Early Christianity and Slavery

by

Chance E. Bonar

• LAST MODIFIED: 22 November 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195393361-0335

Introduction

Slavery was a ubiquitous system of domination in the Roman world, with various permutations that impacted every corner of the Roman Empire. The New Testament and other early Christian literature were written within the historical, social, and literary realities of the Roman imperial world. Consequently, such literature is shaped by the ubiquity and treatment of enslaved people in the ancient Mediterranean and provides a small glimpse into the dynamic between enslavers and the enslaved. Academic interest in what the New Testament can tell us about Roman slavery became especially prominent in the mid-nineteenth century as Americans debated and warred over the legal right to enslave Black people. Particularly since the 1960s, due to the civil rights and Black Power movements, scholarly interest in slavery has been renewed, leading biblical and early Christian scholars to reexamine stereotypes of ancient Roman slavery as benign. Scholarship of the last few decades has especially moved away from exclusive focus on legal definitions and functions of enslavement which were prominent for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, highlighting instead how enslaved people were so ubiquitous in the ancient Mediterranean world that their presence is often rendered invisible in our ancient literature, making it difficult to reconstruct the historical realities of their lives. We find in scholarship of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century a move toward viewing ancient literature on enslavement and enslaved people as literary products of the elite, rather than as transparent windows into the lives of the enslaved. Additionally, material culture has become important in recent decades in an attempt to write “history from below” and uncover enslaved life-practices and experiences beyond the limits of literary sources. Often what we find in New Testament literature are literary depictions of the enslaved that use them as examples to think with—such as in Jesus’ parables or Paul’s theological comparisons of Jews and Gentiles. We also find examples of the types of tasks enslaved people were expected to accomplish: doorkeepers, farmers, domestic workers, religious specialists, and more. Beyond those enslaved to humans, New Testament literature offers scholars with textual material in which Christians talk about being enslaved to non-human entities like God, Christ, or sin. Enslavement to non-humans has allowed for extensive debate regarding whether such enslavement is metaphorical or real in the minds of early Christians, and is a continued question for scholars of late ancient Christianity. Like with other geographic and temporal specializations in slavery studies, those who work in early Christian slavery studies explore whether Christianity has any particularly exceptional role in the history of abolition, what agency looked like for people enslaved to Christians, and how our textual material offers a biased view into the lives of the enslaved.

General Overviews

Various scholars have set the stage for investigation into the relationship between Roman slavery and New Testament literature. Hatter 2021 provides the most succinct overview to date of trends in scholarship and growing interaction with classical scholars. Combes 1998, Glancy 2002, and Harrill 2006 offer broad analyses of slavery and New Testament literature. Journal special issues such as Powery 2013 provides investigations into the effects of classical scholarship on slavery by Keith Bradley and Page DuBois on biblical studies. Martin 1990, Martin 2005, and Smith, et al. 2022 explore the relationship between New Testament slavery and African American interpretation and history. Avalos 2011 offers a critique of common scholarly and lay treatment of the New Testament as inherently abolitionist literature.

• Avalos, Hector. Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship. Bible in the Modern World 38. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011.

  Avalos’s expansive monograph examines both ancient and modern contexts to counter the claim that biblical ethics are primarily responsible for the modern abolition of enslavement. Avalos begins by critiquing how biblical scholars have wrongly upheld Israelite and Christian enslavement as morally superior to the enslaving practices of others, and follows through with an investigation into how Christians over a span of two millennia found biblical literature extremely fruitful for the maintenance and expansion of slavery.

• Combes, I. A. H. The Metaphor of Slavery in the Writings of the Early Church: From the New Testament to the Beginning of the Fifth Century. Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 156. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998.

  Combes suggests that New Testament and early Christian language of slavery can be examined as a case study in how religions use metaphors to describe theological realities. While Combes understands the idea that a believer can be a “slave of God” or “slave of Christ” to emerge from the ancient Mediterranean context of early Christians, he suggests that the metaphor of slavery in Christian thought takes on new valences beyond their sociohistorical roots.

