Transcription
What does Jesus actually say about slavery?
Okay, so the answer, which is probably going to be frustrating to many, is not that much.
What does Jesus actually say about slavery in the New Testament? Hey, I'm Jordan and this is the Bible and Archaeology podcast. This week I'm so happy to be joined by Dr. Chance Bonar for a discussion about Jesus' teachings on slavery, the use of slavery, the lack of condemnation of slavery, if there is an endorsement of slavery. We're going to be getting into a lot of different corners today from the Roman context of slavery to the long-term impact that the use of slavery in Jesus' teaching and parables has on the way you read the text today.
Remember, for early access to ad-free podcast and exclusive bonus content, you can join us over on Patreon. We are Bible and Arc on Patreon. But for now, settle in for our discussion all about what Jesus does and doesn't say about slavery.
Chance, thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk today about a topic that definitely has no one's interest at all. We're going to be talking about Jesus and slavery and what Jesus does or doesn't or never did or always did say about this. So thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk about this today.
Yeah, thanks for the invitation. Happy to be here.
Can we start with what is the simplest and the most complicated question out of all of this that we're going to need to unpack significantly? What does Jesus actually say about slavery?
Okay, so the answer, which is probably going to be frustrating to many, is not that much. So slavery was very much a part of Jesus' socio-political world, but it's not really a topic that he directly addresses or tackles head-on. Um we know that for example that like Jesus talks about slavery a bit in some of his parables. Mhm. And we know that he in these cases uses the lives the like the lived experiences of enslaved persons and enslavers to provide his followers with moral or theological lessons. And we know that he en- encountered and interacted with enslavers and enslaved persons, um but he doesn't at least in what we have in the Gospels doesn't talk that much about the topic.
And we're going to unpack a lot of those examples, cuz I think regardless of where you're coming to this from, whatever you've heard, those are the types of things that people will point to to build one side of a case or another about what Jesus thinks about this, which is a whole other conversation as well, whether we can know what Jesus thought about anything. But can I ask in this framing here of says less than we think, does that surprise you or does that feel significant to you as a scholar looking back at this that we have these moments where the topic comes up, as you mentioned in parables, or is naturally being run across, and yet is absent in the ways that it is absent?
I think so. I mean, I think one of the things that it does for us is that it exposes kind of this common treatment of enslaved persons in antiquity as kind of invisible and hyper-visible, right? They're always there, ubiquitous, they're in the background of all of these Gospel scenes in so many ways, um and yet aren't often kind of, you know, the main characters that our Gospel writers are talking about. Um so in some ways it should make us question, you know, who's present beyond the main characters in the text when we're reading Gospel narratives. Um that it's that this kind of silence or invisibilization is also part of how enslaved people were being treated.
Can you say more about that? Because this is a thing I want to get into before we turn back to some of those let's look at maybe some parable examples. When we're thinking about slavery in the context of this conversation, what are the parameters or things you think that the listener needs to set up in their mind when we are thinking of the way that these texts and the people represented in them would have been thinking about or interacting with slavery as a practice, as a concept, with enslaved persons? Because this is a thing that has an immediate framework that can come to mind in the hearers, depending on where you're coming from, but some of that does not transfer or some of it does transfer onto the world that we're talking about. So when we're looking back at the world of the Roman Empire here and slavery, how do you set that up as a thing that we should be thinking about?
Yeah. So um but especially really common for us in modernity is when we hear slavery, we're thinking like transatlantic slavery. Yeah. Um and to clarify like what does transatlantic slavery versus Roman slavery look like? We shouldn't think of these as the same thing, but also not totally divorced from each other either. If the Roman chattel slavery is pretty similar in many ways to transatlantic slavery. For example, um both involved legally classifying humans as objects or property. Uh both involved nearly unlimited legal and social power over the treatment of enslaved persons, including you know, um bodily punishment, including sometimes torture, sometimes execution. Um both involved stripping people from their kind of kin and their cultural context, right? That um for example, in uh ancient Rome, enslaved persons couldn't legally marry. Um they couldn't have heirs. They instead became members of their enslaver's familia. Familia, of course, we translate as family from Latin, but familia meant this really broad capacious category that included um both children, um spouses, parents, but also enslaved persons and freed persons or formerly enslaved persons who were still kind of attached to the household of their former enslaver. Um and of course, Roman slavery wasn't based on skin color like the enslavement of people of African descent in modernity, but so it was based on these kind of perceived geographic and cultural differences. So for example, like Romans really didn't enslave Romans that much, but they did enslave Gauls, North Africans, Jews, Syrians. Um that um this was still based on cultural difference. Um and that um another big thing that comes up often when kind of talking about or comparing contrasting um transatlantic slavery with Roman slavery is that often we hear this uh idea that Roman slavery was nicer because people could be manumitted more often. Uh and that's true in a sense of that manumission rates were higher, but also um manumission didn't mean that you escaped your enslaver in the Roman world. There were still these other kind of legally enforced obligations that people had to their enslavers even after they were freed.
