers accompanied a pair of brothers to school in Alexandria. One enslaved worker was a schoolteacher and perhaps took notes on behalf of the brothers; the other attendant worked to cover living expenses. See Cribiore, Gymnastics, 50, 57–59. On the importance of timing, see Cicero, Fam. 9.16.1, and Head, “Onesimus the Letter Carrier and the Initial Reception of Paul’s Letter to Philemon,” JTS 71.2 (2020): 628­­–656 [653]. Cicero notes that timing is an important element in the delivery and reception of letters. We should assume that this skill was transferable to other moments: “Accordingly [I have] instructed the bearer to watch for the right moment to hand you his charge, for a letter delivered unseasonably often annoys us like an inopportune visitor. But if, as I hope, you will have nothing to worry and distract you and my messenger chooses a sufficiently tactful and convenient time to make his approach, I am confident that the request I have to put to you will be readily granted.” (Fam. 9.16.1, trans. Shackleton Bailey). Cited and discussed in Head, “Onesimus,” 643.

p.125 n.10 “This was heroic work” The language of heroic work is adapted from Jürgen Blänsdorf, Das Thema der Sklaverei in den Werken Ciceros (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2016), 91. The length of Ignatius’s journey was calculated using ORBIS, an online resource designed by Walter Scheidel and produced by a collaborative team that included Elijan Meeks, Karl Grossner, and Noemi Alvarez (https://orbis.stanford.edu).

p.125–26 n.10a “Burrhus’s companionship in Ignatius’s final months was a luxury” That he was expensive may gesture not just to the cost of travel but the value of a higher-status literate worker. On the cost of literate workers, see Flower, “Most Expensive Slave.”

p.126–27 n.11 Child messengers were utilized in Rome, ancient Mesopotamia, and late antique and early Islamic Egypt. It is noteworthy that in late antique Egypt, many examples involve monastic communities and children “gifted” to these communities. See Benjamin Hinson, “Send Them to Me by This Little One: Child Letter-carriers in Coptic Texts from Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 80.2 (2021): 275–89. On the problems of identifying enslaved workers in Egyptian monastic contexts, see Christine Luckritz Marquis, “Divining Slavery in Late Antique Egypt: Doulology in the Monastic Works of Paul of Tamma and Shenoute,” in Slavery in the Late Ancient World, 150-700 CE, ed. Chris L. de Wet, Maijastina Kahlos, and Ville Vuolanto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 149–69;  Christian Laes, “Child Slaves at Work in Roman Antiquity,” Ancient Society 38 (2008): 235–83. On children in monastic Egypt, see Caroline Schroeder, Children and Family in Late Antique Egyptian Monasticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). For ancient Mesopotamia, see Seth Richardson, “Walking Capital: The Economic Function and Social Location of Babylonian Servitude,” Journal of Global Slavery 4.3 (2019): 285–342. 

Letter from Hermopolis: SB XII.11084, trans. Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 243. We should note, with Jan Heilmann, that the network of long-distance lending libraries often worked in conjunction with the more commercial book market. The commercial market, however, also depended upon enslaved labor.

p.127 n. 12 Catullus 50 and Duncan F. Kennedy, “Crossing the Threshold: Genette, Catullus and the Psychodynamics of Paratextuality,” in The Roman Paratext: Frame, Text, Readers, ed. Laura Jansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 19–32. 

 These concerns are one of the reasons that we encounter distribution without “publication.” The fiction of the unfinished text helped assuage concerns about judgment. I am grateful to Jeremiah Coogan and Joe Howley for conversations about this. For forays in this direction, see Matthew D. C. Larsen, “Accidental Publication, Unfinished Texts and the Traditional Goals of New Testament Textual Criticism,” JSNT 39.4 (2017): 362–87; Raffaella Cribiore, “The Dissemination of Texts in the High Empire,” American Journal of Philology 140.2 (2019): 255–90. In his Sorrows 1.1, Ovid also personified his book as an enslaved person/child when dispatching it into the world. On the foreignness and othering of the personified book, see Carole Newlands, “The Role of the Book in Tristia 3.1,” Ramus 26.1 (1997): 57–79. Newlands sees the book as a cipher for Ovid himself. More broadly on books in Latin poetry, see also G. D. Williams, “Representations of the Book-roll in Latin Poetry: Ovid, Tr.1,1,3-14 and Related Texts,” Mnemosyne 45.2 (1992): 178–89.

p.127 n.12a “Beyond the normal social benefits derived from gift-giving” The concept of gift exchange is derived from the work of French sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Marcel Mauss. For recent New Testament scholarship adopting this framework, see Thomas R. Blanton IV, A Spiritual Economy: Gift Exchange in the Letters of Paul of Tarsus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). 

p.128 n.12b “The letter-carrier-turned-reader could be schooled to read the book with the correct intonation.” On instructing letter-carriers what to say, see Head, “Named Letter-Carriers,” and Londa, “Letters.” In some later sources, sending letters without readers was sometimes seen as burdensome. See Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott, “Production, Distribution, and Ownership of Books in the Monasteries of Upper Egypt: The Evidence of the Nag Hammadi Colophons,” in Monastic Education in Late Antiquity: The Transformation of Classical Paideia, ed. Lillian I. Larsen and Samuel Rubenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 306–25. Letter-carriers were “the vital link between sender and recipients,” as is argued by Pieter J. J. Botha, Orality and Literacy in Early Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 243. As Botha puts it, the process of dictation and oral delivery (which he correctly expects to often involve the same person) creates a situation of “co-authorship.” See M. R. P. McGuire, “Letters and Letter Carriers in Christian Antiquity,” The Classical World 53.5 (1960): 149–150.

p.128 n.13 Cicero, Ep. 12.30.3 LCL. In his forthcoming book on letter-carriers, Peter Head suggests the translation, “Upon my word, he made me see your every look to the life, let alone conveying your mind and words,” which captures the spirit of the Latin. I am grateful to Head for sharing a pre-publication copy of this chapter with me. 

p.128 n.14 “Copy” (Eph. 2.1; 11.2). Role of letter carriers: Head, “Named Letter-Carriers,” 294, 298; Pieter J. J. Botha, “Letter Writing and Oral Communication in Antiquity: Suggested Implications for the Interpretation of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians,” Scriptura 42 (1992): 17–34; Botha, “The Verbal Art of the Pauline Letters: Rhetoric, Performance, and Presence,” in Rhetoric and the New Testament: Essays from the 1992 Heidelberg Conference, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Thomas H. Olbricht (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), 409–28.

p.129 n.15 Pieter J. J. Botha, Orality and Literacy in Early Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 243. Pliny commends his reader Encolpius for reading as he himself would (Ep. 8.1). For more on readers as extensions of enslavers, see Chapter Six.

p.129 n.15a “Paul—and Ignatius along with him—were in more delicate situations. In due course they would emerge as titans in Christian history, but in the moment they were innocent of the future.” I cannot summarize the complicated debates about conflict in assemblies associated with Paul. My best recommendation is to read Fredriksen, Paul. Fredriksen uses the phrase “ignorant of history” only of Paul here (xii). She uses it of Augustine in an earlier work. The phrase, however, as readers who are better read than I am will already know, is not uniquely hers. For a survey of opinions about conflicts in Antioch involving Ignatius, see Allen Brent, Ignatius of Antioch: A Martyr Bishop and the Origin of Episcopacy (London: T&T Clark, 2009).

p.129–30 n.16 “life of mimicry” See Londa, “Letters.” For other studies of the role of letter-carriers as “living paratexts,” see Bianca-Jeanette Schröder, “Couriers and Conventions in Cicero’s Epistolary Network,” in Letters and Communities: Studies in the Socio-Political Dimensions of Ancient Epistolography, ed. Paola Ceccarelli, Lutz Doering, Thorsten Fögen, and Ingo Gildenhard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 81–102 [81]. For enslaved people as agents in business, see Digest 5.1.19.3 (Ulpian), in which a contract made with an enslaved shopkeeper in Rome, whose ‘master’ was in Laebo, was considered a contract with the provincial enslaver. See also a wooden writing tablet from London (WT50), with discussion in Roger S. O. Tomlin, Roman London’s First Voices. Writing Tablets from the Bloomberg Excavations 2010-14 (London: Museum of London Archaeology, 2016), 54, 168. For a discussion of enslaved literate workers in artisanal, mercantile, and military contexts, see Chapter Two.

     On Paul’s messengers: Timothy (1 Cor 16: 10-11), Onesimus (Philemon 17), Tychicus (Eph 6:21; Col 4:7), Epaphroditus (Phil 2:29), Titus (2 Cor 7:15), and Phoebe (Rom 16:1-2). On Phoebe as letter-carrier, see J. Ross Wagner, Heralds of the Good News: Isaiah and Paul ‘In Concert’ in the Letter to the Romans (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 38: “It is quite likely that the bearers of Paul’s letters were charged by the apostle with the further responsibility of helping interpret them.” For an excellent discussion of Onesimus’s social status and role, see Head, “Onesimus.” For a discussion of the various ways in which Onesimus experienced violence, see Joseph Marchal, “The Sexual Use of Slaves and Paul’s Letter to Philemon,” JBL 130.4 (2011): 749–70. On Onesimus’s utility, see Jennifer Glancy, “The Utility of an Apostle: On Philemon 11,” JECH 5.1 (2015): 72–86; Mitzi J. Smith, “Utility, Fraternity, and Reconciliation: Ancient Slavery as a Context for the Return of Onesimus,” in Onesimus Our Brother: Reading Religion, Race, and Culture in Philemon, ed. Matthew V. Johnson, James A. Noel, and Demetrius K. Williams (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 47–58.

      Epaphroditus, the carrier in Philippians, was also likely to have been enslaved or formerly enslaved; his name, which means “lovely,” was “perhaps the commonest of Roman slave names.” See P. R. C. Weaver, “Epaphroditus, Josephus, and Epictetus,” CQ 44.2 (1994): 468–479; Heikki Solin, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum: Die griechischen Personennamen in Rom (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1982), 2.320. On the conventions of envoy-sending in general, see Margaret M. Mitchell, “New Testament Envoys in the Context of Greco-Roman Diplomatic and Epistolary Conventions: The Example of Timothy and Titus,” JBL 111.4 (1992): 641–662.

