Review of de Wet, C. 2015 Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity

Abstract

This first book of an exciting young South African scholar is based on his doctoral research, but bears only a pale resemblance to his doctoral dissertation. Rather, it constitutes a much more mature reflection on hissubject - the discourse of slavery in Late Antiquity - shaped by further engagement and discussion with a wide circle of scholars from a range of disciplines. Pitched as a project in cultural historiography, it asks large questions about the legacy of slavery, challenging current complacency byexposing largely unconscious and socially problematic discourses of domination that continue to persist into the present. This book may be about the period of Late Antiquity, but it draws a long trajectory from the Classical Greek and Roman past into Hellenistic Judaism, Early Christianity, the 'crisis of masculinity' of the 4th century, and well beyond.Similarly, while the focus is the discourse of a single late-fourth-century author, the Syrian priest John Chrysostom, subsequently bishop of the Eastern imperial capital, Constantinople, De Wet provides a model for the analysis of other late-ancient authors on the topic, as well as demonstrating the pervasiveness within Christian circles of the main threads of this particular writer's approach. In essence, the book offers a major contribution to the history of ideas in Western thought, delineating how a core set of ideas, transformed through a Christian lens, led to the passiveacceptance of the (gendered) oppression of other human beings. The implications of the study presented in these pages are extensive and this is a book to be read by scholars across a wide range of interests and disciplines.