So when you're setting up this context of a vast system of slavery in the Roman world, how I guess widespread is this as a thing that if we're thinking of the context of the Gospels, we're within a part of the Roman world, but maybe not, you know, you're not in core Rome here. So when we're thinking of the widespread reaches of slavery and the system and the system of thought, how much of this transfers over to the world of the Gospels as we have it described, do you think?
Yeah, this is a hard conversation, right? Because um so trying to figure out demographics of enslaved people in the Roman world is difficult because we don't really have clear data. Um our best estimates tend to be somewhere between 5 to 25% of the population of the let's say the late Roman Republic being enslaved. Which is a huge population. Yeah. Um but also um enslaved persons, because they weren't uh legally classified as people, weren't counted in like a a Roman census, right? So we don't have kind of those kind of data sets to help us create these calculations. Um our info is really messy. And we know that there are certain places that are, say um that have higher populations of enslaved persons, higher concentrations of populations of enslaved persons. Um so this would be in urban centers, right? Like Rome would be teeming with enslaved persons um living all over, working uh in kind of the urban villas of rich Romans, being on the streets, doing different types of work. Um and also on um rural villas. So things that is pretty the equivalent of like Roman plantations, especially in rural Italy and Sicily. Uh so when we're thinking about first-century Palestine, it's hard for us to tell exactly what these populations would have looked like, but likely somewhere between 5 to 15% of the population being enslaved. Um so it's very likely that Jesus would have been encountering in um enslaved persons and enslavers around him. Um and I mean, even in our Gospels, we get instances of this where we believe this to be the case. Um just to give a couple examples, right? Uh Jesus encounters the centurion and his enslaved person in Matthew 8 and Luke 7. Um Herod has enslaved persons in Matthew 14. Uh of course, famously the Jewish high priest has an enslaved person that uh in some of the Gospels Peter cuts the ear off of. Um and we have these men who are carrying a paralyzed person on a mat in Mark 2 that may also be enslaved. It was a very like a common function of enslaved persons to um physically support their enslavers and kind of function as like um a prosthetic limb for them if they needed help uh with mobility. Um so we we at least know from the Gospels also that there are some uh enslaved persons and enslavers that Jesus is coming into contact with.
When we're thinking of as you mentioned here in that Roman context of a higher density in Rome itself or in some of these locations of wealth. Would that system transfer over so that we would have these clusters of higher densities in highly romanized places or around people like Herod, you know, in this function? So, it might be selectively more dense than in other places or is this really one of these systems that because of those locations of density just kind of spreads everywhere and is all over the place everywhere that you're going?
We probably would see more enslaved persons in urban areas of first-century Palestine, but also because of how both Hellenized and Romanized first-century Palestine was by this point, people would have been very familiar with Roman notions of slavery in the time period and would have participated in them as part of the kind of broader expanding Roman Empire. And maybe just to give some examples of like how affected Palestine was at the time by slavery and displacement. Yeah. Even if we go back to, let's say, go back two centuries. Second Maccabees tells us about how 40,000 people in Jerusalem were enslaved by Antiochus the Fourth Epiphanes, the one who famously is the reason that we celebrate Hanukkah. And after him, we have the Maccabees or Hasmonean dynasty where Josephus tells us as a Jewish historian that John Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus, two of the Hasmonean rulers, as they were expanding their territory and creating this kingdom of Judea, were enslaving people from cities like Sebaste or Raphia, which is modern-day Rafa in Gaza. And then the Romans get involved in this, too, that after Pompey takes Jerusalem, Cassius, another famous Roman, comes because he's fighting against the Parthian Empire. He needs some money and he ends up enslaving 30,000 people in Galilee. And does the same after Julius Caesar dies and enslaves even more just north of modern-day Ramallah and Emmaus. And even the year that Jesus is born, the Roman general in the area, Varus, burns down the city of Sepphoris in Galilee and enslaves its inhabitants. So, when we're thinking about kind of the the social world that Jesus lives in, right, we're also thinking about a place where over the last 200 years hundreds of thousands of people had been enslaved or displaced. Some of them may have been taken out of Palestine and taken to do domestic or agricultural work over in Sicily or Italy. Some would have been enslaved to um Greek or Hasmonean or Roman elites and had to labor for them in Jerusalem. So, it's it's part of the social world that Jesus is navigating.