     A Tychicus is mentioned in Eph 6:21; Col 4:7; Tit 3:12; and 2 Tim 4:12. The manuscript evidence for Tychicus in Col. 4:8 is complicated. On this, see Peter Head, “Tychicus and the Colossian Christians: A Reconsideration of the Text of Colossians 4:8,” in Texts and Traditions: Essays in Honour of J. Keith Elliott, ed. Peter Doble and Jeffrey Kloha (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 303–315. Head notes that the long form of the subscription to the letter identifies it as having been delivered by both Tychicus and Onesimus. Tychicus was described as a “fellow slave” by Paul (Col. 4:7), but it is unclear whether this language refers to legal enslavement. We should note that Tychicus was the name of an enslaved man mentioned in CIL 6.623. 

      Medieval tradition maintains that Phoebe was the enslaver of Tertius, the secretary to whom Paul dictated the text. The ninth-century Mount Athos, Monastery of the Lavra A.88, fol. 99 verso (GA 049) titles Romans “Letter to (the) Romans written from Corinth through (dia) Phoebe the deacon.” The fourteenth-century Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, grec 47, fol. 244 recto (GA 18) has: “The letter to (the) Romans written through (dia) Tertius and sent through (dia) Phoebe from Corinth.” These examples are taken from Brent Nongbri, “The Manuscript Tradition,” in T&T Clark Handbook to the Historical Paul, ed. Ryan S. Schellenberg and Heidi Wendt (London: T&T Clark, 2022), 55–68. On Phoebe, see Caroline F. Whelan, “Amica Pauli: The Role of Phoebe in the Early Church,” JSNT 15.49 (1993): 67–85; Roman Garrison, “Phoebe, the Servant-Benefactor and Gospel Traditions,” in Text and Artifact in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity: Essays in Honour of Peter Richardson, ed. Stephen G. Wilson and Michel Desjardins (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000), 63–73.

p.130 n.16a “As the reader passes down the chain, the social status of these human ciphers grows obscure, but their role remains the same” Here, I evoke the work of Elizabeth Castelli on the “mimetic economy” in Paul. See Elizabeth A. Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991), 94. On ambassadorial envoys and letter-carriers, see Luckritz Marquis, Transient Apostle, 42–45, 127–47.

p.130 n.17 Botha, Orality and Literacy, 243. Even outside the circles of famous leaders, Egyptian Christians also used enslaved workers to deliver invitations and local letters. See AnneMarie Luijendijk, “Books and Private Readers in Early Christian Oxyrhynchus: ‘A Spiritual Meadow and a Garden of Delight,’” in Books and Readers in the Premodern World: Essays in Honor of Harry Gamble, ed. Karl Shuve (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018), 111–12. See also Harrill, Manumission, 63; Patrick Reinard, Kommunikation und Ökonomie: Untersuchungen zu den privaten Papyrusbriefen aus dem kaiserzeitlichen Ägypten (Rahden: Leidorf, 2016), 358–66, 480. Such workers were useful because letters and messages often necessitated a response. Only someone under the slaveholder’s control could be relied upon to follow directions and return home. On relaying responses to the letter-carrier, see, for example, 1 Clem 65.1, and Eldon J. Epp, “New Testament Papyrus Manuscripts and Letter Carrying in Greco-Roman Times,” in The Future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester, ed. Birger A. Pearson (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 35–56. See Peter Head, “‘Witnesses between You and Us’: The Role of the Letter-Carriers in 1 Clement,” in Studies on the Text of the New Testament and Early Christianity: Essays in Honour of Michael W. Holmes on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Daniel M. Gurtner, Juan Hernández, Jr., and Paul Foster (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 477–93. On the trustworthiness of servile people, see also the role of Hermas in the Shepherd of Hermas (Vis.1–4), and discussion in Bonar, “Enslaved to God.” 

     The trustworthiness of representatives was integral to the success of any communication, and servile workers could be held accountable in ways that friends and acquaintances could not. To give but one example of trustworthy letter-carriers, some decades after Paul’s death, three “trustworthy and prudent men” were sent to Corinth as “witnesses” by the church of Rome (1 Clem 65.1). The role of these messengers—Claudius Ephebus, Valerius Bito, and Fortunatus—was to ensure that the letter was understood and to report back on how it was received. It was a precarious situation: a fissure had emerged between Rome and Corinth and, in the eyes of the Roman Christians, Corinth was in crisis. Their names suggest that Claudius Ephebus and Valerius Bito were freedmen, possibly imperial freedmen, and that Fortunatus was enslaved. On Claudius Ephebus and Valerius Bito as freedmen from the imperial families, see Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, 1:27–29; Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, trans. Michael Steinhauser (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 184–86. Lampe tellingly describes Fortunatus as being mentioned as “an appendage” (From Paul to Valentinus, 185). 

     Some recipients may have preferred a digestible and interrogable summary to a dense letter like 1 Clement, which took nearly two hours to read aloud. The estimate of this reading time is based on a presumed vocalized reading speed of 150 words per minute. 

p.130 n.17a “A relay, such as that devised by the Persians, or the imperial post…” The imperial post founded by Augustus was initially called the “vehiculation,” but was later described as the “cursus” or “servus publicus.”

p.131 n.18 The following section on gossip is influenced by: Gianni Guastella, Word of Mouth: Fama and Its Personifications in Art and Literature from Ancient Rome to the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, Gossip and Gender: Othering of Speech in the Pastoral Epistles (BZNW 164; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009). 

p.132 n.19 Virgil, Aeneid 173-97. This is a monstrous reconfiguration of Homer’s idea of “winged words.” Plutarch, On Being a Busybody, Moralia 519F. Some early Christians shared this view: see Kartzow, Gossip and Gender, 208. In the minds of elites, authorless rumors accrued layers of editorializing and embellishment. They were untrustworthy. In many examples of military hearsay, the essential message about the outcome of the conflict is correct, but, away from the scrutinizing glare of verification, the details had mushroomed in the dark. In many ways, the word “gossip” (and the many linguistic terms that carried this meaning) is just a pejorative way of describing unsanctioned informal speech, or the spread of information by those who were not authorized to speak freely. As such, we should see it as a potential form of resistance and egalitarian speech by which the disenfranchised were able to “insinuate a critique of power while hiding behind anonymity.” It is precisely “because gossip is hard to repress,” writes Mary Leach, that “it supplies a weapon for outsiders; it often reflects moral assumptions different from those of the dominant culture; it provides language and knowledge potentially disruptive to the state order but vital to individual and community life of subordinated classes.” See Mary Leach, “Feminist Figurations: Gossip as a Counterdiscourse,” in Working the Ruins: Feminist Postructural Theory and Methods in Education, ed. Elizabeth St. Pierre and Wanda Pillow (New York: Routledge, 1999), 232.

      Rumor challenged those in power. If you were to walk down a street in ancient Pompeii, only storefronts would be open to your view. Homes were shut away, surrounded by a stone epidermis that protected the paterfamilias from the eyes and ears of potential busybodies and critics. But this architecture was more aspirational than effective, because the home was vulnerable to all kinds of informational leaks. It bustled with workers who knew their enslavers intimately: they saw them naked and at their most vulnerable, overheard privileged conversations and drunken banter, and read sensitive correspondence. (On knowledge of the affairs of the enslaver, see V. J. Hunter, Policing Athens: Social Control in the Attic Lawsuits, 420-320 B.C. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994], 70–95, and Keith Bradley, “Slavery in the Roman Republic,” in Bradley and Cartledge, The Cambridge World History of Slavery, 1.241–64). The elite home was filled with attendants, each of whom had the potential to become a domestic enemy and spy. An ancient maxim recognized this chink in the armor of domination: “You have as many enemies as you have slaves” (Seneca, Ep. 47.5). See J. Albert Harrill, “The Domestic Enemy: A Moral Polarity of Household Slaves in Early Christian Apologies and Martyrdoms,” in Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. David Balch and Carolyn Osiek (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 231–54.

      With the memory of the rebellion of Spartacus in the back of their minds, the powerful were, quite literally, kept up at night with worry. One first-century C.E. guide to ancient household management recommended that the paterfamilias retire after his workers, rise before them, and wake in the middle of the night to monitor their activities (Philodemus, On Property Management, column B).

      The Roman enslaver may have had almost complete power, but that power was vulnerable to attack not only through overt and usually unsuccessful acts of violent rebellion, but also through small acts of resistance, such as the surreptitious dissemination of household secrets or the mismanagement of time and resources. The architecture of enslavement only added to the problem. The attendant forced to sleep outside the bedroom of the paterfamilias was also privy to the details of his sex life. It was because of this that deaf people were sometimes highly valued as enslaved workers: What they could not hear they also could not repeat. See Martial 11.38, in which the satirist writes that a hearing-impaired mule driver sold for 20,000 sesterces on account of his condition. Deaf people were categorized under Roman law alongside others with perceived defects (Dig. 21.1.3-4 pr. [Gaius and Ulpian]). In the case that their enslaver was murdered at home, they were—unlike other enslaved workers—protected from punishment because they could not have been expected to hear the attack and offer help (Dig. 29.5.38 [Ulpian]). See discussion in Christian Laes, Disabilities and the Disabled in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 114–32.

p.132 n.19a “The errands that took enslaved workers out of the house allowed them to form small sympathetic alliances, intimate bonds, and looser social ties.” From the perspective of the slaveholder, the agency and conversation of enslaved workers were a perennial threat. The response of enslavers was to attempt to control both the movements and speech of their domestic help. Trimalchio, the antihero of Petronius’s Satyricon, is depicted as having a sign on the door of his home that promised a hundred lashes to any enslaved resident who left it without his permission (Petr. Sat. 28.7). The satirical tale caricatures a reality in which enslavers and their agents attempted to surveil the movements of their staff. Even in agrarian contexts, there was concern about enslaved movement. “The overseer (vilicus),” wrote the agronomist Columella, “should not be an ambler” or stroll around the farm for pleasure (Columella, On Agriculture 1.8.7). The same strategies of containment and restraint were used in elite Roman homes and spaces. These impulses are cross-cultural; in her work on the antebellum American South, Stephanie Camp writes that the “systematic constriction of slave movement…helped establish slaveholders sense of mastery” and assuage enslaver fears about domestic subversion or laziness; see Camp, Closer to Freedom, 6.

p.132 n.20 Martial, Ep. 8.75. On funerary workers, see Sarah E. Bond, Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 59–96.  Though it might seem obvious that accidental relationships were integral to the spread of the Christian message, it is important to acknowledge. Without them, we would be left with a skeletal outline of the spread of Christianity that turns only on the words of a few elite men.

p.133 n.21 Origen, Cels. 3.44, trans. Chadwick.

p.134 n.22 On sleeping: Tacitus, Histories 1.43; Pliny, Ep. 7.27.13; Franco Luciani, “Public Slaves in Rome: ‘Privileged’ or Not?,” CQ 70.1 (2020): 368–84. “Archaeological evidence…” Adele Rinaldi, “Preesistenze tardo repubblicane di carattere abitativo sotto la pavimentazione del foro di Nerva (con appendice di G. Maglie),” Scienze dell’Antichità 21.3 (2015): 3-32. 

