Early Christianity and Slavery

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.