Opinion: This Easter, reflect on how your Bible came into being

Editor’s Note: Candida Moss is the Edward Cadbury Chair of Theology at the University of Birmingham and former professor at Notre Dame. She is the author of multiple books, most recently, “God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible.” The views expressed here are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.

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The version of Easter you’re likely familiar with probably starts with how the Bible tells the story. According to the Gospel of John, Pontius Pilate was reluctant to condemn Jesus to death. He had to be persuaded that Jesus was a threat to the imperial order before ordering his crucifixion.

In reality, Pilate was a man known for his cultural insensitivity and brutality. It’s unlikely that he would have thought twice about executing a low-status teacher who had caused a stir.

This is not the only part of Pilate’s role in the Easter story that is unhistorical. The Bible says he also ordered that a titulus (a sign) identifying Jesus as “the King of the Jews” in Greek, Hebrew and Latin be affixed to the cross. When Jewish religious leaders asked him to change the sign, he refused. “What I have written, I have written,” Pilate replied.

Pilate, of course, did not write anything at all (although the Greek translation of this passage insists he did). The most powerful Roman in Judea did not paint a trilingual wooden sign himself. It’s highly doubtful that Pilate was able to understand Hebrew, much less write in it. (As a governor who likely hailed from the Italian peninsula, he would be unlikely to have learned Hebrew.) This kind of work, therefore, was both beneath his pay grade and above his head.

How did differing accounts of history wind up in the Bible? Enter the ghostwriters.

As just one of many instances where the person who did the (quite highly skilled) translational and literary work is obscured from our view, engaging others to do one’s book work was one of the most common forms of writing in antiquity. The apostle Paul dictated his letters to secretaries, most of whom — with the exception of one, Tertius (Tertius means “Third” and was a popular name for enslaved workers in antiquity) — remain anonymous.

In Romans 16:22, Tertius identifies himself as the one who “wrote the letter.” The author of the Gospel of Mark was the apostle Peter’s “interpreter.” We can expect that as a translator, Mark helped Peter navigate unfamiliar surroundings and communicate to audiences who only spoke Greek. Translation is always interpretive and, in antiquity, often involved expanding the original ideas.

Even taking the most conservative position on the authorship of the texts of the New Testament, we should assume that illiterate and aging apostles needed assistance, who had neither the education nor the eyeglasses to write in their old age. And so, just like everyone else who was illiterate, experienced vision loss or just preferred not to write by hand themselves, early Christians wrote using the expertise of other, usually enslaved, literate workers. These secretaries and scribes were the ghostwriters behind the Jesus movement — and it was their skill and expertise that helped the Jesus movement spread.

The reason low-status literate workers are obscured and considered unimportant comes from Roman enslavers, who depict their secretaries as body parts (hands, tongues) or tools (pens). The agricultural writer Varro called them a “speaking type of tool,” while the poet Martial described a shorthand writer as a “hand.” Since we generally don’t trust the judgment of Roman enslavers’ characterization of enslaved people as body parts, perhaps we should not assume that they are correct on their intellectual abilities and contributions either.

Ancient manuscripts reveal that scribes greatly improved the style and words of the people for whom they wrote. In their work, papyrologists Roger Bagnall and Raffaella Cribiore have isolated examples of scribes improving the style of the letter dictated to them by women, for…