     On romantic relationships: CIL 5.3707, and Maclean, Freed Slaves and Roman Imperial Culture, 24. 

     “elite caricature of truant staff day-drinking in taverns” Columella refers to urban enslaved workers in this way, writing that “this lazy and sleepy class of slaves, accustomed to leisure (time off from work), to the campus, the circus, and the theatres, to gambling, to taverns, to brothels, never ceases to dream of these follies” (On Agriculture 1.8.2). For enslaved religion, see Dig. 21.1.1.9–10. For a discussion of the spatial dynamics of the home, see Joshel, “Geographies of Slave Containment,” 99–123. Regarding the use of alcohol by enslaved workers, it is possible to see this as self-medication and defiant self-nurturance. The language of defiant self-nurturance is borrowed from Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (New York: Metropolitan, 2001), 31.

p.135 n.23 On women: Margaret Y. MacDonald, “Was Celsus Right? The Role of Women in the Expansion of Early Christianity,” in Balch and Osiek, Early Christian Families in Context, 157–84; Kartzow, Gossip and Gender, 208; Kate Cooper, “Insinuations of Womanly Influence: An Aspect of the Christianization of the Roman Aristocracy,” JRS82 (1992): 150–64; Jeremiah Coogan, “Meddling with the Gospel: Celsus, Early Christian Textuality, and the Politics of Reading,” NovT 65 (2023), 400–22. 

     Quote from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Literary Composition 25.193. This construction of authorship developed over time. On the emergence of singular elite authorship and elite status, see Joseph Howley, “Visible Erasure,” forthcoming. On the gendering of authorship, see Karen L. King, “‘What is an Author?’: Ancient Author-Function in the Apocryphon of John and the Apocalypse of John,” in Scribal Practices and Social Structures Among Jesus Adherents: Essays in Honour of John S. Kloppenborg, ed. William E. Arnal et al. (Leuven: Peeters, 2016), 27–31.

p.135 n.24 Matthew 26:51, 69. This argument is made with regard to the parallel passage in John 18:10, 26, in Katherine Shaner, Recentering Women and Slaves in the Early Christian Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

p.135 n.24a “As a result, Jesus could not enter urban centers without attracting attention.” This is strikingly early in the Gospel. Compare John 4:39-42. On the Samaritan woman at the well, see Angela Parker, “‘And the Word became… Gossip?’ Unhinging the Samaritan Woman in the Age of #MeToo,” Review & Expositor 117.2 (2020): 259-271. With respect to the Gospel of Mark, these characters are normally called “minor characters.” See Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, In the Company of Jesus: Characters in Mark’s Gospel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), 191–92.

p.136 n.24b “This last episode—the aborted angelic message in Mark 16—has elicited a great deal of conversation.” On women as disciples in Mark, see Joan L. Mitchell, Beyond Fear and Silence: A Feminist-Literary Reading of Mark (New York: Continuum, 2001), 8–9; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 320; Elisabeth Struthers Malbon, “Fallible Followers: Women and Men in the Gospel of Mark,” Semeia 28 (1983): 29–48; Hisako Kinukawa, Women and Jesus in Mark: A Japanese Feminist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994), 90–106; Seeong Hee Kim, Mark, Women and Empire: A Korean Postcolonial Perspective (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010), 117–32. We should set the alleged ‘failure’ of the women in contrast to their attendance to the suffering of Jesus at the crucifixion; see Angela Parker, “Sandra Bland at the Cross: A Womanist Reading of Mark 15:40-47,” Review & Expositor 118.1 (2021): 89–101.

p.137 n.25 Lucius Domitius: Suetonius, Nero 1.1. Barber: Plutarch, On Talkativeness 509B. On the safety of anonymity in Roman literary culture, see Geue, Author Unknown. We find references to more socially acceptable forms of gossip in the oral Gospel discussed by Papias. Some of the elders who served as his sources may well have been enslaved. 

p.137 n.26 Plutarch, On Talkativeness 503D; Hesiod, Works and Days 760–64: “No talk is ever entirely gotten rid of, once people talk it up: it too is some god.” (trans. Glen W. Most). 

p.138 n.27 On the wind-like qualities of rumor, see Guastella, Word of Mouth, 26–33. Peter’s speech is clearly an important factor: Acts wants us to imagine that bold public speech and subversive speech operate together. For the Christian condemnation of gossip and slander, see 1 Tim 4:7; 2 Tim 4:3; Tit. 1:10-11; Kartzow, Gossip and Gender, 195–201. For an alternative reading of this scene in Acts 2, see Meghan R. Henning, “Holy Impairment: The Body as the Nexus of Apocalyptic Ekphrasis in Acts 2:1-13,” JBL 141.3 (2022): 533–52.

p.141 n.1 Codex Bobiensis is sometimes spelled Bobbiensis. An extraordinary history of the text is provided in Matthew D. C. Larsen, “The Real-and-Imagined Biography of a Gospel Manuscript,” EC 12.1 (2021): 103–131. On Bobiensis in general, see Hugh Houghton, The Latin New Testament: A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 10, 22; Claire Clivaz, “Mk16 im Codex Bobbiensis: Neue Einsichten zur Textgeschichte des kurzen Markusschlusses,” Zeitschrift für Neues Testament 24.47 (forthcoming).

p.142 n.2 Gospel of Peter 39.This, too, is the kind of gossipy speech that Jewish and Roman authorities tried, through bribery and threats, to contain. On this scene in the Gospel of Peter, see Mark Goodacre, “The Walking, Talking Cross in the Gospel of Peter,” NT Blog, October 11, 2011. On the endings of Mark, see discussion in Chapter Six.

p.143 n.3 “Is this what the copyist of Bobiensis imagines?” Or the earliest manuscript copied by the scribe of Bobiensis (though, of course, we do not have this text). “wheezing Pliny the Elder”: Pliny, Ep. 6.16.  “a metaphor for intellectual dependence in the writing of Lucian” See Lucian, ad. Indoc. The identity of Lucian’s target is unknown, but see C. P. Jones, “Two Enemies of Lucian,” GRBS 13.4 (1972): 475–87. Cat Lambert’s work has analyzed this trope in Seneca; see Cat Lambert, “Enslavement and the Reader(s) in Seneca’s Moral Epistles,” paper presented at the “Economic Aspects of Reading in Antiquity Symposium,” University of Munich, August 4-6, 2022. “theological point as well…” See Candida R. Moss, Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). For an analysis of the manuscript of this section, see D. W. Palmer, “The Origin, Form, and Purpose of Mark XVI.4 in Codex Bobbiensis,” JTS 27.1 (1976): 113–122.

p.143 n.4 Larsen, “Real-and-Imagined Biography.”

p.144 n.5 Those who specialize in ancient manuscripts tend to distinguish between the scribe and the copyist, reserving the latter term only for those whose intention was to produce a precise copy. A copyist may also have done editorial and secretarial work. That secretarial labor may well have involved composing sentences, phrases, paragraphs, and even whole letters in the names of others (on this, see Moss, “The Secretary”). So, too, someone whose status was identified as a secretary (e.g., Tiro) would also copy texts. For the purposes of this chapter, I will try to highlight activities performed by those known—in terms of job title—as copyists. On the distinction between “copyist” and “scribe” in the work of papyrologists, textual critics, and other manuscript experts, see the methodological problems raised by Brent Nongbri in his blog Variant Readings.

      On the disrepute of copying, see Rhet. Her. 4.6; Cornelius Nepos, Eum. 1.5. On bureaucratic copyists (scribae), see Benjamin Hartmann, The Scribes of Rome: A Cultural and Social History of the Scribae (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 13–60.

 Referring to copying as “blue collar” work is crass because our own attitudes are both continuous and discontinuous with those of our ancient Greek and Roman sources, with those continuities often entailing the conscious developments of ancient biases. Elite writers, as we will see throughout this book, use classed language to designate literate work that they did not themselves perform as “servile” or “artisanal.” On this, see Jeremiah Coogan, Candida Moss, and Joseph Howley, “The Socioeconomics of Fabrication: Textuality, Authenticity, and Class in the Roman Mediterranean,” Arethusa, forthcoming. Most formative for my own thinking about the crafting of the divide between “physical” and “intellectual” work is Sara Ahmed’s concept of the fantasy of disembodied and immaterial “paperless philosophy” that takes place apart from supporting labor, in Queer Phenomenology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 33. It is worth noting, however, that the Cartesian distinction between mind and body, which informs so many modern classed assessments of work, has antecedents in antiquity. Histories of work usually trace the view of manual labor as degrading to Plato and Aristotle, who saw the work of artisans and in the marketplace as ignoble, corrupting, and antithetical to the pursuit of the Good. On this, see, for example, the discussion in Herbert Applebaum, The Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 3–175. What the language of “blue-collar” evokes is the arbitrary ways in which wealth, social status, morality, and intelligence are layered onto one another in historically contingent ways. One unparalleled feature of Roman medical thought that is worth raising is the Galenic view that “thinking” is a form of physical activity that requires sustenance. I am grateful to Claire Bubb for this insight.

p.145 n.6 For an example of attempts to persuade monks to continue as copyists, see the abbot of Sponheim, Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes (1492); Martyrdom of Polycarp 22.3. 

     As evidence of the many benefits that copying conferred upon monks, Trithemius claimed that when one monastic scribe, who died after decades of copying, was disinterred, the three writing fingers on his right hand were found to be incorrupt. See Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes [De Laude Scriptorum], ed. Klaus Arnold, trans. Roland Behrendt, O.S.B. (Lawrence, KS: Coronado, 1974), with discussion in James O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 79–82. On the religious aspects of copying, see Jeremy M. Schott, “Plotinus’s Portrait and Pamphilus’s Prison Notebook: Neoplatonic and Early Christian Textualities at the Turn of the Fourth Century C.E.,” JECS 21.3 (2013): 329–62.

p.145 n.7 On Christian manuscripts and copying, see Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); David C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Larry W. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006); AnneMarie Luijendijk, Greetings in the Lord: Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Roger Bagnall, Early Christian Books in Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Brent Nongbri, God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 

     We might compare early Christian representations of collating manuscripts with Porphry, Life of Plotinus. Many aspects of bookwork—collation, crafting, and so on—sit at the intersection of work and “elite hobbies.” Collation was performed by some exceptional ancient elites like Galen, and I have several academic friends who, as an outgrowth of their intellectual interests, dabble in crafting books, inscriptions, and leather goods. 

