An intriguing thesis, but Moss overreaches.
A study of the forgotten writers behind the Christian scriptures.
Moss, the chair of theology at the University of Birmingham and the author of The Myth of Persecution, sets out to uncover the labor of enslaved people in the writing, editing, and copying of the New Testament. The author provides a wide-ranging overview of the role of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world, especially the use of enslaved people as readers and writers. Using conjecture, she links the Gospel writers and Paul, especially, to literate people enslaved under Roman rule, beginning with the known fact that Paul dictated his words to scribes. However, her attempts to tie specific New Testament writings to enslaved labor are largely unconvincing. For example, Moss posits a scenario in which Paul speaks through a prison window to a scribe, who must squat on the pavement all day writing down Paul’s words, which the scribe would then have some sway over; she also searches for hidden slave language and meaning in the Gospels, inferring, for instance, that certain aspects of Jesus’ teachings were directly influenced by enslaved writers. Her arguments are thought provoking, but it is nearly impossible to know, 2,000 years later, what the exact situations were, what role in society scribes occupied, and what liberties they may have taken with texts. Nevertheless, Moss sees her goal in this study as doing the “reparative work” of rediscovering the role and agency of enslaved persons in the formation of the Christian scriptures. To a degree, she has done just that—even if she leaves readers with more questions.
An intriguing thesis, but Moss overreaches.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780316564670
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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