Candida Moss


Candida R. Moss is a British journalist, New Testament scholar and historian of Christianity, and as of 2017, the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. Moss specialises in the study of the New Testament, with a focus on the subject of martyrdom in early Christianity, as well as other topics from the New Testament and early church history.
She is the winner of a number of awards for her research and writing, including the 2026 Grawemeyer Award in Religion and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Early life and education

Moss was born on 26 November 1978 in London, England. She is the daughter of journalist, political speech writer, and author Robert Moss. Moss's mother, Katrina Elizabeth Wise, died in 2005.
She graduated from Oxford University in 2000 with a BA in theology, a degree taken with Honors at Worcester College. In 2002, she received a Master of Arts in Religion in Biblical studies from Yale Divinity School. Moss graduated from Yale University in 2006 with an MA and an MPhil in New Testament, following this by a PhD in the same field in 2008. Her doctoral advisor was Adela Yarbro Collins.

Career

Appointments

Moss began her career at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, and became a full professor there in 2012, four years after receiving her PhD from Yale. As of August 2017, Moss had joined the faculty of the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham as Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology. In 2025 Moss became the General Editor of the Yale Anchor Bible Series. She is also a research associate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.

Research

Moss has specialized in the study of martyrdom, ancient medicine and the New Testament, early Christian ideas about the resurrection of Jesus's physical body, and enslaved literate workers in the ancient world.
Moss has written three books on martyrdom. Her writing on this subject has been praised for its "readability, clarity...creativity, thoughtfulness, and wit." She was the recipient of the John Templeton Award of Theological Promise in 2011, which cited her 2010 OUP book, The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom. Her 2012 book, Ancient Christian Martyrdom, argued that post-Enlightenment bias against martyrdom had led scholars to think of martyrdom as a phenomenon that spread from one region of the Roman empire to another; against this, Moss argues that martyrdom developed differently in different contexts. Her controversial 2013 book, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, argues that the stories of early Christian martyrdom "have been altered... edited and shaped by later generations of Christians" and none of them are "completely historically accurate"; she additionally maintains that the Roman authorities did not actively seek out or target Christians and that in the first three centuries of Christian history, Christians were only prosecuted by order of a Roman emperor for a brief period. In a review published in 2013 focusing on her first two books, Edinburgh classicist Lucy Grig wrote that "Candida Moss has swiftly established herself as one of the most interesting and original scholars working on early Christian martyrdom." However, The Myth of Persecution has received negative reviews from Christian scholars who question both the methodology and the conclusions of the book.
Moss is one of the first scholars to study the role and relevance of disability and ancient medicine in the New Testament. In 2011 she co-edited Disability Studies and Biblical Studies with Jeremy Schipper and, in 2015, co-authored Reconciling Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness with Yale Divinity School professor of Hebrew Bible Joel Baden. The latter was shortlisted by the American Academy of Religion for its Book Prize for Textual Studies. Her 2019 book Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity argued that disability might be preserved in the resurrection.
In 2017, Moss and Baden collaborated on a second book on Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby, which examined the efforts of the Green family, the owners of Hobby Lobby to influence religion and politics in America. The book grew out of their role exposing antiquities trafficking and the Hobby Lobby smuggling scandal. The New Republic described the book as "Exhaustively reported and scrupulously fair". The Washington Post called it a "remarkable fusion of biblical studies and investigative journalism." It was named one of Publishers Weekly's 2017 Best Books in Religion.

''God's Ghostwriters'' (2024)

In 2024, Moss published God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible with Little, Brown and Company. The focus of this work is on Slavery in Ancient Rome and the ways in which enslaved secretaries, scribes, readers, and copyists contributed to the writing of the New Testament and the dissemination of early Christianity. The work was based on a number of previously published peer-reviewed articles in the Studies in Late Antiquity, the Journal of Theological Studies, and New Testament Studies, receiving widespread attention as a paradigm-shifting work. The Irish Independent called it ""A tour de force" and "an intellectual triumph."
The Spectator wrote that Moss's "massive achievement is to shift the paradigm and tell the early Christian story from the perspective of the enslaved."
The New York Times Book Review concluded that the book made "it impossible to ignore the labor between the lines.”
The Wall Street Journal described it as "by far the best account we have of the roles by enslaved people in supporting the high literary culture of the ancient world more broadly." It added that "No one can possibly doubt, after reading this vigorous and provocative book, that the whole texture of Christian thought would have looked very different without them." At the same time, some reviewers took issue with Moss's use of Saidiya Hartman's methods of critical fabulation and criticized the speculative nature of some of her arguments. The book was distinctive as the first work of ancient history written for the general public to be published with a companion website containing thousands of additional endnotes and references.
In his 2024 endorsement for God's Ghostwriters, New York Times bestselling-author Reza Aslan described Moss as "the most compelling voice in Biblical Scholarship".
On his blog Variant Readings, Manuscript expert Brent Nongbri described it as "probably the most important book in New Testament studies written in the last half century."
The book received the 2026 Grawemeyer Award in Religion..

Public scholarship and journalism

Moss is a columnist for National Geographic and was previously a columnist for The Daily Beast. She has written for the Los Angeles Times, Politico, The New York Times, BBC Online, TIME, CNN.com, The Washington Post, HuffPost, The Chronicle of Higher Education,''America and the Times Higher Education Supplement.
In January 2015, Moss and her coauthor Joel Baden were the first to reveal the Hobby Lobby smuggling scandal to the public when they wrote about the company's import of illicitly obtained cuneiform tablets for the Daily Beast.
Moss has served as papal news contributor for CBS News, and contributed to the BBC Radio 4's In Our Time. She was an academic consultant to the television series The Bible'', and an on-air expert and host for National Geographic Explorer, as well as for the History, Travel, and Smithsonian Channels.
Moss is an advocate for public academic scholarship. In a 2022 article for data-based website Academic Influence, Moss topped the list of the ten most influential women in religious studies in that last ten years. Following a unanimous recommendation from their Outreach Prizes Committee, the Society for Classical Studies awarded Moss the 2024 Mary-Kay Gamel Public Outreach Award for her public scholarship.

Honors

Awards
Endowed Lectures