     On copyists in the Roman world: T. Keith Dix, “‘Beware of Promising your Library to Anyone’: Assembling a Private Library at Rome,” in Ancient Libraries, ed. Jason König, Katerina Oikonomopoulou, and Greg Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 209–34; Raymond J. Starr, “The Circulation of Literary Texts in the Roman World,” CQ 37.1 (1987): 213–23; George W. Houston, Inside Roman Libraries: Book Collections and Their Management in Antiquity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); William A. Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. (Classical Culture and Society; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Myles McDonnell, “Writing, Copying, and Autograph Manuscripts in Ancient Rome,” CQ 46.2 (1996) 469-491; and Joseph A. Howley, “Enslaved Labor and the Ancient Roman Book,” unpublished lecture delivered at the University of Pennsylvania, November 4, 2019. For books as gifts, see Cicero, Fam. 16.20. On acquiring books in the homes of others: Cicero, Fin. 3.2.7. Much as modern scholars receive free copies of books that they endorse, Cicero often received copies of books dedicated to him; see Att. 13.12.3, 13.50.1, 15.1a.2; Fam. 3.4.1, 3.11.4, 6.7, 7.24.2, 9.8.1, 15.21.1-1.

p.146 n.8 Horace, Ep. 1.20. Horace likens the commercial world of bookmaking to a life of prostitution in which sellers worked as pimps. I use the pejorative language of prostitution (as opposed to the preferable neutral language of sex work) in order to preserve the character of Horace’s description. Freedman bookshop owners included Secundus, the freedman of Lucensis (Martial, 1.2.7). Of the seven identifiable booksellers in the city of Rome, four have Greek names (Atrectus [Martial 1.117.13], Sextus Peducaeus Dionysius [CIL 6.9218], Dorus [Seneca, Ben. 7.6.1], and Trypho [Martial 4.72.2, 13.3.4]), a detail that has led several scholars to conclude that they were formerly enslaved. See, for example, Norbert Brockmeyer, “Die soziale Stellung der ‘Buchhändler’ in der Antike,” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 13 (1972): 237–48.

p.146 n.9 For more information about bookshops, see Peter White, “Bookshops in the Literary Culture of Rome,” in Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome, ed. William A. Johnson and Holt N. Parker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 268–87.

p.147 n.10 We should note that it is difficult to know to what extent the Price Edict represents an accurate picture of commerce. See Jan Heilmann, “The Relevance of Ancient Book Prices and the Book Market for Ancient Reading Culture,” in Economic Aspects of Reading in Antiquity, ed. Jan Heilmann and Robyn F. Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). I am grateful to Jan for sharing a prepublication copy of this work. An online translation of the Price Edict of Diocletian has been published by Antony Kropff here: http://kark.uib.no/antikk/dias/priceedict.pdf. 

     On false advertising: Strabo, Geog. 13.1.54; Cicero QFr. 3.4.5, 3.5.6; Martial 2.8. Diocletian’s Price Edict 7.39–41. 

     In matching the quality of the hand to the economic value of a manuscript, we might overlook the extent to which individual copyists may have bent or toyed with such rules, especially in the period of our interest, when such standards were not enforced in this way. We should be mindful of Garson’s observation regarding repetitive work, that “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 All the Livelong Day, xi. See also Sara Ahmed’s statement that “Paper matters. Paper can also be queer; paper can be used queerly...to queer use can be to linger on the material qualities of that which you are supposed to pass over; it is to recover a potential from materials that have been left behind, all the things you can do with paper if you do not follow the instructions,” in Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 206–7.

p.147 n.10a “Scholars speak of scribal error and rarely of scribal expertise.” For the concept of scribal knowledge versus scribal error, I am grateful to Kelsie Rodenbiker and Martina Vercesi. On the presumed “incompetence” of enslaved workers, see Moss, “The Secretary,” and Schultz, “Collecting,” in Writing, Enslavement, and Power.

p.148 n.11 Some scholarship has, following the logic of Diocletian’s Price Edict, sharply distinguished between the elegant literary hands that copied literature and the more informal documentary ones that did bookwork. More recent scholarship has blurred the boundaries between these two categories. On documentary/literary hands, see the nuanced discussion in William A. Johnson, Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 161; Colin H. Roberts, Manuscript, Society and Belief in Early Christian Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), argues that early Christian papyri were copied by those who were neither “professional calligrapher[s]” nor “private scholar[s]” (14). Though he is sometimes misread, Roberts himself does not equate calligraphic elegance with careful copying. For discussions of early Christian manuscripts, see Luijendijk, Greetings in the Lord, and Luijendijk, “A New Testament Papyrus and Its Documentary Context: An Early Christian Writing Exercise from the Archive of Leonides (P. Oxy. II 209/q10),” JBL 129.3 (2010): 575–96. For work problematizing the designation of “documentary” and “literary” hands, see Nongbri, God’s Library. Deluxe copy of Virgil: P.Ant. I 29, mentioned in Colin H. Roberts, The Antinoopolis Papyri, Part 1 (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1950), 75; Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters, 68–75. See also Alan Mugridge, Copying Early Christian Texts: A Study of Scribal Practice (WUNT 362; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 147; Colin H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 46.

     “What if copying a text well but in an informal documentary style is evidence of a copyist who took satisfaction in their work?” For discussions of sabotage and satisfaction in menial work, see Barbara Garson, All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work (New York: Doubleday, 1975). Her chapters on “Paper” and clerical work not only expose the wide range of important innovations and interventions made by clerical workers, but also prove illuminating for those interested in questions of resistance, motivation, and satisfaction.

p.148 n.11a “Many people make accidental changes when transcribing and copying texts—our best guess for professional copyists is about one per page” On copyist errors, see James Royse, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri (NTTSD 36; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 409–90; Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (2d. ed; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

p.148 n.11b “Book manufacturing, like any kind of luxury goods industry…” On books as luxury objects, see the seminal work of Roger Bagnall, Early Christian Books in Egypt, 62–63. In a forthcoming work, Jan Heilmann presents some compelling evidence that the book was not necessarily a luxury object, at least in the city of Rome. See Jan Heilmann, “The Relevance of Ancient Book Prices,” forthcoming. That said, the scribe of Bobiensis writes in a careful hand, and the quality of the parchment is high. Even if, as Heilmann argues, books weren’t always luxury goods, this particular book was not inexpensive.

p.149 n.12 The argument that Bobiensis was produced by a non-Christian is all the more compelling given the fact that we have a number of very early commentaries on the Lord’s Prayer by North African writers Tertullian and Cyprian. See F. C. Burkitt, “Further Notes on Codex k,” JTS 5.17 (1903): 100­–107 [107]. I am grateful to David Parker for directing me to this source. Houghton argues that the mistakes in Bobiensis may be attributed to a sloppy copyist (Latin New Testament, 22). On the possibility of non-Christian readers, see Nongbri, God’s Library, 23; Walsh, Origins, 134–69.

p.149 n.13 On paratexts, see Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Laura Jansen, ed., The Roman Paratext: Frame, Texts, Readers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 

p.150 n.14 This list of paratexts is inexhaustive and the literature is too extensive to discuss here. See Martin Wallraff and Patrick Andrist, “Paratexts of the Bible: A New Research Project on Greek Textual Transmission,” Early Christianity 6.2 (2015): 237–43. For a full treatment of the history of this manuscript and this story, see Jennifer Knust and Tommy Wasserman, To Cast the First Stone: The Transmission of a Gospel Story (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). Knust and Wasserman’s work underpins my reading of this passage.

p.152 n.15 On bookmaking, see Boudalis, Codex and Crafts. Eye of the needle: Matt 19:24; Mark 10:25; Luke 18:25. The origins of the myth of a pedestrian gate have been traced to Anselm by Agnieszka Ziemińska, in “The Origin of the ‘Needle’s Eye Gate’ Myth: Theophylact or Anselm?,” NTS 68.3 (2022): 358–61. The mythology maintains that a camel could pass through the small gate if the camel was not loaded with baggage and crawled through the opening. On this, see my column, “Your Understanding of the Eye of the Needle is Probably Wrong,” The Daily Beast, June 13, 2022: https://www.thedailybeast.com/your-understanding-of-eye-of-the-needle-is-probably-wrong. 

     On Family 13, see Didier Lafleur, La Famille 13 dans l’evangile de Marc (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Although the idea of a “Caesarean Text-Type” has fallen out of vogue, Family 13 reflects a relatively controlled cluster of texts associated with the city around the fourth century C.E. The textual evidence is complicated because, in the Gospel of Matthew, Family 13 represents the majority reading, whereas in Mark, it is secondary. This might lead us to conclude that the change was made as the Gospel of Matthew was being composed and that the alteration to the Markan textual tradition was intended to harmonize Mark with Matthew. My proposal is that both harmonization and the life-world of the bookshop are on view. For an overview of the debate on Caesarean text-types, see Yii-Jan Lin, The Erotic Life of Manuscripts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 86–94. When inadvertent, this kind of error is known to text critics as itacism or iotacism. It refers to when various vowels (i, e, u) or diphthongs (ei, oi, ui) came to be pronounced as an iota (i). On this, see Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (3rd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 190.

     An important caveat to this conversation is the question of when the kamilos suggestion arose. Some have proposed that the kamilos is a late Byzantine scholiastic suggestion for how the ‘error’ arose rather than a manuscript reading as such. For evidence against this objection, see Saul Levin, “Le chameau et le trou de l’aiguille: καμηλος ουκάμιλος?,” L’information grammaticale 51 (1991): 35–38. What should be noted is that kamilos and kamelos would have been pronounced identically and thus we might be dealing with an issue that arose in vocalized reading and dictation. 

p.153 n.16 On the cognitive skills involved in work, see Mike Rose, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker (New York: Viking, 2004). Rose directed me to a number of other important studies from the field of cognitive science. On tools, see Jeff Taylor, Tools of the Trade: The Art and Craft of Carpentry (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996); Charles M. Keller and Janet D. Keller, Cognition and Tool Use: The Blacksmith at Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On attention, see David LaBerge, Attentional Processing: The Brain’s Art of Mindfulness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). Bookmaking required steady hands and fresh eyes, but also relied upon the tactile feedback supplied by the cord and needle. Rulers appear in our sources as trusted implements. In addition, the smell of leather and glue, the feel of the grain of the leather or the roughness of the cord, the sound that the connection of writing material to writing implement made, even the viscosity of different kinds of inks, all provided sensory feedback. Reed pens had to be sharpened and papyrus was sometimes too thin (Quintilian, Inst. 10.3.31; Horace, Sat. 2.3.7. On papyrus: Pliny, NH 13.74-89). Cicero had to explain to his brother Quintus that he had not been busy or angry when he wrote his previous letter, he’d simply had a bad pen (Q.Fr. 2.14.1). See Frampton, Empire of Letters, 2.

