Enslaved scribes of early Christian texts

Sarah E. Bond, author of Trade and Taboo...

...has a new article in Hyperallergic, "The Enslaved People Who Wrote Down the New Testament": Art history has long concealed the scribes who put swaths of the Bible and early Christian writings on paper. July 28, 2024.

"In ancient Egypt and early Imperial China, scribes were of high status," she says, but this contrasts with "many Greek and Roman cities, villas, libraries, churches, and even monasteries," where scribes were often enslaved.

These books are mentioned in the article:

She also directs us to "Female Scribes in Roman Antiquity and Early Christianity," an article by Kim Haines-Eitzen.

And another article: "In one study, ancient historian Adam Serfass reconstructs how Gregory gave enslaved people to his friends and ordered them bought at auction and even tortured."

Why this interests me

I've written about eunuchs in history.

When we read about eunuchs serving as scribes, we should look at the context of whether they were enslaved. Also, if sole authorship is credited to someone (eunuch or not), we should ask who was helping them (maybe enslaved people, some of whom may have been eunuchs.

On gendered argumentation in 20th-century New York

Just learned of this book:

It's about "the New York Intellectuals—a heavily Jewish scene, formed around Cold War liberalism and high modernist literary tastes, that profoundly shaped everything from art criticism to foreign policy," as David Klion, contributing editor to Jewish Currents, explains today.

Klion says:

"A rare work of academic history with crossover appeal to more mainstream readers, Write Like a Man is also the first book to give full attention to the fraught gender dynamics that shaped the New York Intellectuals. Most of the group was male, defined by names like Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Irving Howe. Grinberg not only gives fair due to the most prominent women in the group—chiefly Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, and Midge Decter—she also ingeniously demonstrates how gender shaped the actual writing produced by both male and female New York Intellectuals.

The title comes from a killer 1963 quote from NYRB co-founder Jason Epstein: 'With women in that crowd, the first thing you thought about was whether they were good-looking and if you could sleep with them. But if a woman could write like a man, that was enough.' To Grinberg, 'writing like a man' refers to a mode of rigorous, swaggering, aggressive argumentation rooted in the legendary cafeteria alcoves of then all-male City College, where many of the future New York Intellectuals spent the 1930s engaged in verbal duels with Stalinists. It's a style still recognizable today, and Grinberg portrays it as a means of assimilation for the sons of poor Yiddish-speaking immigrants trying to assert their masculinity in an America that stereotyped Jews as meek and effeminate. Grinberg’s female subjects, as the Epstein line suggests, held their own in the group because they were able to master this style—though as Grinberg also shows, the women in the scene who came from different backgrounds (either as gentiles or, in Arendt’s case, as a German Jewish emigre with formidable Old World academic credentials) received more deference from their male peers than the shtetl-descended women who were often treated simply as wives."

More on Jason Epstein

Michael Castleman explains how Jason Epstein invented trade paperbacks:

"In 1953, Jason Epstein was a recent Columbia University graduate working in publishing — temporarily, he thought — as an editorial assistant at Doubleday. He lived in Greenwich Village, a short walk from the funky but glorious (and now defunct) Eighth Street Bookshop, which counted among its patrons Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag, E.E. Cummings, Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka.

To Epstein’s wide young eyes, the place was paradise. He visited after work, sometimes lingering for hours. But his editorial assistant’s salary paid so little (forty-five dollars a week) that he couldn’t afford hardcovers, and that was all Eighth Street Bookshop stocked.

One day Epstein asked the store’s owners if they might be interested in selling less expensive paperback editions of their hardcovers to appeal to working folks and young people like him.

Not Pocket Books. Heaven forbid!

No, Epstein explained, he envisioned a larger format and better paper..."

Excerpted from Michael Castleman, The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing (2024), excerpt reprinted in LitHub

Project 2025 says 'porn' to mean 'imagined enemies of the family'

What does Roberts mean by "children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries." What is this "pornography" that Project 2025 says should be "outlawed"?

Melissa Gira Grant reminds us today in "The Real Targets of Project 2025’s War on Porn" (The New Republic):

"The prominence of pornography in Project 2025 is no mistake, of course; it’s absolutely core to the authors’ agenda for Trump. The attack on porn is inseparable from the attacks on abortion and contraception, on marriage equality and trans rights, and of course on drag queens and library books—all of which, they believe, threaten the straight, married family as the natural bedrock of society. All of these threats, to them, constitute pornography. By calling on the president to outlaw porn, they’re calling for the eradication of all these imagined enemies of the family.