• Glancy, Jennifer A. Slavery in Early Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

  DOI: 10.1093/0195136098.001.0001

  Glancy’s study of enslavement in early Christian literature, thought, and practice highlights how Christians were participants in the norms of Greek and Roman enslavement through how they sexually and physically abused enslaved people. She demonstrates that Christians were both slaveowners and slaves in the first few centuries CE, and that New Testament literature often presumes that its original audiences would understand how enslaved people were treated in order to grasp Jesus’ parables or Paul’s epistolary logic.

• Harrill, J. Albert. Slavery in the New Testament: Literary, Social, and Moral Dimensions. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006.

  In response to scholars who have treated New Testament interactions with or participation in slavery as benevolent, Harrill explores how New Testament literature participates in the elite literary culture and stereotyping of enslaved people. Rather than hoping that an examination of New Testament texts settles the moral debate on slavery, Harrill suggests that the writers and texts under analysis were produced in the literary and moral context of their time.

• Hatter, Jonathan J. “Slavery and the Enslaved in the Roman World, the Jewish World, and the Synoptic Gospels.” Currents in Biblical Research 20.1 (2021): 97–127.

  DOI: 10.1177/1476993X211050142

  In this overview of the interaction between biblical scholarship and research on the sociohistorical institution of enslavement, Hatter argues that the scholarly consensus is shifting among historians, classicists, and New Testament scholars—albeit more slowly with the latter. He demonstrates that outdated models of ancient slavery as a benevolent institution are being replaced by models that recognize the violence and coercion of enslavement, and suggests that a growing number of New Testament scholars are adapting this new historical consensus.

• Hodkinson, Stephen, Marc Kleijwegt, and Kostas Vlassopoulos, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

  Currently totaling twenty-eight essays available online and growing before print publication, this edited volume explores a range of literary, epigraphic, papyrological, and material evidence for enslaved people and their lives in Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman contexts. Of particular interest in the chapter “Slaves and Religion,” focusing on the role that enslaved people played in Greek and Roman religious practices as well as the impact of Christianity on slave welfare.

• Martin, Clarice J. “Womanist Interpretations of the New Testament: The Quest for Holistic and Inclusive Translation and Interpretation.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 6.2 (1990): 41–61.

  Writing within a womanist interpretative framework, Martin suggests that the translation of the Greek term doulos in much English-speaking scholarship and biblical publications needs to be recast as “slave” rather than “servant.” In doing so, she utilizes womanist thought about the intersectional oppression faced by Black women to urge scholars not to euphemize or disguise the enslaved in their translations.

• Martin, Clarice J. “The Eyes Have It: Slaves in the Communities of Christ-Believers.” In A People’s History of Christianity, Vol. 1: Christian Origins. Edited by Richard A. Horsley, 221–239. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005.

  Martin provides a succinct overview to the history of enslaved people and slave experience in the Roman Empire in order to contextualize the ubiquity of enslavement in early Christian communities. She especially focuses on the “eye service” that enslaved people were forced under and the forms of bodily and psychological punishment they experienced.

• Powery, Emerson B. “Special Forum: Roman Slavery and the New Testament: Engaging the Work of Keith Bradley.” Biblical Interpretation 21.4–5 (2013): 495–496.

  DOI: 10.1163/15685152-2145P0003

  Powery introduces a special forum to which this journal issue is dedicated to the influence of classicist Keith Bradley’s scholarship on Roman slavery to the investigation into slavery in New Testament studies. Contributions to the issue by Jennifer Glancy, J. Albert Harrill, Sheila Briggs, S. Scott Bartchy, and Keith Bradley discuss the role of resistance, category of humanity, and enslavers’ ideologies regarding slavery in antiquity.

• Smith, Mitzi J., Angela N. Parker, and Ericka S. Dunbar Hill, eds. Bitter the Chastening Rod: Africana Biblical Interpretation after Stony the Road We Trod in the Age of BLM, SayHerName, and MeToo. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2022.

  This edited volume brings together a range of approaches to biblical interpretation and pedagogy that center Black voices and experiences, particularly to understand New Testament texts, enslavement, and anti-blackness. Some of the contributions focus heavily on how enslavement and criminalization shape Black biblical interpretation, as well as how centering enslavement in our academic narrativization of the early Christian story shapes what characters and ethics we uncover.