     The medley of sensory, kinesthetic, and cognitive abilities that contributed to the biomechanical skills of bookwork are a neurological marvel in themselves, but they were maximized in the constrained environments where copyists and bookmakers worked alongside one another. Cognitive scientists and studies of modern labor practices reveal that this kind of tactile work is always intimately connected to the use of tools. On technologies of bookmaking: John L. Sharpe, “Wooden Books and the History of the Codex: Isocrates and the Farm Account, Evidence from the Egyptian Desert,” in Roger Powell: The Compleat Binder, Liber Amicorum, ed. John L. Sharpe (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), 107–129; Boudalis, Codex and Crafts.

     This analysis is possible even if the emendation stems from the authors of Matthew and harmonization is at work. A potential problem here would be the chronological development of the codex, which did not achieve broad use until the second century (Matthew is traditionally dated to the end of the first century C.E.). Nevertheless, wax tablets, which were in wide use from the eighth century B.C.E. onwards, were also sewn together with cord. See Boudalis, Codex and Crafts, 21–34. Note that we tend to assume that rulers can always be used for measurement. In antiquity they were more like straight edges. 

p.153 n.17 “In many cases this analysis is undoubtedly correct, but studies of the behavior of workers engaged in repetitive literate work in more recent periods suggest that there might be other explanations” A clerical worker named Elayne, who was tasked with data entry at Banker’s Trust in the 1970s, relayed how she played games with herself to pass the time. “Sometimes,” she said, “I spell out ‘Pool Number,’ other times I write ‘pl#.’ Interest rate I might go ‘9.50 percent’ or ‘9.5%’” The reason for such ‘inconsistencies’ in her digital footprint is not varying sources, it is the copyist herself. Elayne was not incompetent, she was bored. “I guess you do anything for a little change,” she said, “Something to do inside your head.” Elayne is cited in Barbara Garson, All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work (Rev ed.; New York: Penguin, 1994), 243. The comparison might be far-fetched. But Elayne, an African-American woman working in a predominantly African-American workplace—“Nobody white ever stays,” another interviewee said of her position (241)--described it in enslaving terms: “I hate this job. It’s a big plantation. You write that in black letters.” (244) When she stayed through the night to work and had to pay her babysitter extra, she explained, “You got no choice when you’re slaves” (240) She was not alone in viewing her workplace in this way; her white manager seemed to have absorbed some of the exploitative overseer ethos familiar to us from structures of enslavement. He lectured the assembled clerks that “[My] productivity is how much work I get out of you for the hours I have to pay.” (243) See also Jesper Isaksen, “Constructing Meaning Despite the Drudgery of Repetitive Work,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 40.3 (2000): 84–107. The relationship between stress, dehumanization, and monotonous work has been extensively studied by psychoanalysts, cognitive scientists, and those in working class studies.

     Other clerical workers who are routinely told that their jobs are mindless play different kinds of games. A young woman named Ellen, who proofread documents at Fair Plan Insurance Company around the same time as Elayne, noticed that one client had insured his store for $165,000 against vandalism and $5000 against fire. It was surely a mistake but, after some mental back and forth, she decided to do nothing. “I’m not supposed to understand it,” Ellen said, “If they’re gonna give me a robot’s job to do, I’m gonna do it like a robot.” Ellen (not her real name) is cited in Garson, All the Livelong Day, x.

p.154 n.18 Aesop: Life of Aesop G 38 (oil) and G 41(lentil pot), with discussion in Keith Hopkins, “Novel Evidence for Roman Slavery,” in Studies in Ancient Greek and Roman Society. Past and Present Publications, ed. Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 206–225. David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). I am grateful to Nicolette D’Angelo for this reference. The scribe who wrote allusions to Callimachus in the margins of a tax document from ancient Egypt (P. Mich 223.2665) was of this sort.

p.155 n.19 Heilmann, Lesen. His insights broaden our sense of the mechanical vocabularies, embodied skills, environmental constraints, and interests at work. See also the important work of AnneMarie Luijendijk in Greetings in the Lord and “The Gospel of Mary at Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy. L 3525 and P. Ryl. III 463): Rethinking the History of Early Christianity through Literary Papyri from Oxyrhynchus,” in Re-Making the World: Christianity and Categories. Essays in Honor of Karen L. King, ed. Taylor G. Petrey, Carly Daniel-Hughes, Benjamin H. Dunning, AnneMarie Luijendijk, and Laura S. Nasrallah (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), 391–418.

p.155 n.20 Cicero, Att. 4.4a. On libraries, see Ancient Libraries, ed. J. König, K. Oikonomopoulou, and G. D. Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). This section on organization owes a great deal to Alexandra Leewon Schultz, “Collection,” in Coogan, Moss, and Howley, Writing, Enslavement, and Power, forthcoming. Pasting texts together was messy work and it is unclear if the glutinarius/glutinator mentioned by Cicero (compare CIL 6.9443) refers to a designated role or a distinctly bookish skill: Glue was utilized in a variety of contexts. 

p.155 n.20a “All was right with the world now that Cicero’s library was in order.”  We might compare Cicero’s sentiments to Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “Unpacking my Library: A Speech on Collecting” (1931), or to Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, trans. Cathy Hirano (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2014).

p.156 n.21 Galen, Lib. Prop. 1. Extant book tags reveal that whoever made them was clearly literate (P. Lond. Lit. 27). See discussion in Brent Nongbri, “Maintenance,” in Coogan, Howley, and Moss, Writing, Enslavement, and Power, forthcoming. For enslaved workers in libraries in general, see George Houston, “The Slave and Freedman Personnel of Public Libraries in Ancient Rome,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 132 (2002): 139–76. Female librarians: Treggiari, “Jobs for Women,” 78, 90, and Haines-Eitzen, “‘Girls Trained in Beautiful Writing,’” 634–40.

p.157 n.22 Codex Fuldensis (F), produced between 541 and 546 C.E. 

p.157 n.23 On Marcion’s collection, see Ulrich Schmid, Marcion und sein Apostolos: Rekonstruktion und historische Einordnung der marcionitischen Paulusbriefausgabe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1995).

p.158 n.24 Pasted rolls: Cicero, Att. 9.10. Cicero and Atticus each treasured rolls of the letters that they had received from one another: Cicero, Att. 16.5.5. On 2 Cor., I follow Brent Nongbri, “2 Corinthians and Possible Material Evidence for Composite Letters in Antiquity,” in Collecting Early Christian Letters: From the Apostle Paul to Late Antiquity, ed. Bronwen Neil and Pauline Allen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 54­–67.

p.158 n.24a “While some think that Paul himself had editorial oversight and control, the process of assembling letter collections in antiquity almost always involved enslaved workers.” For the proposal that Paul edited himself, see David Trobisch, Die Entstehung der Paulusbriefsammlung: Studien zu den Anfängen christlicher Publizistik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989). For an excellent overview of the conversation relating to Paul, see Gregory Fewster, “Archiving Paul: Manuscripts, Religion, and the Editorial Shaping of Ancient Letter Collections,” Archivaria 81 (2016): 101–28.

p. 159 n.25 Mary Beard, “Ciceronian Correspondences: Making a Book Out of Letters,” in Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. T. P. Wiseman (British Academy Monographs; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 103–144. For the proposal that Tiro edited the letters himself, see W. C. McDermott, “M. Cicero and M. Tiro,” Historia 21.2 (1972): 259–86, and the critique in James Zetzel, “Emendavi ad Tironem: Some Notes on Scholarship in the Second Century AD,” HSCP 77 (1973): 225–43. For the contributions of other literate workers in the production of Cicero’s oeuvre, see the forthcoming dissertation of John Izzo, Columbia University.

p.159 n.25a “For Roman literary elites, organization was an authorial task” On organization (taxis) as an elite task critical to the writing process, see Moss, “Fashioning Mark,” and Jeremiah Coogan, “Order of Gospel Books.”

p.160 n.26 On indices and tables of contents: Riggsby, Mosaics of Knowledge. On subversive alternative reading schemes: Roy Gibson, “Starting with the Index in Pliny,” in Jansen, The Roman Paratext, 33-55. For a modern example, see Wilda C. Gafney, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: A Multi-Gospel Single-Year Lectionary. Year W (New York: Church Publishing, 2021).

p.160 n.27 Jeremiah Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). On nonlinear reading in antiquity and among early Christians, see Jeremiah Coogan, “Gospel as Recipe Book: Nonlinear Reading and Practical Texts in Late Antiquity,” EC 12.1 (2021): 40–60, and “Transforming Textuality: Porphyry, Eusebius, and Late Ancient Tables of Contents,” SLA 5.1 (2021): 6–27. What follows, like much of this chapter, is indebted to many fruitful conversations. On the canon tables, see also Francis Watson, The Fourfold Gospel: A Theological Reading of the New Testament Portraits of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), and Matthew Crawford, The Eusebian Canon Tables: Ordering Textual Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

p.162 n.27a “one of the oldest illuminated Gospel manuscripts in existence, a sixth-century Ethiopian Gospel book, includes an image of Eusebius” The manuscript is written in Classical Ethiopic (Gǝʿǝz) and known as Abba Gärima III. It was mistakenly re-bound into Abba Gärima II, fol. 295v. For a discussion of the manuscript and portrait, see Judith S. McKenzie and Francis Watson, The Garima Gospels: Early Illuminated Gospel Books from Ethiopia (Oxford: Manar al-Athar in collaboration with Allard Pierson Museum and the Deeds Project, University of Toronto, 2016).

p.162 n.27b “Eusebius too is an evangelist” See Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist, 1.

p.162 n.27c “In this way, Roman reading practices, which often focused on the author, were disrupted by a new scheme that moved people’s attention away…” This is not to suggest that the Eusebian team was deliberately disrupting or subverting authorial intention. He emphasizes how it preserves the love of truth of individual evangelists. I imagine that they were creating reading aids that they believed represented the viewpoint of the ultimate authorial voice: the Divine One. And, indeed, they might have understood themselves to be secretarial workers in service of the divine author.

p.162 n.28 Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist, 46 n.54 (enslaved workers) and 123–71 (influence). 

p.163 n.29 Strabo, Geography 13.1.54. Compare Plutarch, Sulla 26. On this scene, see William A. Johnson, “Cicero and Tyrannio: mens addita videtur meis aedibus (Ad Atticum 4.8.2),” The Classical World 105.4 (2012): 471–77. 

p.163 n.30 Vitruvius recommended that libraries be built facing the east, since in “those that face the south and west, books are damaged by worms and dampness.” See Vitruvius, On Architecture 6.4.1; Aulus Gellius, NA 9.4. On military doctors: P. Ross. Georg. 3.1. On parasites, see Cat Lambert, “The Ancient Entomological Bookworm,” Arethusa 53.1 (2020): 1–24.

p.164 n.31 On the Library of Alexandria, see Alexandra Leewon Schultz, “Imagined Histories: Hellenistic Libraries and the Idea of Greece,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2021, and  Stephen Johnstone, “A New History of Libraries and Books in the Hellenistic Period,” Classical Antiquity 33.2 (2014): 347–393, which builds on Roger S. Bagnall, “Alexandria: Library of Dreams,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 146 (2002): 348–62. On bookworms, see Horace, Ep. 20.11; Ovid, ex Ponto 1.1.72; Martial 13.1; Lucian, Ind. 1; Galen, Hipp. 6 Epid.17a.795 Kühn. A twelfth-century copy of the Gospel of Luke (MS f.3.12) at the University of Liverpool was recently found to contain bookworm excrement. Lambert, “Bookworm,” 1–24.

p.165 n.32 On enslaved curators: Cicero, Att. 4.4a, 4.8a; Nepos, Att. 13.3-4.  On enslaved curators of clothes: Petronius, Sat. 78. On care for rolls: Lucian, Ind. 17. See also P. Fam. Tebt. 15, ll. 35–37, in which an inspector complains that documents were damaged and moth-eaten. 