When you're talking about these you use the phrase Roman notions of slavery. And what you're laying out here is we have a lot of these, as you mentioned, taking people that the Romans would identify as others. And Romans aren't enslaving Romans, but they're enslaving these groups as a part of this. When we're looking then at this world, would the audience that Jesus is talking to have had enslaved persons on kind of a broad scale? Because as you're laying out here, right, they these groups are coming in and enslaving populations that are local here. And Jesus' audience seems to be fairly mixed depending on when or what text you're reading here. We might be talking to a Roman Centurion or you might you might not be so. This audience has an exposure to enslaved enslaved populations, but would they themselves have had this kind of same spread of density of having slaves within their own households or is this kind of one of those places where they're interacting with it, they're aware of it, but they themselves may not be participating in the system because they would have been one of those groups that would have been seen as someone the Romans would have had been okay with enslaving?
Difficult to answer. The hardest thing about this is part of this is trying to unpack, right, who are the audience of the Gospels? Who is who's writing the Gospels, right? Yeah, but maybe a trap question to start there before we can come to the other part.
Yeah. So, I tend to follow Robin Faith Walsh's work where she is arguing that it seems like the people who are writing our Gospel literature are already relatively elite. This is These are people who are well-educated, who are kind of well-trained in Greek and Roman thought. And so, it's very likely that they were already kind of part of this world of enslavement, aware of it, may have had enslaved persons themselves. I think this is also really complemented by recent scholarship by Candida Moss last year in a book God's Ghostwriters made really clear to us that enslaved people in antiquity, especially in the Roman world, were often the ones who were doing scribal work, who were doing literate labor, and that it's extremely likely that most of our New Testament texts were written by enslaved persons at least physically, right, that they were composed by enslaved persons, that they were probably dictated from someone else, an enslaver. Um So, it's it's likely that at least some of the audience of our Gospels would have been people who were enslavers, who participated in kind of this broader Roman Mediterranean practice of slavery, but also at the same time like, you know, people beyond the Romans were enslaving people, too, right? There are Greeks who are enslaving people at this time in Roman Greece. There are Judeans who are enslaving people in Roman Judea. So, this is also a practice that even though it's kind of in inflected by what Rome is doing, that others who whom the Romans looked at and said they that they considered enslaveable were still also enslaving other people and were enslaved and were exposed to kind of the complexity of living in a world where a person could become someone else's property.
As we're laying out a lot of the Roman context here and we're thinking about who is participating in this and what they're drawing on in their awareness, something that people are probably thinking about as well as, well, we have another background of Jewish law and tradition that is coming through in maybe some of these audiences, maybe less in some others. When we're thinking about adding that into the mix before we can turn to some of these teachings that are drawing on both or different strands of this, how do you see that history cuz you've already mentioned some about going back into texts like what is happening in Maccabees that is drawing on or repurposing this practice of Jewish tradition and how it is different from the Roman practice of slavery, how it is very much in the same vein, and and does that matter for how we think about how Jesus does or does not talk about this?
