God’s Ghostwriters
On my way to beer (as is tradition), I wandered into a bookshop, likely in search of a postcard or inspiration. I already have more unread books than anyone with a full-time job and mild internet addiction should reasonably own, but one can never have too many sources of postponed enlightenment. I was, in truth, fishing for something: a sentence, a spark. What I found instead was a little white-covered paperback titled God’s Ghostwriters. The title stopped me cold. Something between a lost Penguin Classics and the admissions page of a Jesuit alumni magazine. I picked it up.
Clutching the book like a misplaced Gideon*, I strolled into the pub where my friend the bartender stood polishing a glass with just enough theatrical indifference. I approached the bar with deliberate steps, my left arm bent at a crisp ninety degrees, the paperback held tightly against my chest. I asked him, entirely deadpan and without breaking stride, if he had a minute to talk about our Lord and Saviour.
My man, a friend of many years and long-suffering witness to my more philosophical moods, raised an eyebrow. He looked at me like I was about to start blessing the taproom. He’s used to my dry openings, but this was Sahara-level.
“Right,” he said. “You want a proper pale ale, something to wash down the sins? We’ve got some good stuff all the way from Wales.”
“Bring it on, buddy,” I replied as I sat down.
The book’s cover had prepared me with its parade of deadpan endorsements: “Very interesting” (The Tablet) and “A revelation” (Irish Independent), which together read less like literary criticism and more like a Vatican press release. One begins to suspect the Holy See had a hand in the publicity copy. Anyway, somewhere between the first and second pint - and with the occasional glance from a nearby table that clearly thought I was conducting some very niche fieldwork, I realised I’d read fifty pages. Not skimmed. Read. Eyes moving, pages turning, actual comprehension. The book had me. Whether it was divine intervention or just the smooth pacing of well-written speculative history, I cannot say.
The rest of God’s Ghostwriters falls into a genre that academics refer to as “critical fabulation” which, if we’re honest, sounds like something invented by a man who couldn't decide between becoming a historian or a novelist, and instead chose both with a hyphen. It’s the art of filling in historical blanks with plausible fictions; not lies, mind you, just extremely confident guesses. The kind of thing a medieval scribe might try when the parchment ran out halfway through the genealogy.
The author begins, rather winningly, with Paul: not (yet) the triumphant apostle of stained-glass windows, but the anxious networker trying to make a good impression in Rome. Gone are the days of rocking up with a tent, some leather tools, and a few well-chosen parables. Rome already had Jesus followers, and they were, by all accounts, getting along just fine without him. Paul, then, found himself in that most uncomfortable of positions: the uninvited guest trying to win over a room full of people who didn't ask for his company. So what does he do? He writes a letter. Not just a “hope you’re well” scribble, but a carefully calibrated, rhetorically armed introduction: part philosophical manifesto, part theological CV, and part “I know we haven’t met, but here’s everything I believe and why you should too.” In modern terms, it’s a cold email, albeit one that ended up in the canon.
The author, to her credit, doesn’t oversell the drama. She allows Paul to remain fully human: brilliant, strategic, occasionally overbearing, and above all deeply aware of his audience. As she puts it, “he was fishing for goodwill.” And if there’s a more accurate summary of early Christian public relations, I have yet to read it.
But the most delightful wrinkle comes not from Paul’s rhetorical genius, but from a passing interruption, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment at the end of the letter. “I, Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord.” Romans 16:22. It’s a small line, easily overlooked. Tertius, it seems, was Paul’s scribe, his amanuensis, if you prefer the sort of word that gets you odd looks in pubs.
“Hey, buddy! Do you know what amanuensis is?” I asked, tilting my glass and trying my hand at conversation with my pal.
“Man, they put all sorts of weird ingredients in those beers nowadays.”
“No, no” I replied, “it’s the poor bloke who had to write down everything Paul dictated. The Pauline Epistles.”
“Right,” he said, pouring another pint, “so basically a biblical admin.”
This wasn’t just a case of taking dictation from a corner while Paul paced and thundered. No. The line suggests something more personal: an acknowledgment, a trace of authorship, a little nudge from the margins: “By the way, I’m here too.”
And here’s where Moss gets genuinely bold. Tertius, the aforementioned scribe, she points out, wasn’t just helping Paul finish his letters before sundown like some eager theology intern. His name - “Third” - and his role strongly suggest he was enslaved. Not hired, not mentored, not thanked in the closing footnotes. Enslaved. And very likely one of many.
What the book proposes, gently but firmly, is that the New Testament wasn’t merely delivered from the heavens via holy men in sandals, but passed through the calloused, ink-stained hands of people who had no say in whether or not they believed what they were writing. Secretaries, scribes, note-takers, copyists, people whose very job was to be invisible. And yet, invisibly, they shaped the form, the tone, perhaps even the structure of early Christian thought. Moss doesn’t scream this; she lets it unfold. Slowly, the idea emerges: that Christianity, at its textual core, was built not only by saints and martyrs, but also by those whose names were assigned to them by owners, people who lived without freedom, but whose labour gave form to a truth millions now hold sacred.
I took a long sip and set my glass down.
“Wait,” I said to my bartender, “what if the Bible as we know it was partially ghostwritten by enslaved people?”
He paused mid-wipe. “Well, they always said it was a collaborative effort.”
Later in the book, we meet Alexamenos, a Roman slave whose name appears scratched into plaster on the Palatine Hill. Next to it, the crude outline of a man on a cross, his head replaced by that of a donkey. Beneath, the words: Alexamenos worships his god. Candida Moss frames this as a profound statement: the birth of Christian satire, a raw artistic testament to faith and ridicule alike. Perhaps it was. Or perhaps Alexamenos was just the kind of lad who doodled during lessons. Philosophy or mischief, we’ll never know. What we can say is that graffiti, as much as parchment, carried the story of Christianity forward.
“Donkey-headed Jesus?” I muttered over my glass.
My buddy smirked: “Now that would be a bold name for a craft beer!”
I thought about it: Alexamenos’ Ale. Slightly bitter, heavy on the aftertaste, best consumed in solitude.
These are just a few of the brushstrokes Moss uses in her quietly provocative canvas. There are many more like it throughout the pages, some even more provocative. The book doesn’t attempt a sweeping rewrite of Church history; it nudges, prods, reframes. Through stories like Tertius and Alexamenos, Moss invites us to look again, not at the theology itself, but at the human scaffolding beneath it. And in doing so, she reminds us that history isn’t just made by those who speak loudly, but also by those who were never meant to speak at all.
And that, really, is the crux of God’s Ghostwriters. The book invites us to reconsider scripture not as pure, unsullied download from the heavens, but as a product of human effort, dictated, copied, edited, compiled, sometimes interrupted by the man with the inkwell. What we think of as divine truth, passed through many very mortal hands - hands that occasionally slipped, smudged, or scribbled their own name in the credits.
*A Gideon, for the unfamiliar, is a member of The Gideons International, a group dedicated to placing Bibles in hotel rooms across the world, presumably in case the minibar proves insufficient. A misplaced Gideon, then, is someone who appears to be distributing scripture, but is in entirely the wrong setting (e.g. a pub). The posture is unmistakable: upright spine, furrowed brow, paperback clutched like doctrine. Watch out for those people.
