From Slave to Saint: Onesimus Throughout Christian History

(Fortress Press, under contract)

Though only 25 verses long, Paul’s Letter to Philemon and its interpretations have had a profound effect on Christian history and thought. Since the US Civil War, scholars have turned their attention toward two research avenues to make sense of Philemon: (1) historical-critical investigations into the epistle’s first-century context, or; (2) the reception of Philemon in African American biblical interpretation as a mode of resistance to pro-slavery interpretations.

Little work, however, has been done on how Christians imagined Onesimus between the 1^st and the 19^th centuries or after the Civil War. In this book, I offer a reception history of Onesimus from the first century until today. In doing so, I highlight unknown and little-known aspects of his presence in late ancient and medieval Christian memory and storytelling, particularly through the martyrdom tradition that emerges and develops around Onesimus by the seventh century. My thesis is that Onesimus starts out as a historical enslaved person in the first century, but quickly became a biblical literary character whom later Christians used as a site for their own discourses on slavery, mastery, and piety. I shed light in particular on the expansive Christian storytelling about Onesimus that took place in the eastern Mediterranean and the horn of Africa in late antiquity and the medieval period—stories that were unknown or lost to later Anglophone Bible readers in the antebellum period—as well as how Onesimus has continued to be a literary and theological resource for writers well into the 20^th century.

God, Slavery, and Early Christianity: Divine Possession and Ethics in the Shepherd of Hermas

(Cambridge University Press, forthcoming Sept 2025)

Early Christians were not only among the enslaved and enslavers in the ancient Mediterranean world, but some also used the ancient discourse of enslavement to conceptualize believers as enslaved to God and God as an enslaver. This book examines how some Christians crafted the ideal subject through the discursive context of ancient Mediterranean enslavement. I focus my analysis primarily on the Shepherd of Hermas, a first- or second-century CE text. It is attributed to a Roman man named Hermas who records the visions, mandates, and parables he is given through encounters with divine interlocutors. I argue that through participation in the language, practices, and logics of ancient Mediterranean enslavement discourse, the Shepherd both exhorts believers to be obedient enslaved subjects and portrays God as an enslaver capable of possessing, surveilling, punishing, and rewarding the enslaved.

The analysis consists of four parts. In order to demonstrate that the Shepherd participates in a broader Mediterranean discourse of enslavement, I first examine how God’s enslaved persons are encouraged to be useful, loyal, and commodifiable for their enslaver. I then turn to the figure of Hermas himself, who is portrayed in the Shepherd as an enslaved literary laborer. The textual composition, dissemination, and reading of the Shepherd itself is framed by enslavement insofar as Hermas textually produces and copies revelatory material with the express purpose of circulating the Shepherd among God’s enslaved persons. Third, I demonstrate that a central aspect of the Shepherd’s presentation of God as an enslaver is spirit possession. The anthropology and pneumatology of the Shepherd depict the holy spirit as the presence of the indwelling enslaver, capable of entering the bodies of God’s enslaved persons in order to surveil them and affect their cognition, behaviors, and actions. Finally, I take up the issue of agency and explore how God’s enslaved persons are treated as God’s instrumental agents in the Shepherd.

God’s enslaved persons who fail to be used as effective instrumental agents and conform to God’s will are encouraged to repent or suffer death through separation from God. The significance of the book lies in showing that slavery shapes the ways that some believers constructed themselves as ethical, loyal, and pious subjects so as to be in right relationship to God. My reading of how the Shepherd crafts such subjectivities and relations of believers to God in light of enslavement exposes how deeply entrenched some early Christian literature and practices were in ancient Mediterranean discourses of enslavement.

The Author in Early Christian Literature

(Cambridge Elements – Cambridge University Press, 2025)

While scholars of ancient Mediterranean literature have focused their efforts heavily on explaining why authors would write pseudonymously or anonymously, less time has been spent exploring why an author would write orthonymously (i.e., under their own name). This Element explores how early Christian writers began to care deeply about “correct” attribution of both Christian and non-Christian literature for their own apologetic purposes, as well as how scholars have overlooked the function that orthonymity plays in some early Christian texts.

Orthonymity was not only a decision made by a writer regarding how to attribute one’s own writings, but also how to classify other writers’ texts based on proper or improper attribution. This Element urges us to examine forms of authorship that are often treated as an unexamined default, as well as to more robustly consider when, how, for whom, and for what purposes an instance of authorial attribution is deemed “correct.”