Yeah. So, slavery in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near East is a huge huge topic. So, we can only scratch the surface here, but I guess what's worth noting, right, is like typically in if we're thinking about kind of ancient Near Eastern practices, especially predating the New Testament, typically enslaved persons were being bought and sold on more of like an ad hoc basis between individuals. That that looks a little bit different than like Roman slave markets, which are closer to what we might imagine in like the transatlantic world as well. And then often enslaved persons in the ancient Near East were doing domestic labor or they were used as kind of like mobile capital, right, that you could like purchase an enslaved person, send them to a creditor to kind of stave off defaulting on a loan or something like that. Um And famously in the Hebrew Bible, there's this distinction in treatment between Hebrew enslaved persons and non-Hebrew enslaved persons that Hebrew enslaved persons are meant to be indentured, they're meant to be they can sell themselves into debt slavery, but can be they're released on the Sabbath year or famously in the Jubilee year. And that the latter, non-Hebrew enslaved persons, were typically treated more like chattel, right? This was lifelong enslavement typically from conquest and war or being purchased. Um One of the big issues that we run into, though, and the best person for this is Catherine Heser's work, book called Jewish Slavery, and does plenty of work on this, is that in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Jewish slavery actually looked a lot like Roman slavery. That it seemed to be chattel slavery, typically of non-Jewish people, typically involved circumcising enslaved men and trying to integrate them to some degree into Jewish ancestral practices. And later on in like when the Roman Empire becomes Christianized, there starts to be laws against this because Christians are really worried about enslaved Christians being circumcised and trying to be, kind of, converted to Judaism against their will. But it's messy because of this, both because uh Jewish practices Jewish slavery practices in let's say Hellenistic and Roman Palestine start to look a lot like Roman practices. They start to kind of transition over because of that influence of Roman colonialism. And also we it's hard because we don't also have much evidence in the Hebrew Bible or beyond it in, for example, our record our papyrological record of um of Jewish enslavers actually freeing people on the Sabbath or Jubilee years and kind of doing what, for example, some of the Torah says is supposed to be done, which is to regrant them their ancestral property. We don't actually see that happening that often. So, it's also, right, when we're dealing with slavery, especially laws around slavery, we also run into this issue of we have to kind of this legal ideal that's put out into the world and then we have the on-the-ground practices of what people are actually doing.
Yeah, always cycling back to just cuz it's written down doesn't mean that it happened as it was written down says it's supposed to have happened.
Mhm, exactly.
If we can turn now, having all of this context in our mind, to some of the instances that you started at the beginning with, where Jesus does talk about or draw on slavery in teachings. And I think people are probably thinking about first, as you noted, is parables, because slavery shows up in a number of this moment these types of teachings from Jesus. Is there a reason why you think that is a place where this shows up for Jesus's framework?
Yeah, I think part of why it comes up for him is because slavery was part of Jesus's social world. And it's part of the social world of those who orally transmitted Jesus's teachings, and eventually those who wrote it down and edited and disseminated these texts further. Um, and that also because the figures of the kind of almost like archetypal figures of enslaver and enslaved person um were really easy way for Jesus to explain social hierarchy, both kind of in this world and in kind of the divine sphere, right? That as we'll talk about more in a second, right? Um, this was an easy way for Jesus to explain what it means to interact with a God who's understood to have absolute power over the bodies and the futures of humans.
Is this a framework, this archetypal framework here, that is unique to Jesus's teaching structure or something that really draws on wider practices of setting up this as cuz parables aren't unique to Jesus, right? So, like, is this something we see in other instances too where this same teaching style uses these figures as something widely understood?
We do to a degree, yeah, that we do see I mean, one of my favorite examples that's a little bit outside of parables, but related, is um Valerius Maximus, who's a Roman writer who's uh doing work with kind of uh moralizing tales, where he tells little stories and says, you know, here's what here's what we should learn about how people should act. Um, and he has this whole section on enslaved persons, where he's talking about uh in this case he's talking about kind of uh enslaved persons who have gone above and beyond, been, you know, excessively loyal to save their enslaver from harm, sometimes like, you know, um switching places with them in bed so that their killed instead of their enslaver when their, you know, their um their villa's being seized or something like that. Um, so we do see in other places enslaved persons and enslavers being used in these kind of like moralizing tales.
It might surprise people I guess going back to that framework problem that we're talking about a system of slavery in a moralizing situation to teach you a moral when the audience's reaction might be very clearly, well, this is an a moral problem itself. When we look at this though, do you see it as morally it it has nothing to say, it's very much in support of this? How do these stories fit into that kind of dichotomy of the moral problem?
Right, this is something that I I am still struggling with. I mean, this this ended up being half of why I wrote my dissertation on how early Christians were talking about being slaves of God, cuz I was dealing with this issue of why is it that um it's treated as this kind of moral category that we're able to use um and that Christians can can think through and and can um relate to. Um, so this is something that beyond thinking about Jesus and slavery, um dealing with this larger early Christian problem of why did early Christians talk about God as this ultimate, you know, ideally benevolent enslaver, if you're loyal to him, he's the best enslaver you can have, and it's kind of like the perfection of this enslaved enslaver relationship, um and that, you know, later Christians in early Christianity and late antiquity used to encourage enslavers and enslaved persons to like reflect on their own behavior and say, how can you be in line with like God's paternalistic benevolence? Um, that this is something that Jesus is kind of partially setting the stage for in Christian discussions by using parables in this way that um deploy enslaved persons as characters. Um, but it's not just him, right? This is kind of a broader discourse that people in the ancient Mediterranean are having where um um they uh especially those who are enslavers and those who are affiliated with enslavers tended to not see slavery as a a moral problem to fix, but rather um a great way to describe the way things are, the way things should be in terms of kind of maintaining hierarchies.
When we're looking at the parables of Jesus then and in setting the stage in some ways for the systems of thought that are going to come, is there a parable or a couple of them that you think best encapsulate kind of the way Jesus uses slavery as a system or the way Jesus thinks about slavery?
Yes, I would say, I mean, it's my favorite example for this is the parable of the talents, Matthew 25. Just to kind of recap it for us, right? An enslaver leaves on a journey, right? And gives three of his enslaved persons some some money. And when he returns, he, two of them have kind of successfully invested this money, and he gives them as reward more to be in charge of. And the one who fails to invest, he's thrown into the outer darkness, which now we the place of the, you know, weeping and gnashing of teeth. Um scholars today think that probably refers to incarceration. Uh, but uh I think what's really important here is this where Jesus is using this slave parable, the reward for being a loyal enslaved person isn't manumission, it's not freedom, but is more responsibility. Um, that this is the way that Jesus is framing what should happen to you um if you've done well for your enslaver. And I think what's so important about the parable of the talents is also where it's placed. Um, so if you're reading through Matthew 24 and 25 together, um there's a bunch of different things coming together, right? This is um discussion about the importance of the apostles' watchfulness. Um, this is uh a parable about loyal and unloyal enslaved persons. Then there's the the 10 bridesmaids who don't know the day or the hour that the groom is coming. Then the parable of the talents. And all of this is bookended by Jesus's discussion about the coming of the son of man who uh has been absent and will return. And when he returns, he will punish and reward accordingly. Um, so when you're reading all this together, you would say, oh, okay, like, you know, he's using these parables partially as in reference to this son of man figure who's going to come, who's acting like an enslaver, who's kind of divinely surveilling humans um who are here characterized as enslaved, right? That they're being watched for what they're doing and not doing, and are being kind of um either rewarded with more responsibility or tossed out um when the son of man comes.
When we're thinking of I Is there a counter, I guess I would ask, to to this one as maybe your the one you'd put forward first, that gives either a different term or a an opposite to the way Jesus talks about slavery? Here or is Jesus pretty consistent in the use of slavery in parables?
In parables, Jesus is fairly consistent, and I think this is one of the things that makes this so difficult for us, right? Is that um he uses these mostly as I I guess actually one of the things that might be closest to maybe an opposite to this is that um for example, the um the faithful and prudent slave manager of Luke 12 um is a discussion around what does it mean to be put in charge of other people and to treat them relatively well in this circumstance um until the return of the son of man. Um, so it still is kind of within this same framework of being vigilant and watchful, um but is uh at least giving a kind of a a different perspective on um the treatment of enslaved persons.
When when you look at the way enslaved persons show up in the parables, do you see them as narrative shorthand of a type to to talk about these types of themes or these questions, or real ways to try to engage with a lived reality that the audience understands? Cuz parables kind of walk this line back and forth of how do you want to understand them and see them being engaged with?
I typically read them as Jesus trying to give narrative shorthand for to try to explain how he imagines divine human relations are supposed to function. Um, right? Especially um here, right, where we're um encountering him as this kind of, you know, eschatological prophet, right? That he's predicting what's about to come with the son of man. He's predicting that the kingdom of God is coming um and is using these parables to try to explain a little bit about what that's going to look like when the son of man comes. Um, so this seems to be one of the main ways that slavery pops up in these is that he's using, you know, these these parables that tend to be agricultural in nature and is in in doing so, right, using the realities of agriculture in the Roman Mediterranean to tell these stories, to say, well, this is what it looks like when someone is uh when an enslaver leaves and his enslaved persons are working in the farm um or um goes away on a journey and has his enslaved persons do a task while he's gone. That he's kind of pulling on these real life scenarios that people would be very familiar with around them.
When you see people talking about these, I feel like often times when the parables come up and when we're talking about a conversation like, what does Jesus have to say or not have to say about slavery, these moments are the places that get attention because here we have a series, okay, let's look, is there consistency, how are things showing up? And something that people will talk about quite frequently is the lack of condemnation in these is it facto endorsement of of the system itself in the here and now. But you're also talking about how you see this as Jesus setting up something about this divine human relation. What do you think about that idea of the lack of condemnation means endorsement or is it a condemnation in another way that we don't quite recognize cuz Jesus is trying to trying to do something else?
Yeah, right. Um I guess what makes this so hard, right? If we're thinking about like is this condemnation? Is this endorsement? Where does it fall on the spectrum? Right? Is it's it's complicated because yeah, endorsement doesn't really capture the nuance of how Jesus is deeply ingrained in a slave-owning culture and is using examples from what he sees around him. Right? Certainly Jesus isn't at least as far as I can see like doesn't seem to come out and just reject slavery as a social system. Mhm. Um nor are other elite writers of the time. Right? This is is something that to to many of the elites is unthinkable. Um but also that doesn't mean that others weren't thinking it, right? Enslaved persons were definitely thinking it. We know of many slave revolts in antiquity where enslaved persons were trying to escape and break the system. Um but it's strange to us, right? That he doesn't come out and like outright reject slavery as a social system when he's also critiquing the rich and how the rich treated the poor. This is something that um some of us in the field right now are trying to figure out is like is there some connection between uh these two demographics of the poor and the enslaved for Jesus or does he kind of just like have this cognitive dissonance between the two? Um and we really need to wrestle, right? With the Gospels' portrayal of Jesus as someone who uh sees slavery as a comprehend to how God and the son of man relate to and interact with humans and how later biblical readers uh will um like later biblical readers continue to make that choice day after day to um mimic this style of hierarchy to continue to enslave and abuse other humans. I think part of the explanation explanation for why Jesus uses slavery so heavily in his parables um is that they're familiar to his his audience. Um but also that it opens the door for us to potentially critique how Jesus in the Gospels um is using these examples in a way that also seems to normalize them a little bit. Mhm. Right? That he kind of extends this hierarchy up to heaven. Um and that it becomes that you know, in modern Christian circles we don't often pause to think about you know, what it means that Christians are encouraged to let's say have a servant's heart. Yeah. >> Or refer to Jesus or God as Lord, the Greek term kurios, which is also used for enslavers. Um that this is something that scholars in the field have wrestled with a lot is like um how do uh how do our biblical texts, especially our English translations, tend to euphemize slavery, say that slaves are servants instead of talking about them as enslaved persons. Um so that we we miss out on even more of what's going on in the social world that Jesus is navigating.
Do you have a particular reason why you think Jesus doesn't come down on a on a condemnation? Cuz as you mentioned, there's a lots of other people or topics or frameworks that that get the criticism of Jesus and and slavery doesn't. And you said it's something the field is wrestling with. So can I ask you Mhm. do you have a particular read on why you think is it just that it becomes so useful for this framework in moving things up and so the texts, the systems leave it because they don't have something else to reach for or is there a different answer that seems to sit better for you?
Yeah. Um so this may not be the answer that I think listeners might want to hear or to expect, but I think part of my answer is that I think we ask too much of Jesus in the Gospels. That scholars like uh James Crossley and Katie Shiner in their recent work have really been encouraging us to think about the origins of Christianity and the Jesus movement as more than just Jesus. Right? That he's an important kind of like node in its development, but he's not working alone. He's not tackling every single social issue at once. Um that he was you know, we know that he was interacting with enslaved persons and enslavers. Um and especially in the case of the Centurion's enslaved person, this is uh a really troubling ethical case for Bible readers to deal with, right? Because he ends up encountering this enslaver who's also a soldier, ends up healing his enslaved person so that his enslaved person can go back to laboring for his enslaver. Um and uh I think this may have been in part because of this status at that Jesus had as an eschatological prophet. Um that maybe one way to put it is you know, if the world as we know it is ending soon and the son of man is coming to reverse all of these sociopolitical situations, why change everything in the 11th hour, right? Everything's going to be totally overturned anyway. Um so I think that's that's at least part of the explanation for why this isn't uh at the forefront of what Jesus is concerned about, that there are um kind of other let's say um peasant movements and movements of the poor that he's involved in, that he is very concerned about um some forms of um economic exploitation, uh but uh does not go to the point of kind of thinking about slavery as an entire social system that for him needed to be necessarily overturned. That um and I think this is somewhere where we can push more on Jesus in the Gospels and say um how were others around him trying to do what he himself was not as a single individual trying to accomplish.
When listeners to this might want to come back to this text to do some of that pushing, are there particular things that you think historically either biblical scholars, translations like you mentioned, just the way that this this gets talked about have imported things into our reading that they should be aware of when they try to come back to doing this because a part of it is probably just understanding the world of slavery in the Roman Empire on its own terms. But there are so many like personal connection points to these stories, to the way you've been told these parables or your interpretation of this. Are there particular things you think they need to kind of flag in their own mind as they try to return to the text to do that?
Yes. Um so at least two things come up here for me. Um one is pausing when you counter language of let's say servants or maids. Um that this is something that in many translations are starting to move away from this, but it's been common for the last century or so for English translations to hide or euphemize enslaved persons um through this language, right? To say that someone is just a servant. They're talking to their servant. Um and almost in every single one of these cases this is an enslaved person in the text. Um so I think part of it is um pausing on um what choices are English translators are making when they're translating biblical passages for us out of Greek. Um another thing that I think is really helpful here is paying attention to like the the secondary or tertiary characters in a New Testament text. Um so looking at like who's named and who isn't. >> Mhm. Um if there are actions being done and they're kind of being done like in the passive voice or in the case of like Mark 2, that the the carrying of the paralyzed man in uh to see Jesus and be healed. Uh right? That it's just four men were carrying him. Well, who are these people, right? What what are they doing? Why are they um part of this story? Who else is in the room at the same time with these kind of main characters in the narrative? Um so I think that this is a large part of what we as readers can do is to um partially interrogate the translators and the choices that they're making um and also interrogate the Gospel writers themselves a little bit. Say you know, who's on the margins of their storytelling, right? Cuz obviously this is a story about Jesus. Um the apostles take on a pretty big role, but there are other people there and it's worth unpacking what they're doing there and why they're part of the story.
That is always one of the most fun parts of going back over stories that everyone thinks they know is to do like well well, who who is named? Who isn't named? Who really gets to talk? Who is being spoken to? Just we can we can skim right over it. And as you mentioned, things like that translation into the servant can do a lot of lifting um around a topic like this that soothes some discomfort that should naturally arise from the way that the text um is is really talking about. And so can I end here maybe for a final takeaway for people. There's things that they should be looking at as they're going to come back to this. But someone might go why why do I need to keep that part in my mind because I'm not living in the Roman world. I'm not encountering Roman slavery in my day-to-day life. And so why do I need to keep that part in my mind as I'm going through the text today maybe instead of something else that I have been told I should be focusing on as I read through these things?
Yeah. I would say um part of why we need to keep it in our mind is because the history of Christianity and the history of slavery are so intertwined. Right? That these are texts that have been used over millennia to justify the enslavement of human beings. And it's worth understanding how uh both in the past, that is the past of 1st century Palestine, and also in the present we have relied on enslaved labor to um you know, let's say read literature, to use our phones, to live comfortable lives, right? That um that uh slavery was a part of Jesus's world and it's worth understanding how enslaved people were or were not included in these Jesus stories as they're passed down over generations.
Dr. Bernard, thank you so much for taking the time to come and walk through this. I'm sure there will be no follow-up questions, but if you have one, put it down in the comments. I'll happily reach out and if Chance has more time, who knows, you might see him again. But for today, thank you so much for going through some of the context of this and the parables of this. It's a difficult topic, but one that definitely deserves the time to wrestle with. I I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
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