    On cedar oil as a depilatory: Pliny, NH 32.47. For books: Pliny, NH 24.11; Ausonius, Epigrams 19.1. See AnneMarie Luijendijk, “‘Embalm Them with Cedar Oil’: Maintenance of Manuscripts with Oil of Cedar,” in Festschrift for Martha Himmelfarb, ed. Ra’anan Boustan, David Frankfurter, and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming). I am grateful to AnneMarie for sharing a pre-publication version of this paper. A third-century CE shopkeeper’s account in Egypt (P. Oxy XIV.1727) includes the purchase of cedar oil alongside papyrus. As Luijendijk has suggested, this might indicate that cedar oil and papyrus were purchased together, almost as we might purchase insurance along with our cars. See also Mark de Kreij, Daniela Colomo, and Andrew Lui, “Shoring Up Sappho: P. Oxy. 2288 and Ancient Reinforcements of Bookrolls,” Mnemosyne 73.6 (2020): 915-48; Andrea Jördens, “Reparaturen in arsinoitischen Gauarchiven,” in Actes du 26e Congrès International de Papyrologie. Genève, 16-21 Août 2010, ed. Paul Schubert, Recherches et Rencontres (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2012), 371–79.

p.165 n.33 Horace, Ep. 1.20; Martial, Ep. 1.117.15. On bookshops and publication as sex work, see Ellen Oliensis, “Life after Publication: Horace, Epistles 1.20,” Arethusa 28.2/3 (1995): 209–24. On Rabbinic texts: m. B. Meṣ 2.8-9; b. B. Meṣ. 29b. On frayed beards: Martial, Ep. 14.84. See discussion in Newlands, “The Role of the Book,” 62.  

p.166 n.33a “The making of the Bible is not just about copying, it is about the arts of crafting, curation, and care.” All of this is important work. Hypothetically speaking, the small pieces of papyri that were used to mend old books might, centuries later, have been subjected to carbon 14 dating.

p.167 n.34 Lucian, Indoc. 22; Rabbinic text: m. Git. 2:4: 4, in which “Rabbi Judah ben Batera says: they do not write [a get] on a sheet from which writing has been erased nor on semi-finished parchment, for it can be faked. But the sages validate [such a get].”

p.167 n. 35 Knust and Wasserman supply a pithy history of some of these issues in To Cast the First Stone, 18–46. Perhaps the most famous example of recent scholarship focused on the theological ramifications of manuscript evidence is Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2005). It is worth noting that Ehrman did not discuss the social status of copyists in his book. On how the field of textual criticism has been riddled by racist and racializing assumptions, see Lin, The Erotic Life of Manuscripts. For a response to Ehrman’s work, see H. A. G. Houghton and D. C. Parker, eds., Textual Variation: Theological and Social Tendencies? Papers from the Fifth Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2008). 

     The past fifteen years have revolutionized the study of textual criticism; scholars like Kim Haines-Eitzen, Jennifer Knust and Tommy Wasserman, Brent Nongbri, Jeremiah Coogan, and AnneMarie Luijendijk have pursued different questions, many of which involve a turn to the material history of objects. On this material turn in the study of ancient Jewish and Christian religious texts, see Liv Ingeborg Lied and Hugo Lundhaug, eds., Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017).

p.169 n.36 Aulus Gellius, NA 9.4. Christians were also concerned about textual corruption. See Tertullian’s complaint about a pirated version of his Against Marcion, in 1.1. On this tendency in ancient literary theory in general, see William Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture, 74–96; Coogan, “Meddling with the Gospel”; Sean A. Gurd, “Galen on ἔκδοσις,” in Perceptions of the Second Sophistic and Its Times--Regards sur la Seconde Sophistique et son époque, ed. P. Fleury and T. Schmidt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 169–84. For overviews of early Christian textual criticism and literary theory, see Knust and Wasserman, To Cast the First Stone, 82–93, and Jennifer Wright Knust, “Early Christian Re-Writing and the History of the Pericope Adulterae,” JECS 14.4 (2006): 485–536. Origen specifies four reasons for textual difference: well-intentioned mistakes, indolent alterations, audacious and rash emendations, and mistaken correction (Comm. Matt. 15.14). In this list, Origen does not mention accurate corrections as those are, of course, appropriate. On the exceptional nature of Origen’s activities, see Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist, 43–44. Even in a city as well-documented as Oxyrhynchus, it is often difficult to ascertain the social status of the actual copyist. See Peter J. Parsons, “Copyists of Oxyrhynchus,” in Oxyrhynchus: A City and Its Texts, ed. A. K. Bowman, R. A. Coles, N. Gonis, D. Obbink, and P. J. Parsons (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 2007): 262–70 [265]. P. Lond. 2110 specifies that a copyist was paid at the rate of 28 drachmas per 10,000 lines.

p.169 n.37 So Coogan, “Meddling with the Gospel”; Howley, in conversation. For a similar challenge, the famous mathematician Archimedes published a fake set of mathematical theorems to unmask those who would steal his ideas. The inadequacy of the plagiarists would be unveiled by their inability to identify and produce proofs. See Reviel Netz,The Works of Archimedes: Volume 2, On Spirals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 12, 19, 28–30. Tertullian may be doing something analogous in the “test” he sets his readers in De pallio 3.4, on which, see Blake Leyerle, “Tertullian’s Chameleon,” JRS 109 (2019): 275–89.

p.169 n.38 Galen, Hipp. Epid. VI. It’s worth noting that much of Galen’s oeuvre involved collating manuscripts of Hippocrates and other medical writers. See Claire Bubb, “Medical Literature and Medicine: Going beyond the Practical,” in Medicine and the Law under the Roman Empire, ed. Claire Bubb and Michael Peachin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 196–215.

p.170 n.39 Theodotus’s name may suggest that he was ethnically Jewish. On Theodotus’s origins, see Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.28. Eusebius uses a source known as the Little Labyrinth, which is often attributed to Hippolytus of Rome. For a wide range of possibilities for his background, see H. Gregory Snyder, “Shoemakers and Syllogisms: Theodotus ‘the Cobbler’ and his School,” in Christian Teachers in Second-Century Rome: Schools and Students in the Ancient City, ed. H. Gregory Snyder (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 183–204.

p.171 n.40 On bookstores: Galen, Lib. prop. 1 (K 19.8–9); Martial 2.17. Cicero on Tiro: Cicero, Fam. 16.17.1. This is not a nice letter. In response to Tiro’s request that he receive his own book, Cicero berates him for using an anachronism and demeans him by calling him a “ruler.” On the Theodotians, see Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus, 344–48.

p.171 n.41 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.23.13-19, modified translation. The language of recklessness (aphobos) is repeated in several places (Hist. ecc. 5.28.13, 15). The words suggesting correction/straightening here are diorthokenai and katorthomena.

p.171 n.42 On Marcion’s origins: Justin, 1 Apol. 26.5, 58.1; Irenaeus, Haer. 1.27.2; Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.13.3; Tertullian, Marc.1.1.3. On Marcion’s wealth: Tertullian, Praescr. 30.2; Marc. 4.4.3. See discussion in Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus, 241–57. 

p.172 n.43 On Marcion: Tertullian, Marc. 1.1.5, 4.2.3-4; Irenaeus, Haer. 1.27.2, 3.11.7, 3.12.12, 3.14.4. For the view that Marcion had produced his own Gospel for only a small group of friends and disciples and that it was published accidentally, see Markus Vinzent, Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels (Leuven: Peeters, 2014), 97.

p.172 n.44 “Corrected” and “recovered”: Tertullian, Marc. 4.4.4; 4.4.5. Pontic mouse: Tertullian, Marc. 1.15. Dismembering Paul: Irenaeus, Haer. 1.27. Theological commitments: Tertullian, Marc. 4.6.2. Dowry for Marcion’s work: Tertullian, Marc. 1.19.4; 4.1.1. Tertullian described the Antitheses as the “dowry” for Marcion’s Gospel and claimed that, for Marcion’s followers, the Antitheses were the more important work. As the producer of an early Gospel, Marcion has attracted attention from modern textual critics as well as ancient theologians. There is considerable debate about the contents of his Bible, his redactional motivations, and the relationship of his Gospel to other real and hypothesized early Christian texts (see Vinzent, Marcion). For our purposes, we are more interested in where other early Christian thinkers located the heretical impulse.

p.172 n.44a “the “barbarian” assumptions of Marcion’s” The opening of Marc. 1.1 includes a chauvinist salvo about the barbarism of Pontus in general.

p.173 n.45 Mistakes and errors: Tertullian, Marc. 1.20; 2.8.4; 2.24.1-2; 3.8.1; 4.12.9; 4.29.6. Circumcised the Gospel: Tertullian, Praescr. 38.9. Tertullian was troublingly antisemitic, although it is doubtful how many Jews he had actually met. I use the language of antisemitism here deliberately; Tertullian’s prejudice was more likely directed against the Punic locals that he identified as semitic, non-Roman, and barbarian. We should note, therefore, that Tertullian’s biases are more clearly directed against what is non-Roman and servile.

p.173 n.46 Celsus had accused Jesus of being a mere construction worker who “fabricated” the miraculous story of his birth, implying that people who fabricate buildings and furniture might also fabricate texts (Cels. 1.28). See Origen, Cels. 2.27. See also Coogan, “Meddling with the Gospel,” for further discussion. The idea that literate enslaved workers can only produce fabrications and, by extension, forgeries, is visible in other periods as well. Take, for example, an advertisement offering a one-hundred-dollar reward for the whereabouts of a self-emancipated enslaved pressman from the early twentieth century, which describes the man as someone who “reads and writes, and may have forged FREE papers with him,” Charleston City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser, May 5, 1815, 2. Cited and discussed in Jordan Wingate, “Enslaved Pressmen in the Southern Press,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism 32.1 (2022): 34–52 [44].

p.174 n.46a “For people of the enslaving class (which included Christians).” On the early Christian figures who fit comfortably into the elite intellectual culture of Antonine and Severan Rome, see Laura Nasrallah, “Mapping the World: Justin, Tatian, Lucian, and the Second Sophistic,” Harvard Theological Review 98.3 (2005): 283–314; Kendra Eshleman, The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire: Sophists, Philosophers, and Christians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Jason König, Saints and Symposiasts: The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Jared Secord, Christian Intellectuals and the Roman Empire: From Justin Martyr to Origen (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020).

p.176 n.a “crawfish and pig’s liver” See recipes in Joseph Dommers Vehling, ed. and trans., Apicius Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome (New York: Dover, 2012), 9, 63, 120, 159, 161.

p.176 n.b “the floor littered with the detritus of the costly meal” For food littering floors, we have only to turn to the mosaics that depict dining events. See, for example, one such 3rd-4th century C.E. stone tesserae scene published in Phoenix Ancient Art 13 (2014): 86–95, no. 13. Such images give new shape to our understanding of the “scraps” dogs ate from the table in Matt. 15:26–27//Mark 7:27–28. “Dogs” was sometimes a euphemism for enslaved or subjugated people (see Judges 1:7: “seventy kings with their thumbs and big toes cut off used to pick up scraps under my table”). That Matthew uses the language of despotics (kurios or ‘master’) may suggest that this is the situation on view here. Note that in Matthew 15:27, both Jesus and the proverbial ‘master’ are described in the same way.

p.176 n.1 My construction of this reading scene relies on Walsh, Origins. This chapter has benefitted enormously from the work of classicist Cat Lambert, which she kindly shared with me pre-publication. See Cat Lambert, “Bad Readers in Ancient Rome,” PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2022.

p.177 n.1a “Reading events were supposed to spark conversation, and exotic stories of foreign marvels in far-flung lands were usually quite good for that.” On marvels or thaumata prompting discussions of philosophy, medicine, and science, see Michiel Meeusen, “Aristotelian Natural Problems and Imperial Culture: Selective Readings,” Schole 12.1 (2018): 28–47. An alternative view, suggested to me by Jeremiah Coogan, is that the ambiguous ending of Mark might have sparked conversation and generated the long ending. Rhodion, in this version, would have noted the conversation and incorporated it into the expanded text.

p.177 n.1b “He had likely jotted some light marks in the margins as a guide…” On these kinds of marginal notes, see William A. Johnson, “The Function of the Paragraphus in Greek Literary Prose Texts,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 100 (1994): 65–68.

p.177 n.1c “Reading was an energetic, disheveling, and sweaty activity…” Quintilian, Inst. 11.3.147: “our speech draws near its close, more especially if fortune shows herself kind, practically everything is becoming; we may stream with sweat, show signs of fatigue, and let our dress fall in careless disorder and the toga slip loose from us on every side.”

p.177 n.1d “Perhaps the group would get distracted and fixate on the original meaning of a word.” For further discussion of pedantic elitist attitudes to reading, see Lambert, “Bad Readers in Ancient Rome.”

p.178 n.1e “had the apostles recline alongside the audience” Mark 16:14.

p.178 n.1f “Felix’s expansions now had textual form.” Methodologically, my use of the word “expression” comes from FRBR, a model utilized by proponents of what academics call the ‘new’ or ‘material’ philology: a new approach to textual criticism that is interested in the material artifacts themselves and how they came to be. For an updated articulation of the FRBR model, see Chryssoula Bekiari, Martin Doerr, Patrick Le Bœuf, and Pat Riva, “Definition of FRBROO: A Conceptual Model for Bibliographic Information in Object-Oriented Formalism,” International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions 2016. https://www.ifla.org/files/assets/cataloguing/FRBRoo/frbroo_v_2.4.pdf.

p.178–79 n.1g “unlike the more familiar forms of bureaucracy that emerged in the aftermath of the French Revolution” On paperwork in the French revolution, see Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

p.179 n.1h “Though my account is narrative rather than argumentative, it is not markedly different from other scholarly explanations for the longer ending” One alternative theory relayed (but not supported) by David C. Parker (in Living Text, 143) solves “the problem [of the abrupt ending of Mark] by suggesting that something happened to the evangelist to interrupt him. Either arrest or death overtook him mid-sentence, and so we have in his manuscript an unfinished masterpiece.” This does not, to me, seem less speculative than my own reading. While Felix is a fabulation, preserving records of actual unnamed enslaved people is critically important work for our knowledge of history. For an example of this, see the “Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade” project (Enslaved.org) based at Michigan State University and led by Walter Hawthorne, Dean Rehberger, and Daryle Williams. At the time of consultation, June 12, 2022, the database included 13,909 enslaved people whose names are unknown. The language of “fabulation,” as noted in the introduction, is derived from the work of Saidiya Hartman, in particular her “Venus in Two Acts” and Lose Your Mother.

p.179 n.2 For traditional analyses of the longer ending of Mark, see James Kelhoffer, Miracle and Mission: The Authentication of Missionaries and Their Message in the Longer Ending of Mark (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). For text critical analyses, see Parker, Living Text, 124–47; Claire Clivaz, “Looking at Scribal Practices in the Endings of Mark 16,” Henoch 42.2 (2020): 373–87; and the essays in Claire Clivaz, Mina Monier, and Dan Batovici, eds., The Transmission of Mark’s Endings in Different Traditions and Languages, Papers Presented at the International Workshop, Lausanne, 2–3 June 2022, Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin 8.2 (2022).

p.179 n.2a “At gatherings of Christians, it was the servile reader…” The illiteracy of early Christians was a talking point from the beginning. They were variously described by their critics as “uncultured (apaideutos),” “uneducated (idiotes),” “ignorant (amatheis/rudes),” and “illiterate (agrammatos).” These accusations are inferred from the writings of early Christian apologists. It may be noteworthy, as Allen Hilton suggests, that Christians did not dispute these claims. See Allen Hilton, Illiterate Apostles: Uneducated Early Christians and the Literates Who Loved Them (LNTS; London: T&T Clark, 2018). On the portrayal of the Apostles and the textual revolution in early Christianity, see John S. Kloppenborg, “Literate Media in Early Christ Groups: The Creation of a Christian Book Culture,” JECS 22.1 (2014): 21–59; Chris Keith, Jesus’ Literacy: Scribal Culture and the Teacher from Galilee (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 156–63.

p.180 n.3 See William A. Johnson, Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 160. On reading in antiquity, see Jan Heilmann, “Ancient Literary Culture and Meals in the Greco-Roman World: The Role of Reading During Ancient Symposia and its Relevance for the New Testament,” JTS 73.1 (2022): 104–25, and Lesen in Antike und frühem Christentum: Kulturgeschichtliche, philologische sowie kognitionswissenschaftliche Perspektiven und deren Bedeutung für die neutestamentliche Exegese (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 2021). On the lector, see Christian Laes, “Lectors in the Latin West: The Epigraphical Evidence (c. 300-800),” Arctos 53 (2019): 83–127. As Laes notes, there are no studies dedicated to enslaved readers, but see Philipp Fondermann, “Anagnóstes,” in Handwörterbuch der antiken Sklaverei, ed. Heinz Heinen (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2017): col. 105, and also “Briefbote,” in Heinen, Handwörterbuch, col. 430–34.

p.181 n.4 On learning to read See William Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture, 3–16. Some scrolls from Qumran do have word divisions, and practical Latin texts and some inscriptions often had interpuncts indicating word division. Decipherment is a feature of all reading, regardless of what language a text is written in; my intention here is only to flag the differing junctures at which interpretation took place in the ancient languages under study. 

p.182 n.5 On ancient Jewish reading: Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, “The Dangers of Reading As We Know It: Sight Reading as a Source of Heresy in Early Rabbinic Traditions,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85.3 (2017): 709–45. On Rabbinic experts: b. Shabbat 152b; b. Ketubot 106b Gellius, NA 13.31; Dio Chrysostom, Or. 18.6–7.

p.182 n.6 On silent reading, see William A. Johnson, “Toward a Sociology of Reading in Classical Antiquity,” American Journal of Philology 121.4 (2000): 593–627; Quintilian, Inst. 10.3.22–26. On Augustus: Suetonius, Aug. 78.2. Quote is from Dio Chrysostom, Or. 18.6–7 LCL. I am grateful to Cat Lambert for this reference.

p.183 n.7 On speaking and acting: Pliny, Ep. 6.17, 7.17.1, 3.18, 5.5; Tacitus, Dial. 13; Suetonius, Nero 10. See Dan Nässelqvist, Public Reading in Early Christianity: Lectors, Manuscripts, and Sound in the Oral Delivery of John 1–4 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 100-103, and Anne Elvey, “Strained Breath and Open Text: Exploring the Materiality of Breath in Relation to Reading Luke 4:16–30,” The Bible and Critical Theory 16.2 (2020): 73-87.

p.183 n.7a “Christian reading can appear either as a subset of Jewish religious reading” Of course, Jewish reading is itself a subset of Mediterranean textuality in general, but it is rarely treated as such.

p.184 n.8 On Christian texts that assume public reading: 1 Thess 5:27; Col 4:16; Rev. 1:3. On Justin Martyr: 1 Apol.67.2. On benefits for the reader: Rev. 1:3, compare 1 Tim 4:13; 2 Clem. 19.1. On reading practices and the use of readers, see William David Shiell, Reading Acts: The Lector and the Early Christian Audience (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Laes, “Lectors”; Heilmann, Lesen. We have already met Burrhus; on enslaved Christians in leadership roles, see, for example, the two female deaconesses who were tortured by Pliny when he was governor of Bithynia (Ep. 10.96), and Shaner, Enslaved Leadership. 

p.185 n.8a “Modern scholars of the New Testament agree that there is a literary relationship between Matthew, Mark, and Luke.” On invisible workers in the composition of the Synoptic Gospels, see Jeremiah Coogan, “Synoptic Work: Compositional Practices, Invisible Workers, and the Synoptic Problem,” forthcoming. Historically, the material turn in the study of Synoptic relationships has looked at benches; body posture; the controversial status of desks (or tables); the book roll, the tablet, and the codex; and even the utility of the floor. The problem that materiality and the potential absence of desks posed for discussions of the Synoptic Problem is noted in Parker, Living Text, 186. For recent inroads into the question of materiality and the Synoptics, which are best read in chronological order, see Robert A. Derrenbacker, Jr., Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem (Leuven: Peeters, 2005); Derrenbacker, “The ‘External and Psychological Conditions Under Which the Synoptic Gospels Were Written’: Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem,” in New Studies in the Synoptic Problem. Oxford Conference, April 2008. Essays in Honour of Christopher M. Tuckett, ed. Paul Foster et al. (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 435–457; Derrenbacker, “Texts, Tables and Tablets: A Response to John C. Poirier,” JSNT 35.4 (2013): 380–387; F. G. Downing, “Word-Processing in the Ancient World: The Social Production and Performance of Q,” JSNT 19.64 (1997): 29-48; Downing, “Waxing Careless: Poirier, Derrenbacker and Downing,” JSNT 35.4 (2013): 388–393; Alan Kirk, Q in Matthew: Ancient Media, Memory, and Early Scribal Transmission of the Jesus Tradition (London: Bloomsbury/T & T Clark, 2016); J. C. Poirier, “The Roll, the Codex, the Wax Tablet and the Synoptic Problem,” JSNT 35.1 (2012): 3–30.

p.186 n.9 On child readers: Quintilian, Inst. 1.12.8; Victor of Vita, History of the Vandal Persecution 3.34; Cyprian Ep.38.1.2; Ac. Scil. 12. See Laes, “Lectors,” 88-90, 92–94. On Speratus as a name for enslaved workers, see Ronald Syme, “‘Donatus’ and the Like,” Historia 27.4 (1978): 588–603.

p.186 n.10 Dio, Or. 20.10.

p.187 n.11 Sulpicia Petale: AE 1928, 73. Butcher’s wife: Trastevere, second century, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, inv. ZV 44. Natalie Kampen argues that the woman is a scribe, in Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia (Berlin: Mann, 1981), 81. On the lectrix, see Susan Treggiari, “Jobs in the Household of Livia,” Papers of the British School at Rome 43 (1975): 48–77. Grapte: Herm.Vis.2.4. Grapte is identified as a teacher of women. Her name suggests that she was enslaved or formerly enslaved. See Solin, Griechische Personennamen, 3.1171–73. Perpetua: Pass. Perp. For a traditional view of Perpetua’s literacy, see Walter Ameling,“‘Femina liberaliter instituta’: Some Thoughts on a Martyr’s Liberal Education,”  in Perpetua’s Passions: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, ed. Jan N. Bremmer and Marco Formisano (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 78–102.

     The literary accoutrements of the female reader included, it seems, the bookstand. These were, as the name implies, lectern or table-top-style holders that held a scroll open for a reader. Scholarly analysis has offered two persuasive explanations for the bookstand: it either protected the scroll from wear and tear or it held the roll open so that a user could take notes. What is striking, as Stephanie Frampton has noted, is how frequently they are found in contexts associated with women. Stephanie Frampton, “Sulpicia’s Ashes: Gender, Literacy, and Inscription(s),” unpublished paper presented at the Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting, 2021. On bookwinders, see Susan Wood, “Literacy and Luxury in the Early Empire: A Papyrus-Roll Winder from Pompeii,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 46 (2001): 23–40.

     Structurally, bookholders are similar to devices that held textiles—so similar that initial excavation reports hypothesized that the bookstands found in women’s graves were used for embroidery or weaving. The theory did not quite work: bookholders are too small to allow the hands of the fabric worker access to the cloth. Nevertheless, the misidentification directs us to the similarity in their designs. Perhaps bookholders as a technology were an outgrowth of technologies ordinarily associated with and produced for women. In general, women suffered from arthritis and bone loss earlier than men and were expected to engage in weaving and textile production--tasks that strained the same joints as did using book rolls. Perhaps bookholders were a way of minimizing painful effort? Or perhaps they were simply a means of displaying an expensive text and one’s own erudition. In pursuit of evidence for women’s reading, I have ventured far out on a limb; but in either case, the bookstand’s association with women is one more piece of evidence for women’s reading. 

      This is not to say that all weaving was performed by women. It was not; there were guilds of male weavers in antiquity (P. Mich. 2.123). As with work in Atlantic slavery, queer scholarship has also advocated for imaginative and creative modes of reconstructing queer women’s lives, experiences, and work. Bonnie Zimmerman writes that the work of the lesbian critic “involves peering into shadows, into the spaces between words, into what has been unspoken and barely imagined. It is a perilous critical adventure, with results that might violate accepted norms of traditional criticism, but it may also transform our notions of literary possibility,” in Bonnie Zimmerman, “What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism,” in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Green and Coppélia Kahn (New York: Routledge, 1985), 178–210 [188]. 

p.188 n.12 On the funerary evidence, see Eckardt, Writing and Power in the Roman World, 154–74. 

p.188 n.13 See b. Megillah 18b; m. Megillah 4.4; t. Megillah 3:39; Wollenberg, “The Dangers of Reading as We Know It.” The dates of many of these rabbinic sources are later than the period under discussion and we should be cautious about assuming that they supply equally firm evidence about an earlier period. On the oral performance of early Christian texts, see Nässelqvist, Public Reading in Early Christianity, 100–103; see also Valeriy A. Alikin, The Earliest History of the Christian Gathering: Origin, Development and Content of the Christian Gathering in the First to Third Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 147–82.

p.189 n.14 Mark 13:14 was first seen as an instruction for an enslaved lector almost a century ago by Julius Wellhausen, in Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien (Berlin: Reimer, 1905), 103. For a fuller explanation of the variety of options here, including the idea that the reader was being granted interpretive license, see John Muddiman, “The Reader of Mark 13:14B as the (Re-) Interpreter of Apocalyptic,” in Revealed Wisdom: Studies in Apocalyptic in Honour of Christopher Rowland, ed. John Ashton (Leiden: Brill, 2014): 170–82. For the view that this passage refers to the individual anonymous reader, see Heilmann, Lesen, 105–34. Heilmann is correct to keep the possibility of private reading in view.

p.191 n.15 On gesture and communication, see Shiell, Reading Acts; Erik Gunderson, Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Shiell’s work draws from the work of classicist Gregory S. Aldrete, Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

p.191 n.15a “The relationships between reader and scribe and between reader and audience were always unstable and irreplicable” The aesthetic theories of reception history (Rezeptionsgeschichte) articulated by Iser and Jauss lean into this kind of approach. See Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1982).

p.192 n.16 Quint. Inst. 10.1. Readers are influenced, wrote Quintilian, by the orator’s voice, gestures, and the adaptation of the delivery itself. Quintilian explicitly genders the reader as male, although we should not assume that this was always true. On performance while holding a scroll, see William Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture, 119–20.

p.193 n.16a “While enslaved lectores are invisible in modern histories of the Gospels, they were, to ancient audiences, the faces of the Gospel” This is not to say that they directly competed with other repositories of apostolic tradition, but rival sources of power are well known among early Christian assemblies. We can see this as early as the Pauline epistles. On the intimate relationship between reading and writing, see Shane Butler, The Matter of the Page: Essays in Search of Ancient and Medieval Authors (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).

p.193 n.17 Pliny, NH 35.9-10. Quote from David Petrain, “Visual Supplementation and Metonymy in the Roman Public Library,” in König, Oikonomopoulou, and Woolf, eds., Ancient Libraries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 332–46 [340n36]. There were other Christian forms of such safeguarding: for example, by providing images of the evangelists in Gospel books. On this, see Jaś Elsner, “Beyond Eusebius: Prefatory Images and the Early Book,” in Canones: The Art of Harmony, ed. Alessandro Bausi, Bruno Reudenbach, and Hanna Wimmer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 99–132. Similarly, we might posit that textual descriptions of authorial characters (for example, Paul in the Acts of Paul and Thecla) helped safeguard some writings from such revisions. 

     Clearly, there were different kinds of readers, and, in certain circumstances, Roman displays of wealth and power might have made it preferable to utilize readers whose bodies and physical appearance were perceived as matching the subject matter. If readers took their audiences on a journey, it was desirable to have a local guide. For Romans, who delighted in shipping garum—a popular fish paste that tasted the same no matter where one obtained it—from far-flung parts of the empire, having a Gallic reader perform the tales of Caesar’s wars in France, or an enslaved Jewish man read the suddenly popular stories of Israel’s past, might have held a perverse kind of cachet. In such cases, things like accent, diction, and bodily mannerisms would have played a significant role in reshaping the text and its reception. In conversation, Stephanie Frampton has speculated that the use of the Greek (anagnostes) rather than Latin (lector) word for a reader might suggest something about the ethnic origins of the reader as well as the language in which they read. Compare here the work of Merve Emre, Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), which explores how the categories of good and bad reading developed in postwar America.

p.194 n.18 Tertullian, Praescr. 36.1-2.

p.194 n.19 Clement, Strom. 1.1.13.1–4. On the ear: Strom. 1.1.15.2, 9.45.1; 2.5.23.3–6.25.3; 7.14.88.4. On heretics: Strom. 3.4.29.1. On this, see Jane M. F. Heath, Clement of Alexandria and the Shaping of Christian Literary Practice: Miscellany and the Transformation of Greco-Roman Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

p.195 n.20 Irenaeus, Haer. 3.7.2. Compare Irenaeus’s statements about the readerly interpretation of John 1:1-4 and 1 Cor 7. See also Augustine, Sermon 352.

p.195 n.20a “they developed an ideology of “good reading” as an elite skill formed through education.” A “good” Christian reader, wrote Origen, subjects the text to torture to ascertain the truth of its meaning (Origen, Cels. 3.58). On this point, see the brilliant work of J. Albert Harrill, “‘Exegetical Torture’ in Early Christian Biblical Interpretation: The Case of Origen of Alexandria,” BibInt 25 (2017): 39–57. “Bad” readers were those without enslaving powers and elite training and, in this respect, everyone Christian and non-Christian alike worried about “bad” readers and their influence. On the nature of Christian knowledge, see Blossom Stefaniw, “Knowledge in Late Antiquity: What is it Made of and What Does it Make?” SLA 2.3 (2018): 266–93, and Christian Reading: Language, Ethics, and the Order of Things (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).