With My Own Hand
Reflections on the Lectionary for July 6th
The texts in the lectionary this week are…strange. You’ve got the story of Naaman and a skin disease, miraculously cured. You’ve got Isaiah and a “glorious bosom.” In the Galatians passage, we find several pithy sayings that have made their way into everyday language: “God is not mocked,” it says, and “you reap what you sow.” The Luke passage continues the strangeness of last week’s section, with an extended meditation on hospitality and hostility from strangers. Amid all that strangeness, and because my desk is cluttered up with other complicated things to write this week, I want to focus on one detail, in one verse, offering one viewpoint into one very interesting (and troubling) aspect of the Bible.
In Galatians 6:11, which comes in the concluding section of that letter, Paul writes something unexpected. Verses 6:1-10 are exhortatory in the way you might expect the end of one of Paul’s letters to be; he’s instructing the Galatians toward right behavior and perseverance in doing good. 6:12-16 feel like “oh and one more thing” kinds of words, dashed off as leftover thoughts at the end of a long letter. But 6:11 stands out, because it’s neither spiritual nor exhortatory nor instructive nor even, really, religious at all.
“See what large letters I make when I am writing with my own hand!”
What’s that about?
I love this verse (and the others like it, found in 1 Corinthians 16:21, Colossians 4:18, 2 Thessalonians 3:17, and Philemon 19. ). I love it because it gives us a window into the way large parts of the Bible were written, and it helps us be thoughtful about the relationship between an author like Paul and the books that can now be found in our Bibles. For us, biblical texts often simply show up as a part of collection—as books placed in order, with covers at each end, typeset and tidy with explanatory notes and scholarly introductions. For us, the Bible arrives as a well-produced and sleek package. But it traveled a long way to get there.
It might be hard to imagine the action behind the composition of a book like Galatians, but try to picture a scene in your mind. Imagine the room in which Paul is writing or the desk at which he might sit. What would lead someone like Paul to write, near the end of a long letter, something like “see what large letters I make when I am writing with my own hand”? Why would he say that? The statement implies a couple of things about the action, or the scene, I think. First, it implies that Paul’s handwriting was not especially good. His letters were large, which probably means that they were ill-formed and not neat and tidy like they should have been—that he was probably not accustomed to writing in this kind of way. Second, the statement implies that up to Galatians 6:11, the handwriting of the letter had not been Paul’s. Whatever scene you were picturing of the composition of Galatians, you should probably have at least two people there—not only Paul but a second person too. Paul’s statement in 6:11 should cue us that he was explaining, to the first readers of Galatians, why the handwriting had changed, and that it had something to do with the second person in the scene. More on this in a moment.
Now obviously today, in our Bibles, the handwriting does not change from 6:10 to 6:11. It’s all typeset the same way. And it’s also true that in every manuscript we have of Galatians—every ancient papyrus fragment and bound vellum book—the handwriting also stays consistent through this section. But in the first version, the one where Paul picked up the pen and started writing in 6:11, we can surmise that the handwriting did change. We do not any longer possess that first version of Galatians; it has been lost to history. Nor do we have the first versions (what are often called “originals” or “autographs”) of any other book of the Bible. Those have all been lost and destroyed by the vagaries of time. But somewhere along the way, someone made a copy of that first version that Paul sent to Galatia, and then someone made a copy of that one, and so on. We don’t have the first version, and we don’t have the second version either, but some unknown number of copies later, something survived. The dating of biblical manuscripts is notoriously contested, more art than science, but it’s likely that our oldest copies of texts found in the New Testament date to perhaps the 2nd century and more likely the 3rd. Certainly not the 1st. So in the case of a book like Galatians, we are working from a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, or more copies than that, and whatever shifts in handwriting between 6:10 and 6:11 might have existed have long ago been lost. We no longer can read Paul’s “own hand.”
But back to the scene of the composition. There would have been a second person in that room where Paul was writing Galatians. Sometimes Paul’s letters start with an explicit acknowledgement that there was more than one person in the room—as in 1 Thessalonians, for example, which names Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy as authors together. But here I’m talking about something different. Early in Galatians, Paul names only himself as an author, but he wasn’t the only writer. Paul was using a scribe—an amanuensis, to use the fancy term. Paul was dictating his thoughts to someone else, and that second person was the one actually writing things down. The note in 6:11 tells us that while Paul was literate—he could read and write—his handwriting was not of the high quality you would expect from a professional scribe. In a time before typewriters and printing presses and screens, that mattered a lot. The difference between a regular person’s writing and a professional’s writing—between an amateur’s hand and what scholars call a “trained hand”—could be dramatic. For the sake of readability and efficiency, many people dictated their words to someone who then wrote them down. (You can see a note from Tertius, the scribe who was taking dictation from Paul, in Romans 16:22, which reads “I Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord”). Then, near the end of the letter, if they were able, the person dictating the letter might have taken the pen and written a line or two in their own scribbled handwriting—a mark of authenticity, a personal touch. That seems to have been what Paul did in Galatians 6:11.
