Slavery in Early Christianity

Abstract

Slavery in Early Christianity, by Jennifer A. Glancy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 203. $39.95 (cloth). Though she does not explicitly acknowledge the influence of feminist theory on her work, Jennifer A. Glancy's Slavery in Early Christianity adopts an angle of vision common in feminist theoretical discourse. Throughout this book, Glancy's methodological lens remains focused squarely on the material bodies of slaves in early Christianitygendered bodies, natally alienated bodies, bodies constantly subject to violent abuse and sexual violation, bodies ranking on the lowest rung of the hierarchically ordered Roman social world. In so doing, Glancy provides a much-needed corrective to scholarly literature in a field that has preferred to contemplate slavery on an abstract plane as a metaphor for spiritual malaise (or spiritual salvation); has treated slavery as a benign and common means of advancement in Roman social circles; has adopted the morality of slaveholders who decry the indolence and thievery of slaves; or has simply ignored the issue altogether. The argument is organized in following way: ch. 1 attempts to ground the Stoic and Pauline use of slave metaphors in the bodily facts of slavery on which such metaphors depend; ch. 2 focuses on slavery in the Pauline churches and the question of how a new identity as a Christian would affect an urban slave; ch. 3 focuses on the liminal states associated with slavery, including manumission, self sale, and fugitive status; ch. 4 discusses slavery in the sayings attributed to Jesus; and ch. 5 traces the intertwining of ecclesiastical development and slaveholding culture, focusing primarily on the biblical household codes and the Pastoral Epistles. In these chapters, Glancy repeatedly confronts her readers with the bodily implications of slavery in the ancient world. These bodies, if gendered female, were subject as a matter of course to sexual penetration and were used as breeders, milk producers, and sexual surrogates for modest wives. These bodies, if gendered male, were also subject to sexual abuse and daily incidental violence. Male slaves were denied the experience of paternity and of masculinity; symbolically, no slave had a phallus (p. 25). Glancy startles and disturbs by holding up these brute facts of slavery, sometimes plucked from obscure sources, but most often gleaned from familiar texts that she reads with new emphases. There is the slave collar from the fourth or fifth century provided by one Christian archdeacon, Felix, for his human property that identifies the slave and exhorts its finder, Hold me so that I do not flee. There is the scene in the Acts of Andrew in which the elite Maximilla, on her conversion to Christian ascetic practices, offers up her slave Euclia to take her place in her husband's bed. Eventually this Euclia, who becomes uppity, is mutilated and cast out to become food for dogs. There is the reference in the denouement of the parable of the unmerciful slave in Matt 18 to the slave being handed over to the torturers (tois basanistais). The prevailing arguments of NT scholars about the benign implications of Christianity for slaves are repeatedly exposed by Glancy as begging the question of what the Roman slave institution entailed, especially given the cultural normalcy of corporal punishment and sexual use. Did the exhortations in Colossians for masters to be just and fair to their slaves really translate into cessation of corporal punishment? While the Pastoral Epistles do not explicitly encourage householders to use physical violence against their slaves, how could a householder read the instruction to manage the household well, in any other way? Paul writes in 1 Thess 4:4 that each male should obtain his own vessel. If he did not mean by this exhortation that each householder should procure a slave as a morally neutral sexual outlet, should he not have been more explicit on this point? …