Slavery In Early Christianity Research Articles

Six Years a Slave: The Confessio of St Patrick as Early Christian Slave Narrative

This article interprets St Patrick’s Confessio, supplemented by his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, in the light of North American slave narratives, arguing that Patrick’s account of his enslavement in Ireland shares many of the characteristics of North American slave narratives identified by James Olney. In addition, Patrick’s account of his conversion shares all of the characteristics of North American slave conversions discussed by Albert J. Raboteau. As such, although not intended as such, Patrick’s confession can be described as the only extant example of an early Christian slave narrative, which makes it of great significance for the study of slavery in early Christianity.

Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity by Katherine A. Shaner

Reviewed by: Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity by Katherine A. Shaner Mary Ann Beavis katherine a. shaner, Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Pp. xxviii + 207. $99. This volume is a revision of the author's doctoral dissertation (Harvard Divinity School, 2012; supervised by Laura S. Nasrallah). Although the topic of slavery in early Christianity has been studied from a variety of angles, Shaner's contribution is distinctive in focusing on the role of slaves as religious actors in and around Ephesos. S. uses archaeological and textual evidence to make her case that enslaved persons were "at the center of first- and second-century struggles to define power and authority in both Roman and early Christian communities" (p. 111). In endeavoring to reconstruct the religious involvement of early Christian slaves, S. has affinities with recent trends in the study of ancient slavery that attempt to discern the experience of the enslaved (e.g., Keith Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World, 140 BC–70 BC [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989]; Stephen Hodkinson and Dick Geary, eds., Slaves and Religions in Graeco-Roman Antiquity and Modern Brazil [Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012]; Sandra R. Joshel, Slavery in The Roman World [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]; Sandra R. Joshel and Lauren Hack-worth Petersen, The Material World of Roman Slaves [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014]). S. is also indebted to feminist rhetorical criticism, which has uncovered the ways in which the rhetorical perspective of ancient texts and materials "often constructs (rather than describes) gender, slave/free status, economic means, and social status along traditional kyriarchal lines" (p. xv). Thus, although slaves were ubiquitous in antiquity, they are hidden by material that is dominated by the perspectives of slaveholders, which have often been accepted uncritically by scholars. The five main chapters in the book alternate between examinations of evidence that portrays slaves as religious actors in non-Christian and Christian settings in Roman Ephesos. In chap. 1, "Power in Perspectives: Interpreting Enslaved Presence in Archaeological Materials," S. examines how slave presence is marked by spaces, images, texts, and other archaeological remains in the harbor, the agora, and a luxury housing complex. In chap. 2, [End Page 344] "Power Plays: Roman Policies, Public Slaves, and Social Status," S. interrogates the implications of an imperial decree by Paullus Fabius Persicus regulating the role of slaves in the cult of the civic goddess Artemis, which implies that public slaves were buying priesthoods, a practice that Persicus wanted to stop. S. investigates in chap. 3, "Voices of Power: Onesimos, Paul, and the Ambiguity of the Enslaved 'in Christ,'" the ambiguous status of the slave Onesimos, who seems to have held a position of honor in the ekklēsia, perhaps as a deacon (Phlm 1:13). Chapter 4, "Shifting Power: Ambiguous Status, Visual Rhetoric, and the Enslaved in Imperial Sacrificial Practices," contrasts the Parthian Reliefs, which "idealize images of sacrifice, reinforce imperial authority, and erase the role of slaves" (p. xxvi) with inscriptional evidence that enslaved ritual specialists taught elite men holding honorific priesthoods how to perform sacrifices. In chap. 5, "Power in the Ekklēsia: Contesting Enslaved Leadership in 1 Timothy and Ignatius," S. questions these documents' guidelines for various functionaries (bishops, deacons, widows) that attempt to circumscribe the ability of the enslaved, especially, to fill such roles. S. suggests that, in view of the evidence of slave participation in Christian and non-Christian ritual activity uncovered in the previous chapters, slave involvement in these functions likely figured in their contestation by Pseudo-Paul and Ignatius. Shaner's slave-centered approach steers between two viewpoints that have dominated the study of early Christian slavery: the argument that, since slavery could serve as a metaphor for salvation, slavery must have stood for more than abjection—even as a means of upward mobility (e.g., Dale B. Martin, Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990]); or, conversely, that slavery was a degrading and exploitive institution that allowed the enslaved limited ability to participate in the ekklēsia (e.g., Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005] 50-52, 111). S...