So what, you might be asking? So Paul used a scribe?
The important thing to know about this scribe, this second person in the room, is that the scribe was almost certainly enslaved. Galatians—like most other books of the New Testament—was written by a slave.
If you want a much better and fuller version of this story, you should read Candida Moss’s new-ish book God’s Ghostwriters, which lays out the evidence for this and thinks about its implications. Moss is a wonderful scholar and communicator, and her book is full of really great insights.
Here’s my version. In the ancient world, slavery was normal. The Bible presumes the institution of slavery; it’s built into the logic of the Bible and it runs in the background of biblical texts. While we can look for ways to let the Bible off the hook—while we can talk about its time and place, and the way the Bible is simply a product of the environment in which it was produced—the fact of the matter is that the Bible’s embrace of slavery is a major moral problem and a major ethical flaw in the text. (One among many, in my opinion). We can talk about how slavery was normal and expected in the time and place when the Bible was written, but the Bible is understood by many people to contain timeless wisdom and ethical teaching. We can talk about how our understandings have evolved with time, but the Bible, for many people, contains God’s eternal wisdom. So the Bible’s embrace of slavery is a problem, and it’s a place where it’s incumbent upon us to say no to the Bible’s logic.
Some people try to get around biblical slavery by claiming that ancient slavery wasn’t that bad. This attitude is surprisingly common today, especially in African-American churches and in liberal white churches, particularly ones with roots in the northeast. The reasons for this are really interesting. In the 19th century, as slavery became an increasingly fraught moral and policy question in the United States, pro-slavery advocates often supported their position by citing the Bible and its frequent acceptance of slavery. If it’s good enough for God, they asked, why isn’t it good enough for us? In response, abolitionists (both Black and white) tried to draw a distinction between ancient slavery and modern slavery, claiming that the form of modern slavery practiced in the American South was categorically different—crueler, more violent, less godly. They painted a rosy picture of ancient slavery, and contrasted it with the depraved form of slavery practiced in the South.
While it’s true that southern American slavery was depraved and evil, so was ancient slavery. The key difference between ancient and modern slavery is that modern slavery was racialized, so that race became a marker of caste and status, even long after slavery itself ended. This was less true in the ancient world, though ancient writers sometimes talk about certain ethnic groups as especially suited for slavery or service, in a way that anticipates modern racist arguments and modern racialized slavery. But in most respects, ancient slavery was just as cruel, violent, capricious, and wrong as modern slavery. It was hereditary chattel slavery, the same as slavery in the South, with all the same violations of body and spirit that we know from America. We should consider them equally wrong.
Paul’s use of slaves to write Galatians and other letters, then, should trouble us. Yes, Paul was a person of his time and place, and yes, he lived in a world where slavery was normal and presumed. It’s always fraught to judge people by the standards of a different era. But the Bible is not only the Bible for past eras and bygone times and places. The Bible is the Bible for our time and place, and in our time and place we recognize that slavery is wrong. We ought to face the moral difficulty of knowing that our sacred texts only exist because they have passed through the forced labor of enslaved people. We ought to reckon with the uncomfortable truth that our Bible is a product of slavery, and that whatever truth or glory we find in it is tempered with the full reality of the world’s brokenness. We can never forget that we live in the world as it is, not in the world as we wish it were or the world as it ought to be.
As for Galatians 6:11, I will forever be captivated by the image of Paul taking the pen (perhaps from Tertius or some other enslaved scribe) and scribbling out a few lines himself. His handwriting would have looked shabby next to the fine and regular letters of someone who had been trained for the work of writing. It was different enough, shabbier enough, that Paul found it worth commenting upon—that Paul felt he needed to point it out and make a little joke about it. Perhaps the two people in the room would have had a little laugh about it, or perhaps the scribe would have rolled his eyes at the badly formed letters of a religious zealot. It's a human moment, and an inhumane one too, among all the words and arguments of a Pauline letter. It’s a little bit of the personal in the midst of scripture, like a fingerprint on the back of the canvas of a masterpiece. And I love it.