Candida Moss: “Roman Justice Was Never Equitably Administered”

Candida Moss, God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (Little, Brown and Company, 2024), 240:

When later generations thought about eternal punishment, they took their inspiration from the violence visited upon enslaved workers and criminals. Though the incarcerated and the enslaved were not identical, both were often on the receiving end of the same abusive forms of confinement. When Christians, including the servile collaborators who produced early Christian literature, came to think about the consequences of disobedience to God, they used the violent mistreatment of prisoners and enslaved people as their guide. For enslaved collaborators, stories of eternal damnation may have offered the opportunity to push back against the injustices of their own time. Roman justice was never equitably administered; in their experience, it was usually only the impoverished, debtors, and other low-status people who found themselves imprisoned and tortured. There may have been something cathartic about a hell that visited judgment on the powerful and affluent too.