Review: Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity, by Chris De Wet

Chris De Wet. Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. xiii + 329. ISBN: 9780520286214. $95.00. Slavery has attracted considerable attention in recent scholarship on Late Antiquity. This book, a Foucaldian reading of the scattered but abundant references to slavery in John Chrysostom's gargantuan oeuvre, constitutes a powerful and important contribution to that rising wave. Its first chapter, “Introducing Doulology: The Discourse of Slavery,” is broken into four sections. The first follows Jennifer Glancy in showing that ancient slavery was a sort of cultural habitus that was assumed into Christian discourse like some ancient corporal vernacular. It then turns to the economy of slavery, both as part of the supply and demand structure that commodified human bodies, and as a Foucauldian “carceral mechanism” that bound slaves into a web of power relations whose every fiber reproduced the system De Wet calls “kyricarchy.” This “carcerality” included obvious devices of domination, like chains and whips, but also social relations many of which tend to be recast by moderns as ameliorative of the slave condition, such as family relations, peculium , and even manumission. Thus, for De Wet, “outside of abolition there are no aspects of slavery that are truly in the greater interest of slaves” (24). We then turn to the “heteronomy of the body”— the way that ancient bodies were assumed to require domination from some exterior agent—and to “moral slavery” as conceptualized by the Stoics and Philo. These interiorized slavery as a condition of the soul, creating a moral code in which all bodies required domination. This universalization of slavery through metaphor rendered the institution banal and its practitioners indifferent to its inhumanity. The second chapter, “Divine Bondage: Slavery between Metaphor and Theology,” is concerned with Christian variations on the theme of heteronomy as these were manifested in slavery to the passions and sin. This notion traces to Paul, who described himself as the “slave of …

Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity. By Chris L. de Wet . Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. xiv + 329 pp. $95.00 hardcover.

Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity. By Chris L. de Wet . Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. xiv + 329 pp. $95.00 hardcover. - Volume 86 Issue 1

Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity, written by Chris L. de Wet

Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity, written by Chris L. de Wet

Chris L. de Wet: Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity

Chris L. de Wet: Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity

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

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.

Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity by Chris L. de Wet

Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity by Chris L. de Wet

Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity, written by Chris L. De Wet

Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity, written by Chris L. De Wet

Slavery in Early Christianity. By Jennifer A. Glancy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiv + 203 pp. $55.00 cloth.

Slavery in Early Christianity. By Jennifer A. Glancy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiv + 203 pp. $55.00 cloth.

Slavery in Early Christianity. By Jennifer A. Glancy. Oxford University Press, 2002. 203 pages. $39.95

Slavery in Early Christianity. By Jennifer A. Glancy. Oxford University Press, 2002. 203 pages. $39.95

Review: Slavery in Early Christianity.

Review: Slavery in Early Christianity.

Slavery in Early Christianity (review)

Slavery in Early Christianity (review)

Slavery in Early Christianity

Slavery in Early Christianity

Slavery in Early Christianity

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? …

Slavery in early Christianity

In this study, Glancy paints a grim picture of ancient slavery as she delves through various ancient sources, and explains what the normal dynamics between slave and slaveholder were like. Above all else, her sympathies and interest lie mainly with the circumstances of the slaves themselves. Taking into consideration that slavery was an established fact of life, Glancy investigates the early Christian texts to analyze their impact on the early church. What emerges is an understanding of the subject which is at the same time illuminating, and to our modern (Christian) sensibilities, quite alarming.