Though Project 2025 does not define 'pornography,' their concern clearly extends beyond porn itself. Pornography, according to the Mandate, is responsible for the 'normalization' of non-normative gender expression and identity among young people—what the right often calls 'gender ideology.' Pornography could be anything that contributes to that purported normalization. 'Pornography,' Roberts continues, is 'manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.' And how should it be outlawed? 'The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.' Project 2025 is not targeting 'pornography' as something that’s harmful to children per se, but rather redefining anything concerning sexuality and gender that they say is harmful to children as pornography."

Pay attention:

"Behind all this is what philosopher Judith Butler calls anti-gender ideology and movements, which is how we should understand Project 2025’s anti-pornography rhetoric. It’s a transnational movement, fueling and also fueled by the reassertion of patriarchal order, of a return to normative sex and gender roles, and of ordering the world by sex and gender hierarchies. Gender in this movement has come to be regarded as a code, as Butler has described it—for pedophilia, for the destruction of the family, 'a plot by urban elites to impose their beliefs on ‘real’ people,' a threat to civilization, a threat to masculinity. When the fight is defined that way, a fight to save not just children and families but society and civilization, nearly any crackdown can be justified."

Aziz Rana on Republicans' constitutional control

Constitutional scholar Aziz Rana talked to The Ink. Rana is author of The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (2024). You can subscribe to the Ink if you like this stuff — in fact, now's the time.

Rana says there were

"specific dynamics in the mid-20th century. From the New Deal to World War II, through the Cold War and decolonization, that created the conditions for political agreement rather than anything that's there in the text of the Constitution. And now all of that has gone away. I worry that liberals oftentimes invoke that broken set of agreements whenever you see even more brazen acts of misbehavior by either the Court or political actors like Trump. And I just don't know that that's going to work going forward."

That agreement "defined politics in the mid-20th century." It was a time when "there was some degree of center-right, center-left consensus around the terms of the institutions, how folks operated with respect to each other, which types of discretionary misbehavior were out of bounds, and which kinds of discretionary misbehavior would be papered over." But now, it has broken down. We have "nostalgia" for it, but that doesn't help. The breakdown explains why "we're in this moment."

Some liberals appeal to what the Constitution supposedly really says or should mean, at least on a symbolic level if not with any real-world political force that they could leverage to promote their ideas. Although "Constitutional veneration...can provide some constraints," in the long term it may be unhelpful, as it legitimizes the whole system that lets certain people get away with bad behavior.

More specifically:

"The problem, in my view, is that the long-term trajectory of American power and the centrality of the presidential office to the national security state and the national security apparatus have over the long term overwhelmed these proceduralist constraints such that the War Powers Resolution is deeply ineffective.

The courts overwhelmingly ended up deferring to presidential authority. And I'd say that the collapse of the Soviet Union was seen as a validation of not just the American Cold War project but specifically the belligerent, aggressive Reaganite approach to the Cold War. That was very closely tied to market fundamentalism, to a kind of belligerent posture towards the world, to unilateralism globally.

And all of this got built into the cultural politics of the country, and made it very, very difficult, in Congress and certainly in the courts, to constrain the presidency. And we saw this dynamic play out again in the War on Terror."

Sure, "use whatever constitutional devices that are available to try to hold Trump accountable," but recognize "why those devices fail time and time again."

With Republicans in control of the Supreme Court,

"the internal disagreements of the right — how much immunity is too much immunity, how much of the administrative state to gut, whether or not to completely get rid of the right to abortion or just to functionally get rid of it by systematically undermining the checks on laws that would constrain reproductive rights — that is the sum total of the legal universe. And that means that the rest of us are effectively now just subject to their internal disagreements."

Democrats and journalists still imagine an "ideological spectrum" that used to exist in the Supreme Court but no longer does. The justices will only agree to hear cases on things they care about ("affirmative action, abortion, Trump's immunity, the nature of the administrative state"), and they'll debate the answers from their own perspectives. Issues that matter to many Americans today — "the carceral state," "a fundamental right to education" — are never going to be taken up by the court.

We need "systematic changes to constitutional structure, including some very fundamental reforms to the structure of the Supreme Court itself." More justices on the court, term limits for them, and better procedures to amend the Constitution.

Rana's book: