Candida R. Moss (born 26 November 1978) is a British public intellectual, journalist, New Testament scholar and historian of Christianity, and as of 2017, the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. A graduate of Oxford and Yale universities, Moss specialises in the study of the New Testament, with a focus on the subject of martyrdom in early Christianity, as well as other topics from the New Testament and early church history. She is the winner of a number of awards for her research and writing and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
For the past two thousand years, Christian tradition, scholarship, and pop culture have credited the authorship of the New Testament to a select group of men: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul. But hidden behind these named and sainted individuals are a cluster of unnamed, enslaved coauthors and collaborators. These essential workers were responsible for producing the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament: making the parchment on which the texts were written, taking dictation, and refining the words of the apostles. And as the Christian message grew in influence, it was enslaved missionaries who undertook the arduous journey across the Mediterranean and along dusty roads to move Christianity to Rome, Spain, and North Africa—and into the pages of history. The impact of these enslaved contributors on the spread of Christianity, the development of foundational Christian concepts, and the making of the Bible was enormous, yet their role has been almost entirely overlooked until now.
Filled with profound revelations both for what it means to be a Christian and for how we read individual texts themselves, God’s Ghostwriters is a groundbreaking and rigorously researched book about how enslaved people shaped the Bible, and with it all of Christianity.