The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse: Double Trouble Embodied by Marianne Bjelland Kartzow

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse: Double Trouble Embodied by Marianne Bjelland Kartzow Mary Ann Beavis marianne bjelland kartzow, The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse: Double Trouble Embodied (Routedge Studies in the Early Christian World; New York: Routledge, 2018). Pp. xiii + 167. $140. This study sets out to explore the slave metaphor, which is ubiquitous in early Christian discourse, using perspectives from metaphor, intersectionality, and embodiment theory. [End Page 149] The “double trouble” of the subtitle refers to the fact that the metaphor of slavery to God/Christ is not “merely a manner of speaking—it is a way of using some people’s vulnerable bodies and lives as source material to talk about abstract and concrete realties in God’s world” (p. 146). Marianne Bjelland Kartzow uses the device of “imaginary scenes” (following Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y. MacDonald, A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006] 18–19) to reconstruct the experience of the enslaved in the ancient ecclesia. Kartzow’s analysis ranges from well-known NT passages to the underinterpreted Shepherd of Hermas (chap. 5) and the explicit portrayal of Jesus as a slave trader in the Acts of Thomas (chap. 6). For example, in chap. 2, “Embodying the Slavery Metaphor: Female Characters and Slavery Language,” K. points out that Mary’s self-designation as “female slave of the Lord” (Luke 1:38) resonates with scriptural accounts of the slave girls Hagar, Bilhah, and Zilpah, who served as surrogate mothers for their barren mistresses, and in the interests of patriarchal lineages (pp. 50–51): “When used on a young girl such as Mary, . . . being a woman in reproductive age who is asked to give birth to her master’s son, the metaphor is ‘made real’” (p. 54). K. places the enslaved girl with a python spirit (Acts 16:16–19), dismissed by the text (and by most interpreters) as a nuisance, at the center of attention. By “freeing” the girl from spirit possession, K. notes, Paul causes her to lose her economic value to her owner(s), thus leaving her vulnerable to an uncertain, and likely worse, future (pp. 54–57). In both cases, Paul the “slave of Christ” and his free male com-patriots have very little in common with the metaphorical and real slave women of these narratives. Chapter 3 (“Metaphor and Masculinity”) examines the “no longer slave” formulations of John 15:15 and Gal 4:7, noting that this discourse assumes changes in relationships that are available only to males, whether slave or free: “Women rarely become acknowledged as friends or sons or heirs” (p. 83). Moreover, as chap. 4 argues, if all believers are slaves of the Lord, some (the actually enslaved) are more slaves than others. Chapter 5, on the Shepherd of Hermas, explores a text where a formerly enslaved church leader, the freedman and prophet Hermas, negotiates his transformation from slave of a female owner to metaphorical slave of God—Hermas’s favorite designation for believers. K. pays special attention to the striking parable of the slave and the son (Sim. 5.2), where a faithful slave is not only manumitted but adopted as son and co-heir with his master’s biological son. She speculates, “Perhaps he [Hermas] moved from being a slave of his owner to being a slave of God because he, like the slave in the parable, showed himself worthy of being a freed man and an heir” (p. 113). Paradoxically, K. observes, although metaphorical slavery pervades the Shepherd, actual slaves—apart from the putative author—are invisible, Hermas’s concern for the poor and marginalized notwithstanding (pp. 115–18). For Hermas, especially, the bodily experience of male enslavement and manumission intersects with the metaphorical usage. The last main chapter (“Jesus, the Slave Trader: Metaphor Made Real in The Acts of Thomas”) considers a fictive narrative in which a metaphorical slave of Christ is transformed into a “real” slave when Jesus sells the apostle Thomas to a merchant from India. K. ably unpacks the many ways in which the slave metaphor operates in the text, and how it works with respect not only...