One consistent criticism of the Bible is that it condones slavery. Institutional slavery was common until the inability to tolerate it began to accelerate in the 18th century and eventually lead to abolition across the modern world, although it is true that underground forms of slavery and forced labor continues and that millions of people still need to be liberated today. Nevertheless, the modern world is far more sensitive to the humanity and freedoms of the individual, and never again does it seem like we could return to a system akin that was so widespread in the past. But what if everyone decided to follow what the Bible says? Would that mean slavery would be re-established or, at the very least, there would be nothing preventing us from re-establishing slavery? Even if one argues that Christianity was on the side that abolished the Atlantic Slave Trade, is it not true that there was also a sector of Christians fighting to maintain that institution? By the end of this article, we’re going to have sifted through an overwhelming amount of misrepresentation and distortion. We’re going to first look at slavery in the Old Testament, which is indeed a morally flawed institution, but then turn our eyes to slavery as conceived in the New Testament, where the reverse is true (despite your fleeting familiarity with the half-quotes of Ephesians 6:9 usually thrown out). Then, we’re going to look at history and find that Christianity was, in fact, largely what caused the movement that ended slavery, and it is to Christianity that we owe much our modern ethics on that issue.
People usually blout about how it “took 1800 years” for Christianity to abolish slavery. (Even on a purely factual basis, that’s not even the right number. Christianity first became important part of the lives of those who governed states in the 4th century, and there is not 1,800 years separating the 4th century from the 18th.) Though they don’t usually realize the weight of the fact that it was Christianity which abolished slavery rather than something else – an institution that existed for all of human history so of course it would take a hell of a long time to sway opinion on it. (But surely history can’t be complex, that’s silly!) There are numerous factors that would have gone into when slavery was abolished. Christianity was never the only or even the most important influence on Christian majority populations. Even in terms of religious influence, non-biblical traditions (e.g. the Pope and the papacy, the Church Fathers, the commentaries on their writings, and even a number of Greek and Roman writers like Aristotle and Ptolemy) were taken with just as much authority as the Bible itself. And this is not even counting influences like nationalism, money, custom, and so forth, all of which also existed to massively slow down and blatantly oppose the Christian drive to abolish slavery. So the timespan is a blatant red herring. We’ll also find out later on that the only institution in ancient history where slavery was even debated was in the monasteries. Another fact not usually taken into account.
There are a few far and between popups of ideas against slavery outside of Christianity. One example comes from ancient China. Slavery was never really abolished in ancient China and, even today, slavery continues by the millions. Nevertheless, a usurper named Wang Mang from the early 1st century (at least officially) abolished slavery for a few years. This may seem like he was doing slaves a favour, but it turns out that his motives were completely self-centred. Martin Klein writes;
The Chinese state generally discouraged the institution of slavery because slaves were not productive. It also feared slave revolt. Many Chinese rulers took action against slavery. In 17 CE, a usurper named Wang Mang abolished slavery to limit the power of landowning families. The Mongols had enslaved many people, but T’ai Tsu, the founder of the Ming dynasty, who expelled the Mongols, abolished all forms of slavery. [Note that this was totally unsuccessful.] When the Manchu conquered China, they took about 2 million slaves, but in 1685, the Emperor Kangxi freed all slaves belonging to the families of the ruling Manchus. There was, however, one very privileged group of slaves, the eunuchs, who played an important role at court and in the government. In 1909, three years before the fall of the Qing dynasty, all slaves were freed and given the status of commoners. (Martin Klein, Hisorical Dictionary of Slavery and Abolition, 108-9)
The reason why Wang Mang took this action was so that he could deprive landowning families of their power. This way, there would be far fewer people with sufficient resources to challenge the rule he just viciously seized. Furthermore, the masses might begin believing he would be on their side, which would also decrease the probability that they would revolt against him. Overall, it was a calculated form of deception intended to solidify his own power. Junius Rodriguez writes;
Wang Mang is sometimes incorrectly portrayed as an early socialist who tried to institute reforms that would help the landless and the poor, but this was not the case. His reforms were neither genuine nor rooted in an early notion of social and economic justice, but rather he sought to inaugurate himself among the masses of China’s poor so that with a popular following his Hsin Dynasty would be recognized as legitimate. Since China’s peasants led the revolt against Wang Mang and his reforms, it is clear that his efforts to gain popular supports among the masses had failed. (Junius Rodriguez, “Red Eyebrow Rebellion (17-23 C.E.)” in Junius Rodriguez (ed.), Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion: Volume 2, Greenwood Press, 2007, 420-1)
Unsurprisingly, Wang Mang’s power grab changed nothing about slavery in ancient China. As it turns out, tactical abolition or tactical offers of abolition during times of insurrection are more common than is often known. During the height of the French Revolution in 1794, France abolished slavery. This was in order to draw back rebellious slaves in what is now Haiti (then Saint-Domingue). Once Napoleon was comfortably in power, slavery was simply reinstituted (Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler, 2018, 360-1). During the Second Servile War in the late 2nd century BC in the Roman Republic, the slaves rebelled against Rome and one slaver leader, Salvius, set siege to a city called Morgantina. He offered the slaves inside the city liberty if they assisted him, but their masters then offered them liberty if they helped them fight against Salvius. So, they accepted their masters offer, and helped fight Salvius off. Then, the masters refused to set them free (Diodorus Siculus, 36.4). Another example of tactical offers of liberty is when Simon bar Giora during the Roman-Jewish War of 70 AD offered slaves their liberty and financial reward to anyone already free as long as they joined him in battle against the Romans (Josephus, War of the Jews, 4.9.3), although the Romans won that war nonetheless. In antiquity, even successful slave revolts lead to severe oppression rather than freedom.
In the first century, there were two Jewish ascetic groups that were reported to have rejected slavery. They were the Essene’s and the Therapeutae. The report for this comes from Philo of Alexandria, a Platonic Jewish philosopher writing in the middle of the first century. His report on the rejection of slavery by the Essene’s can be found in his Every Good Man is Free, 75-79, and his report of the rejection of slavery by the Therapeatae can be found in his On the Contemplative Life, 70-71. Philo himself accepted slavery (see his On Special Laws, 2.79-85), so he could not have been inventing this claim about these ascetic sects in order to figment some sort of wider support for a position that he himself had. However, the reason he gives for why they rejected slavery is, most likely, an invention. According to Philo, they rejected slavery on the basis of their belief that nature has imputed equality upon all men. But these were largely isolated, ascetic Jewish groups in the wilderness of Israel, and so historians doubt that they were really reasoning in such a philosophical way like this. Philo is engaging in a wider practice where ritualistic practices of Jewish ascetic groups like the Essene’s and Therapeutae are post facto ascribed a philosophical reasoning to them. Most likely, the real reason for their rejection of slavery is to be found in their ritualistic beliefs, primarily including a rejection of property (Ilaria Ramelli, Social Justice and the Legitimacy of Slavery, pp. 12-14, 93-97).
What about the attitude towards slavery found among the Greeks and Romans? From the start, we can gloss over any discussion of attitudes regarding slavery among the wider populace, where it was practiced to an unbelievably frightening extent (between 5-20% of the population was enslaved) and was simply seen as part and parcel of daily life. What about attitudes towards slavery among the philosophers? Socrates appears to have been against the enslavement of one’s own people or friends, but he thought it was right to enslave the enemy (see Xenophon’s Memorabilia, 4.2.14-5). Plato was all too aware of how unnatural slavery was, how exploitative it was, its degenerate origins, and so forth, and yet said that the question of slavery was ultimately a “difficult” one. Plato, it turns out, seems to have had a slave girl named Artemis. Describing the Roman household, Aristotle puts it in Book 1 of his Politics that slaves were not exactly humans but simply one of the tools of the master in his house. Aristotle thoroughly argued for the claim that slavery is a natural condition, and slaves are naturally inferior humans. The philosophers of Greece and Rome weren’t all that much better.
While the Stoics are usually touted by some as rejecting the morality of slavery or even making conditions for slaves better, that isn’t so. The Stoics did not accept what Aristotle said regarding slavery being natural (they thought it was a human institution), but that isn’t the same as them believing that slavery is immoral. The Stoics argued that if you attain a perfect state of mind, then no external condition is relevant or matters, and the status of slavery itself was a manner of indifference. For example, in Letter 28, the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote “What difference does it make how many masters a man has? Slavery is only one, and yet the person who refuses to let the thought of it affect him is a free man no matter how great the swarm of masters around him.” Indeed, Seneca, like many others, condemned mistreatment of slaves as if they were animals, but he definitely owned a lot of slaves. Both Musonius Rufus (Diatribe 18a) and Gellius (Attic Nights 2.18) attribute slave ownership to Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism. Yet another Stoic philosopher, Hierocles, was also fine with slave ownership so long as the slave was not mistreated. As he describes in his Elements of Ethics, if you were the slave, you wouldn’t want to be mistreated.
Just like Seneca, Epictetus, a former slave himself, was completely indifferent to slavery and considered it to be one of those things “not up to us”. He was so indifferent to slavery that he commented that people should prefer their being enslaved over being released from their slavery (manumitted) because of the poverty that might ensue. Musonius Rufus criticized sexual use of slave girls, but his reasoning is that the master is committing an injustice against himself, compromising his own purity and passion-free existence. The problem Rufus states isn’t that, you know, the girl is being raped. The one exception I’m aware of to all this is Dio Chrysostom, a popular philosopher that mixed Stoic with Cynic thought. In his Oration 15, titled “On Slavery and Freedom“, he argues that the ownership of human beings is unjust because all means used to acquire humans are illegitimate. Dio is therefore the only recorded ancient, apart from any Christian tradition, to have truly denounced slavery on the part of its inhumanity. Even among all recorded Stoics then, in this regard, he is exceptional. But certainly not enough.
The first person to endorse the outright abolition of slavery in a society where slavery existed was Gregory of Nyssa, a bishop living in Nyssa (in modern-day Turkey) in the 4th century. Gregory pronounces his condemnation of the institution of slavery in the fourth homily he wrote on the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, where he asks, for example, “Do you condemn man to slavery, whose nature is free and autonomous?” Gregory asks this under the impression of the “free and autonomous” nature which humans have due to their being made in God’s image. The full condemnation that Gregory made can be read here. His discussion surrounds Ecclesiastes 2:7, where the purchase of male and female slaves is described as one of many meaningless exercises of wealth in vv. 1-11 that adds not to wisdom but only pleasure. (Notice that, on this basis and as described earlier, one may renounce slave possession on the basis of asceticism.) Gregory repeated these views in the range of his writings across his lifetime, and though his views weren’t shared with the most of his contemporaries, we should ask some questions. Why is it that Gregory of Nyssa was the first who, acting out of a sense of human dignity, condemned the institution of slavery in his own society? Why was it a Christian bishop who, against all the assumptions and ideals of his society, found that his reading of scriptures led him to condemn this practice? How will it relate to what the Old and New Testaments actually say about slavery, and how will it relate to the rest of the relationship between Christian history and slavery? We’re about to find an answer to all of these questions.
We begin with the Bible. Here, we must separate our discussion between the Old Testament and the New Testament. I have shown here how the New Testament (contrary to some misrepresentations of Matthew 5:17-19) understands the teachings of Jesus to act as the new covenant for Christian morals, superseding the older covenant in the Torah such that virtually any attempt to critique biblical morals on the basis of what the Old Testament says immediately collapses. What I will do first is analyze everything the Old Testament says about slavery and, at the end of that analysis, make some moral conclusions. At the very beginning of the narrative in the Old Testament, slavery is a matter of indifference. Abraham seems to have had slaves (Genesis 12:16, 20:14, 24:35, 30:43, 32:6). Towards the end of the Old Testament, slavery is limited to the point where its sheer practice is a matter of sinful indulgence. I will then describe what the New Testament says about the topic, and then show how Christianity is responsible for the end of the Atlantic Slave Trade – a trade that would have been impossible if certain “Christians” actually decided to act like Christians.
The sections of the Torah that deals with slavery are Exodus 21:1-32; Deuteronomy 15:12-18; 23:15-26; and Leviticus 25:39-55, and so we will focus on these. Immediately, we need to distinguish between slavery of Israelite’s and of non-Israelite’s in the Old Testament. The treatment of Israelite vs. non-Israelite slaves is described in completely different terms. Furthermore, we also need to contend with the following fact: the Torah is a compilation of different laws that have been collected over time, and some blocks of legal texts are earlier than others. (Some follow theoretical frameworks such as Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis, although consensus regarding that or virtually any other framework has completely collapsed in recent years. For this reason, I will not appeal to any theory of source criticism.) We need to be cognizant of this because of the fact that the Torah, if treated as a unitary whole, will appear to have contradictory rules regarding the practice of slavery. Once we distinguish the different sources, and distinguish which ones were written earlier and which ones were written later, we will find that the Torah rules regarding slavery evolved. Earlier, more objectionable practices of slavery become kinder over time, although we never find perfection in the Old Testament. (This is similar to how God, even later, reveals the New Covenant.) A study on this change is found in David P. Wright, “‘She Shall Not Go Free as Male Slaves Do’: Developing Views About Slavery and Gender in the Laws of the Hebrew Bible” in (ed. J. Brooten), Beyond Slavery, Springer Nature, 2010. The earliest part of the Torah that describes slavery is Exodus 21. This chapter is encompassed in a block of text called the Covenant Code, which is universally recognized as having very early origins. Here, in Exodus 21, we find the oldest biblical rules regarding the practice of slavery. These rules will develop and change in later sources within the Torah. So, let’s start with Exodus 21.
Exodus 21:1-11: These are the ordinances that you shall set before them: When you buy a male Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, but in the seventh he shall go out a free person, without debt. If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s and he shall go out alone. But if the slave declares, “I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out a free person,” then his master shall bring him before God. He shall be brought to the door or the doorpost; and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall serve him for life. When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master, who designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed; he shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has dealt unfairly with her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out without debt, without payment of money.
A Hebrew “slave” was not exactly just a “slave”. A more applicable term is “indentured servant”. What this means is that if an Israelite went into debt and was unable to pay it back, they could instead become a servant to the person they owed the debt until the seventh year, at which point they had to be freed, instead of paying that debt back. This is the practice described in Ex. 21:1-2. One moral problem we find in Exodus 21:1-11 is that, as the text describes, only male Israelite slaves are freed on the seventh year, whereas female Israelite slaves remain slaves for life. This also creates another moral problem that this passage describes. Because female slaves cannot be set free, say that the master allows two male and female Israelite slaves to marry each other, and they have a child. Once the seventh year comes and the male is set free, both the female and child remain slaves to the master. Thus, because of this rule preventing female Israelite slaves from being set free like males, the children of Israelite slaves are also born and kept into slavery. This rule, that female Israelite slaves are not set free on the seventh year like male Israelite slaves, will be one of the rules in this earliest part of the Torah that is revised in parts of the Torah that date later, where the rule becomes that both female and male Israelite slaves are to be freed on the seventh year. However, Exodus 21 says more that raises moral problems. But at least one part of it does not.
Exodus 21:16: Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper’s possession.
In Exodus 21:16, the Torah bans kidnapping people. By extension, this would prevent people from being kidnapped into slavery. While some dishonest individuals, such as a certain Thom Stark in a book-length response to a Christian philosopher named Paul Copan on Old Testament ethics, claim that this verse only stops Hebrew people from being kidnapped into slavery, that is ridiculous. There’s nothing in Exodus 21:16 that says it’s talking about the Hebrew peoples. It’s just a general ban against kidnapping. Exodus 21:1-11 is talking about Hebrew slaves, sure, but Exodus 21:16 isn’t even talking about slaves, and so to draw a connection would be rather fanciful. Don’t get me wrong – overall, Stark does a really good job of refuting Copan. However, at times, in his own apologetic mess, Stark badly mixes up fact and fiction.
Exodus 21:20-21, 26–27: When a slaveowner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished. But if the slave survives a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner’s property … When a slaveowner strikes the eye of a male or female slave, destroying it, the owner shall let the slave go, a free person, to compensate for the eye. If the owner knocks out a tooth of a male or female slave, the slave shall be let go, a free person, to compensate for the tooth.
Here, Exodus 21 says a couple things about treatment of slaves. If you beat your slave badly enough that they die, you must be punished. If you beat your slave to the point that they’re maimed, they’re to be set free (but otherwise, it seems that the owner isn’t personally punished). If the slaveowner beats the slave really badly but they’re still alive in one or two days, then there is no punishment, because the slave is the property and money of the slaveowner. This passage raises serious moral problems surrounding both the treatment of slaves and the fact that slaves are considered property. Later texts compiled into the Torah will change this. In the future, Israelite slaveowners will cease to be the property of their masters, and the Torah will prohibit their ill treatment. On the other hand, this courtesy is not extended to non-Israelite slaves.
Exodus 21:32: If a bull gores a man or woman to death, the bull is to be stoned to death, and its meat must not be eaten. But the owner of the bull will not be held responsible. If, however, the bull has had the habit of goring and the owner has been warned but has not kept it penned up and it kills a man or woman, the bull is to be stoned and its owner also is to be put to death. However, if payment is demanded, the owner may redeem his life by the payment of whatever is demanded. This law also applies if the bull gores a son or daughter. If the bull gores a male or female slave, the owner must pay thirty shekels of silver to the master of the slave, and the bull is to be stoned to death.
In this passage in Exodus 21, the slave is shown to be considered of inherently less value than the free. So, when a bull gores a man or women, the owner of the bull is required to pay whatever is demanded in return. (If this becomes a recurring manner of negligence, the bull owner is themselves executed.) However, if it is an enslaved man or women that is gored, the payment is limited at thirty shekels of silver and the death of the bull. And that’s the conclusion of what one of the earliest sections of the Torah, the Covenant Code, has to say about slaves. We will now move on to parts of the Torah that derive from traditions that came from later periods.
Deuteronomy 15:12-15: If a member of your community, whether a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you and works for you six years, in the seventh year you shall set that person free. And when you send a male slave out from you a free person, you shall not send him out empty-handed. Provide liberally out of your flock, your threshing floor, and your wine press, thus giving to him some of the bounty with which the Lord your God has blessed you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you; for this reason I lay this command upon you today.
The first thing we’re told here is that “whether a Hebrew man or a Hebrew women” is sold, either one of them will be freed on the seventh year of their indentured servitude. Thus, the distinctions between the treatment of man and women in slavery are abolished, and all the moral issues that emerged out of this inequality themselves are abolished by this point in the development of the Torah. Furthermore, we’re specified that when the Israelite slave is freed, they are to be supplied liberally out of the resources of the master in order to enable them to start a new life. The reason for why the master does so much for the slave they free here is given by this text to be that God freed the Israelite’s from slavery, and thus, God favors their ability to flourish in the land of Israel. This truly reflects the notion of what indentured servitude is. Here, Israelite slaves are no more than temporary workers who owe debts and repay them by acting as the equivalent of hired workers to other individuals for a period of seven years. This is because the Torah institutes a practice where the debts of slaves/indentured servants are wiped out every seven years. Thus, at the end of the seventh year of their work, indentured servitudes are cleared of their debts and so return to society, free, and with the help of their masters, hopefully have a prosperous start as well. Indentured servitude was an institution meant to fight against poverty and was reserved for those who had no other ability to pay their debts.
Deuteronomy 23:15-16: If a slave has taken refuge with you, do not hand them over to their master. Let them live among you wherever they like and in whatever town they choose. Do not oppress them
Here, the Torah clearly protects slaves. The authors of this passage understand that some slaves live under brutal conditions and cannot bear what they’re dealt by their masters. This passage sympathizes with people damned to this lifestyle, and allows them to make an escape if they want to. If a slave escapes their master and runs to you, you hide them. You keep them free, away from the bondage of their old and brutal master. Compare this text to Isaiah 16:3-4, where Israelite’s are told to hide the fugitives of foreign lands who escape to Israel seeking their freedom. Israel effectively acted as a refuge for runaway slaves from other nations. However, we find ourselves once again opposed by the distortion of Thom Stark, who says that the reason for why fugitives and slaves were protected is not because of any concern for them, but because surrounding nations (like Moab) were Israel’s enemies and so Israel was just “sticking it” to them. This is as dishonest as dishonest gets. What Stark fails to make clear here is the fact that this theory of his is invented out of thin air. And it’s hilariously wrong. Deut. 23:16 specifies that we should not “oppress” a runaway slave. Why would this rule be added if the point was just not to return the runaway slave to their enemies? The idea that the Old Testament doesn’t have the wellbeing of the runaway slave in mind is ridiculous. It seems that if someone finds their life in slavery sufficiently unbearable, they have the full right to escape and be protected. The text clearly has the good of the person in mind.
We move on to the slavery traditions in the Torah found in Leviticus 25. Here, we’re told that Israelite’s cannot be treated as slaves but instead are to be treated as “hired workers or temporary residents”. Therefore, Israelite slaves are not the property of their master, and they cannot be beat in the manner described in Exodus 21:20-21, 26-27. The reason given in the Torah for why Israelite’s cannot be treated as slaves is that God freed the Israelite’s from their slavery in Egypt and so are not to return to this status again;
Leviticus 25:39-43: If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and sell themselves to you, do not make them work as slaves. They are to be treated as hired workers or temporary residents among you; they are to work for you until the Year of Jubilee. Then they and their children are to be released, and they will go back to their own clans and to the property of their ancestors. Because the Israelite’s are my servants, whom I brought out of Egypt, they must not be sold as slaves. Do not rule over them ruthlessly, but fear your God.
Leviticus goes on to describe how to maintain the well-being and eventually free an Israelite servant who is sold to a foreigner outside of Israel (Lev. 25:47-53). Also notice that all Israelite slaves, including their children, are freed on the Year of Jubilee, which came every 50 years. This is unlike Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 15, where release comes on the 7th year. Nevertheless, all this means for the Israelite is that they’re going to be in the equivalent of a specific job for up to a large portion of their life. Unlike a normal job, the home of the individual will move to being in the home of the master. Non-Israelite slaves don’t receive this fair treatment and many of the same moral problems retain when it comes to them.
Leviticus 25:44-46: Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly. “If a stranger or sojourner with you becomes rich, and your brother beside him becomes poor and sells himself to the stranger or sojourner with you or to a member of the stranger’s clan, then after he is sold he may be redeemed. One of his brothers may redeem him, or his uncle or his cousin may redeem him, or a close relative from his clan may redeem him. Or if he grows rich he may redeem himself.
We find that foreign slaves are the property of the owner and they could be kept for life. Furthermore, the children of foreign slaves can be inherited into slavery. Furthermore, v. 44 comes right after v. 43, which says that you cannot rule ruthlessly over Israelite slaves. By implication, this sequence implies that you can rule ruthlessly over non-Israelite slaves. This passage also shows special concern for freeing Israelite slaves from foreign slaveowners residing in Israel. This section of Leviticus correlates to Genesis 9:25-27, where the descendants of Canaan, the Canaanite’s, are condemned to be slaves to the descendants of Shem, which include the Israelite’s. These Canaanite’s appear to be the foreign slaves that Leviticus is referring to. Finally, people today believe that the inherent act of owning someone else is a problem.
We’ve finally gone over what the Torah says about slavery. In earlier parts of the Torah, Hebrew women can’t be freed from their slavery like Hebrew men can, and this gives rise to several moral problems. Furthermore, all slaves can be beaten to brutal degrees. However, in later texts in the Torah, Hebrew slaves seize being the property of their masters and gain the right to be treated fairly and as other humans. They are to be treated as “hired workers” or “temporary residents”. Furthermore, any slave who finds their conditions brutal enough that they want to escape are to be protected. And as time passes on, we even get to the point where God declares that all Hebrew slaves should fully gain their freedom, although the people disobey God and do not follow God’s instructions, and, in return for not freeing the Hebrews from slavery, God punishes them.
Nevertheless, the situation remains bad for non-Israelite, foreign slaves. In their latest discussion, they’re still the property of the master, they can still be made to work brutally and, most likely, the master is allowed to treat them brutally. Unlike Hebrew slaves, who can be freed along with their children, foreign slaves are retained as slaves for their lives, and their children are born into slavery. These are all moral problems in the Old Testament’s treatment of slaves. Interestingly, there remains the ideas noted in Ecclesiastes 2 we briefly mentioned in our discussion of Gregory of Nyssa, where slave ownership itself becomes a sinful indulgence in luxury. This is, in fact, the last word that the Old Testament has to say about slavery. This is also where we now move to discussing the New Testament’s attitudes towards slavery. The New Testament, we will see, as God’s current revelation for the moral behaviors of man, abolishes the moral problems we find in Old Testament text. An important source I rely on for discussions on the New Testament and early Christianity to come, but also on the Stoics above, is Ilaria Ramelli’s Social Justice and the Legitimacy of Slavery (Oxford 2016).
Though critics usually say something vague about slavery also being in the New Testament or half-quote Ephesians 6:5 saying that slaves should obey their masters, they don’t mention much else. Here’s a more detailed look of everything that the usual critics ignore before moving on to their arguments. Philemon 15-16 has Paul telling Philemon that when his slave Onesimus returns to him, he is to be “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother”. It appears as if Paul is requesting the manumission of Onesimus. It’s worth looking a little more about what Paul wants for Onesimus here. In Philemon 11, Paul brings attention to that Philemon considered Onesimus useless to him. In Philemon 15, Paul says he is trying to explain why Onesimus was separated from Philemon. In Philemon 17, Paul asks Philemon to “welcome him [Onesimus]” back, and in Philemon 18-19, Paul says that if Onesimus has ever wronged him or owes him anything, he should not hold it against him but instead charge it to Paul. Finally, in Philemon 21, Paul says he knows that Philemon will do even more than he asks him to do. Considering this context, it appears as if Onesimus has wronged Philemon and that, for this reason, Philemon has thrown Onesimus out of his household, and as a result, Onesimus has went to Paul (Philemon 10).
Despite the fact that nothing in this passage says Onesimus was a runaway slave, some people still try to suggest that Onesimus was a runaway slave. The problem with this argument is that, as we’ve just seen, Philemon is the one who was wronged by Onesimus. This would suggest that Philemon threw Onesimus out of his household. If Onesimus was a runaway, Paul wouldn’t have to convince Philemon to take him back. Instead, Philemon would be furiously demanding his return. Paul’s statement that he will repay whatever damages Onesimus has caused in Philemon 18-19 also suggests that the problem wasn’t running away, nor does it help that Deuteronomy 23:15-16 instructs those holding fugitive runaways not to return them to their masters. Paul asks Philemon to take Onesimus back, not as a slave, but as a dear brother. Thus, Paul wants to re-establish the relationship between Philemon and Onesimus, but he wants it to be different as well. The prior master-slave relationship is to be done away with, and instead, they are now to be as brothers together. Paul told Philemon about how Onesimus was a “son” to him (Philemon 10), how he helped him spread Christianity (Philemon 13), and how dear he was to him (Philemon 16). It seems that Paul bereaves that Onesimus should return to Philemon, but also hopes that their new relationship is modelled off of the one that he had with Onesimus. While it is true that it is not certain that Paul’s specific aid in freeing Onesimus can be used for any sort of broad ethical conclusions with Christianity, it remains that this episode shows evidence that masters should seek different relationships with their inferiors besides that of making them slaves.
Revelation 18:13 condemns Rome for its slave trade, as if humans were just cargo that can be moved around or sold to other humans (Murray Vasser, “Bodies and Souls: The Case for Reading Revelation 18.13 as a Critique of the Slave Trade”, NTS 2018).
In Galatians 3:28, Paul says that “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The same idea is also found in both 1 Corinthians 12:13 and Colossians 3:11, where we’re told again that God makes no distinctions between the humanity, dignity, or personhood between all people, and that we’re all one under Jesus Christ (cf. Job 31:13-15). Interestingly, this passage appears to be a complete reversal of Aristotelian philosophy, which argued, very specifically, that men really were superior to women, that the free really were superior to slaves, and that Greeks really were superior to barbarians/non-Greeks, which, in a Jewish equivalent, would be the idea that Jews really were superior to non-Jews (Gentiles). Similarly, compare what Paul says to what we instead read in the rabbinic morning prayer Tefillat Shahrit, where one thanks God “because you have not made me a gentile . . . [because] you have not made me a slave . . . [because] you have not made me a woman” (Tosefta Berachot 7:18). The demonstrable polemical context in which Paul makes this statement shows that he rejects that any one human is naturally inferior to another. It’s also worthwhile to note how this manifests in Paul’s relationship with Gentiles where he, against the orthodox Judaism of his day, “insists upon sharing his work, his travels, his meals, and his worship with Gentiles as those who are fully his equals and co-workers ‘in Christ'” (Elaine Pagels, “Paul and Women: A Response to Recent Discussion”, JAAR (1974), pg. 545).
1 Corinthians 7:20-23 encourages slaves to get their freedom if the opportunity is available (v. 21), and warns free people from becoming slaves (v. 23). Now, the Greek itself in v. 21 lacks a direct object, and so it has to be supplied from the context. The two options are that Paul is saying (1) we make use of the chance for freedom or (2) we make use of our slave status despite the chance for freedom. J. Albert Harrill, in his The Manumission of Slaves in Early Christianity, 1995, 68–128, demonstrated to the satisfaction of almost all scholars that what is being made use of is the opportunity to gain freedom. In addition, Will Deming (in his paper “A Diatribe Pattern in 1 Cor. 7:21-22: A New Perspective on Paul’s Directions to Slaves”, Novum Testamentum (2020)) notes that it would make little sense for Paul to suggest we shouldn’t use freedom in v. 21 when he advocated for the manumission of Onesimus elsewhere. Deming also makes a compelling contextual argument for the same reading. Very similar phrases can be found in multiple authors, even in the context of this passage itself, where we read something like “If X, stay X, if Y, stay Y”. However, Paul adds the pertinent clause found in 1 Cor. 7:21 to this usual saying, implying that it has a mitigating effect on what is being suggested (i.e. don’t worry if you’re a slave, but if you can become free, go for it).
Jennifer Glancy (in her Slavery in Early Christianity, pg. 96) claims that Paul’s statement in 1 Cor. 7:21 is not significant since manumission was common in the Roman world. Her logic is that, because manumission was common, plenty of people must have thought that slaves should escape their slavery with the chance. That doesn’t make sense. The Roman slaveowners who manumitted their slaves after countless years of hard labor had enslaved them to begin with and presumably thought that their slave should be enslaved to them, rather than should be free, at least until they were old and worn out enough that they weren’t needed, or because they paid their master enough money to gain their freedom. This isn’t even remotely similar to what Paul thought, who is actively encouraging people to escape their slavery. What’s more, without saying much more than that slaves should gain freedom with the opportunity, it’s fully possible that he’s endorsing individuals to become runaways. (Paul wanted Onesimus to return to Philemon, but he did so assuming that one would no longer enslave the other. Paul also personally knew and trusted Philemon.) This happens to be a practice that, as we’ll see, was actively encouraged by many monasteries, likely on the basis of this passage itself. By the way, for those who rely on Glancy’s reading of Galatians 4 and 1 Thessalonians 4:3-8, see Larry Hurtado’s refutation in his paper “Freed by Love and for Love: Freedom in the New Testament”, footnote 28.
Elsewhere, the New Testament uses analogy to turn people away from becoming slaves (Galatians 5:1), which assumes that non-slaves becoming slaves is a bad thing, and condemns slave traders who reduce free people to slavery (1 Timothy 1:9-10). For those stuck under slavery in their lives on Earth or until they can get their freedom, the New Testament requires a humanization of their treatment, where it says that slaves must devote themselves to their master but also be treated fairly and equally (Colossians 3:22-4:1) (see Murray Vasser, “Grant Slaves Equality: Re-Examining the Translation of Colossians 4:1”, Tyndale Bulletin 2017), that they are forbidden from being threatened (Ephesians 6:5-9), and that masters must be devoted to their slaves welfare (1 Timothy 6:1-2). The claim I made regarding 1 Timothy 6:1-2 depends on the NIV translation, whereas others make no reference to masters being devoted to their slaves welfare. Nevertheless, all translations refer in v. 1 to slaves being under the “yoke of slavery”, which is a reference to the repressive/oppressive state of their slavery. (Leviticus 26:13, for example, refers to God breaking the “yoke” of the Israelite’s slavery in Egypt.) 1 Peter 2:18-25 sympathizes with the suffering slaves must endure in their unjust state and commends them to make it through, saying that God will grant them reward for it.
The usual passages used against the New Testament on the topic of slavery are the Household Codes in Colossians 3:22-4:1 and Ephesians 6:1-9, where the structure of the family is described and slaves are recognized as a legitimate category within the family. This is true, but sort of irrelevant to everything I’ve described above. The New Testament position, ultimately, is an allowance of the acceptance of slavery in the meanwhile but an ultimate wish to escape it and bring it to an end. So, again, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7 that people should go on being a slave if that’s the status they find themselves in, but if they find the opportunity to become free, they should take it. The basic implications are clear enough and logically irrefutable.
We turn to the Gospels. As I’ve shown in my article here, Jesus did not believe in the continuity of the Mosaic law, and so we must look at what Jesus said himself in order to understand his perspective on slavery. One of the things that Jesus does is subvert the economic order of slavery when he taught his disciples that in order to be a true leader in your community, you must become the “slave of all” (Mark 10:44). It’s hard to jibe slavery with the idea that you are the one, quite literally, who should be serving and helping others. Jesus also performs a typical slaves task in John 13:1-20 where he washes the feet of his disciples. Paul evidently knew Jesus’ teaching to be a servant to others and called himself, though free, a slave to his fellow Christians (2 Cor. 4:5). Furthermore, it is not inconsequential that Jesus rejects wealth (Mark 10:25). One person righteously devoted to Jesus is depicted as selling off their possessions (Luke 14:33). Compare this to how the early Christian community is depicted as living in Acts 2:44-46 and Acts 4:32-36. A lifestyle like this is hardly reconcilable with owning slaves.
The Gospels do not call for manumission and their description of everyday life understands the ubiquity of slavery. However, they do describe and sympathize the plight of Jesus and his disciples in terms of the plight of slaves (Edmund Neufeld, “Vulnerable Bodies and Volunteer Slaves: Slave Parable Violence in the Rest of Matthew”, BBR 2020). Slaves are most frequently mentioned in Jesus’ parables. In Matthew alone, slaves are described in six different parables: “the weeds and wheat (13:24–30), the unmerciful slave (18:23–35), the wicked tenants (21:33–41), the wedding banquet (22:1–10), the overseer (24:45–51), and the talents (25:14–30)” (Neufeld, pg. 45). It is interesting that the slaves in Jesus’ parables are almost always meant to represent the disciples, the followers of Jesus. Sometimes, in Jesus’ parables, violence is done against the slaves. This is true of the last five of the six parables quoted earlier. However, whenever the master is described as the perpetrator of this violence, the master is always depicted as either God or Jesus. The implication is clear enough: Jesus and God may punish, but the rest of us are as God’s slaves, forbidden to do violence on one another (e.g. see the parable in Matthew 24:48-49/Luke 12:45). All other violence in the Gospels, apart from the violence committed by God’s judgement, is unjust, and followers of Christ are to be meek and merciful. The violence done on the slaves (disciples) in these parables is either punishment from outsiders, representing those who persecute Christians, or violence by slaves over other slaves that they rule (most likely depicting master-slave relations), or violence done by the master himself upon his return to the household after having left for a while, representing God’s divine judgement at the Second Coming. Only the last is ever portrayed as just. The Gospels utilize the injustice of the suffering of slaves in order to depict the horrible persecutions and suffering that await many Christians, and in the end, Jesus Himself. The violence is unjust, but expected, but in the end, God’s justice will await. The way that slavery is overall framed in the New Testament is as an unjust institution that individuals should seek to avoid. We move on to slavery in early Christianity. I will note early on that Christianity dried up the second most significant source of new slaves in the Roman Empire. Greeks and Romans often practiced child exposure, where unwanted children were literally thrown away. This seems to have been common when it came to female newborns. The most common fate for exposed children was that they would be taken and raised into slavery. (The next most common fate is that they would simply die.) With Christianity, the new societal values rejected the practice of child exposure. (Of course, it did not die off completely.) See W.V. Harris, “Child-Exposure in the Roman Empire”, JRS (1994).
Attitudes towards slavery among early Christians were diverse. One well-known Christian at the turn of the 2nd century was Tertullian. Though converting, his attitude towards slavery was still that of a typical Roman, seeing slaves as socially dead, animals, and criminals (J. Albert Harrill, “The Metaphor of Slavery in the Writing’s of Tertullian”, Studia Patristica). On the other end of the spectrum, we’ve already seen Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century, who was the first in human history to advocate in a surviving text for the abolition of the slave trade out of a concern for the dignity of humans. The Acts of Thomas was a Christian text composed in the 3rd century and depicts the enslaved status of one of Jesus’ disciples, Thomas, in India. Throughout this work, the critique of slavery is both implicit and explicit. The text tells us that being a slave is no different than being treated like an animal without recognition of humanity. When a slaveowner does something wrong, Thomas does not blame the slaves themselves, as was common, but the slaveowner as responsible. See Jennifer Glancy, “Slavery in Acts of Thomas”, Journal of Early Christian History (2012). Keep in mind, Glancy makes some odd mistakes in this paper, such as by suggesting that the critique of slavery in this text is undercut because it also discusses sexual morality and uses standard linguistic tropes to discuss slavery. In reality, neither of these is mutually exclusive from what Glancy admits is a rejection of the morality of slavery.
Antiquity was also a period where the status quo clamped down on Christian attitudes against slavery. For example, as we noted earlier, 1 Corinthians 7:21 encourages slaves to get their freedom with the opportunity. Origen of Alexandria in the 3rd century believed as much when he wanted to reinterpret this verse as allowing one to take freedom from the “slavery of marriage” that he thought prevented one from practicing an ascetic lifestyle. But in the fourth century, this was suddenly reinterpreted. John Chrysostom, deacon at the cathedral in Antioch at the time who went on to become the archbishop of Constantinople, announced to his readers a new reading of 1 Corinthians 7:21. This new reading, he told us, is what Paul really meant – and what Paul really meant, contrary to what John tells us were the assumptions of his readers, is not that slaves should gain their freedom with the chance but instead that they must remain slaves and forego their opportunity to freedom. We know little about the nameless Christians before John who understood this passage in its traditional sense of a slave seizing their opportunity for freedom. Nevertheless, his reference to the Christians who understand this passage as telling slaves to get their freedom when possible gives away that these Christians existed J. Albert Harrill has noted that Chrysostom’s attempt to reinterpret the passage, which acknowledged that it was different from how people usually interpreted it, might have been a reaction to the many Christians in this time who were working to help slaves escape their slavery, precisely on the point of the interpretation of this passage, and as we’re about to see. For all this, see J. Albert Harrill, “Revisiting the Problem of 1 Corinthians 7:21”, Biblical Research (2020).
In the same century, a local council of bishops held the Council of Gangra in the city of Gangra (modern-day Çankırı) in 340 AD and aimed to condemn what they took as heresies in their communities. The Council concluded in their Third Canon; “If any one shall teach a slave, under pretext of piety, to despise his master and to run away from his service, and not to serve his own master with good-will and all honour, let him be anathema.” It looks like a monasteries encouraging escape from masters and sheltering them as fugitives was a significant enough issue that the bishops at Gangra faced that they needed to issue a divine condemnation was that a bunch of Christians were trying to free a bunch of slaves from their masters. The historian Socrates Scholasticus records in the Second Book of his Church History that one of the individuals targeted by this council was Eustathius of Sebaste who “snatched slaves from their masters under the pretext of piety” (Church History, 2.43). Another historian in his own Church History, Sozomen, reports that Eustathius submitted to the Council of Gangra (Church History, 3.14), but then continued the practice anyways, leading an Antiochan synod to accuse him of perjury (Church History, 4.24). Eustathius was reported to have “numerous” followers. Over a century later, the same problem was still a persisting issue for the elite, and so in 451 AD, another group of bishops held the Council of Chalcedon in Chalcedon, also in modern-day Turkey, concluded in their Fourth Canon that “And no slave shall be received into any monastery to become a monk against the will of his master. And if any one shall transgress this our judgment, we have decreed that he shall be excommunicated, that the name of God be not blasphemed.” Once again, a group of elite bishops presiding over a major council are aware of the abolitionist tendencies and underground attempt to free slaves from masters in these monasteries, and threaten excommunication and accuse blasphemy against those who are doing it. Even by the sixth century, the emperor Justinian had to legally declared that masters must have the authority to reclaim fugitive slaves hiding in monasteries for up to three years (Youval Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, 144-5). The fact that Justinian had to put this into law suggests that many monasteries weren’t giving him an easy time. One Shenoute, an abbot and founder of the White Monastery in Egypt that had thousands of members by the time of his death, denied the allowance for slavery to exist in his monastery, writing “Therefore let us not blasphemously say, ‘Those who rule us are our masters and we are beneath them like servants.’ Those who rule us are not over us, but we are over them and they are beneath us; indeed, they are our servants because they take care of us, with God’s help, in everything.” It’s not easy to comprehend but Shenoute is saying that, so far as he’s concerned, the superiors in his monastery will be as servants to their inferiors rather than the other way around. Therefore, Shenoute subverts the economic order of his day (Rebecca Krawiec, Shenoute & the Women of the White Monastery, 2002, pp. 139-40). Observe how this is very similar to what Jesus describes in Mark 10:44, a text we’ve noted earlier.
Other Christians around this time were responsible for freeing countless slaves, although their personal opinion on whether or not slavery was immoral is not recorded. One Christian from the fifth century, Patricius (who some denominations have canonized as “Saint Patrick” today) was a slave himself at one point in his life. He wrote two letters that still survive today, one which he titled the Confessions, the other being A Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus. In the former, describing his own and the slavery of others, he writes “Those who are kept in slavery suffer the most.” This suggests that Patrick is not very happy about people being enslaved. In the latter, he decries when he writes “For they have been taken far away and abandoned in a land where sin abounds, openly, wickedly, impudently; there freeborn men are sold, Christians are reduced to slavery, and worst of all among the most worthless and vilest apostates, the Picts”. Jennifer Glancy, (in her Slavery in Early Christianity, pg. 80) argues that this only provides evidence that Patricius had a problem with people originally free being reduced to slavery. However, the quote I noted from his Confessions suggests otherwise. In Book 7 of the Church History by Socrates Scholasticus, a 5th century Christian bishop named Acacius of Amida is described as freeing thousands of slaves. What are we to say about this? Gregory of Nyssa’s sudden and unprecedented condemnation of the institution of slavery, the unnamed Christians that Chrysostom refers to that believe that Paul wanted slaves to get their freedom from their present status as slaves, and the many more unnamed Christians condemned by the Council of Gangra that were actively working to help slaves escape the status they held? This evidence indicates a more widely held opinion among commoners, evidently either buried or censored by the elite, where slavery was an institution held in dismal regards and the idea of abolition was a present hope. J. Albert Harrill concludes as much when when he writes that this data “thus more likely points to the unmarked voices of rustics and traders, artisans and manual laborers, farmers and fishermen, and other raucous “middling” social inferiors below the aristocratic elite in Chrysostom’s congregation at Antioch” (Harrill, “Revisiting the Problem of 1 Corinthians 7:21”, Biblical Research (2020)). Similarly, Ramelli concludes that the monasteries were the only institution in the ancient world where the legitimacy of the institution of slavery was debated (Ramelli, Social Justice and the Legitimacy of Slavery. pg. 230). Slavery as an institution continued into the Middle Ages, although it is not as if the period was absent its own Christians who rejected slavery.
The Middle Ages in Western Europe represent a significant change in societal slavery as a result of the “destructuralization” of early medieval society in the aftermath of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The specifics of what happened are nicely summarized in Kyle Harper’s Slavery in the Late Roman World: AD 275-425, Cambridge 2011, pp. 497-509. To put it simply, due to the economic collapse and many ways in which society restructured itself, slavery, although not disappearing itself (impossible given the millions of slaves in the Roman period), became an increasingly and exceptionally marginalized practice. It is not even clear, at this point, if it could even be called an ‘institution’. Slavery declined slowly over the first few centuries and by the end of it, it seems to have essentially died. If anything, instead of slavery existing on anything beyond a residual local level in western Europe anymore, there was export of human chattel into the growing Islamic Caliphate. In the east as well, slavery takes a nosedive. “There is a major lacuna in the middle of the fifth century, in the papyri and even in the literary remains. And when the lights turn on again in the sixth century, slaves are suddenly much less prominent” (pg. 505). While Justinian’s law discussed slavery, it also gives evidence of its decline. When legislating slavery, Justinian often weakened it and sometimes with overt Christian motive. “Justinian abolished the senatus consultum Claudianum [laws governing relations between free women and slave men which gave the master an option to make the free women his slave]; he liberalized the rules governing the legitimation of offspring from slave-women; he abrogated the Augustan marriage and manumission restrictions” (pg. 505). The eastern decline of slavery is interesting because, unlike the west, eastern Europe did not undergo any reduction in societal complexity or experience an economic collapse. Nevertheless, household slavery remained strong in the 6th century (and would continue to do so deep into the middle ages), even if estate slavery did not. The mainstream of the church, like before, continued to accept slavery as before.
We turn to the emergence of the Atlantic Slave Trade. It is amazing that civilizations that pretended themselves Christian could have allowed for this to have emerged so quickly, and to such a scale, but one saying does ring true in reflection of it. “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs” (1 Tim. 6:10). Nevertheless, although opposition and oppression significantly slowed them down, the influence of Christianity shone strongly enough that these same civilizations also discarded their slavery. In the end, Christianity was responsible for the abolition of the modern slave trade.
The Atlantic Slave Trade emerged in the 16th century and lasted until the 19th century between Europe, the Americas, and Africa, transporting millions of slaves and the deaths and barbaric treatment of a vast number of them. While the omissions of the critics of Christian history would have you believe as if Christians were silent in this time, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Let’s begin by discussing the great Bartolomé de las Casas, a 16th century Spanish bishop. I wont describe it at any length, but medieval canon law began judicially establishing principles like natural rights and freedom from coercion. One of the greatest reformers of his time, the Spanish bishop and trained canon lawyer Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) simply extended these claims to the indigenous of the Americas in an age of Spanish empire. Through his influence (“By what right and with what justice do you so violently enslave these Indians? By what authority do you wage such hideous wars against these people who peacefully inhabit their lands, killing infinite numbers of them by unimaginable and unspeakable means?”) came the New Laws of 1542 under King Charles of Spain, dissolving the encomienda system (the system by which the natives were enslaved), abolished future wars of conquest and placed the Indians under protection of the Crown. Unbelievable opposition by the colonists themselves lead these laws to being repealed within only a few years, but they were the first of their kind. Las Casas had been originally, in fact, a participant of the conquests and owned slaves. He was, he says, awakened to the horrors of these murders and oppression by Christianity in a number of ways, and upon reading Ecclesiasticus 34:18-22, he entered a mental state of self-debate for days until finally deciding against the evils being done in the New World. He argued that brutal colonialism contradicted human rights which was best justified under the Christian law of charity. He eventually received the title “Protector of the Indians” and so was responsible for their well-being and his influence after decades of work resulted in a few other ways in which indigenous rights were supported. His Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542) documented the atrocities against the indigenous populations. He also wrote a longer History of the Indies as well as an Apologetic History of the Indies – a thorough ethnography of the natives to show that they were just as human as any Spaniard, and like them, possessed rational souls. The life of Bartolomé de las Casas is discussed in a much more detail in David Lantigua, “Faith, Liberty, and the Defense of the Poor: Bishop Las Casas in the History of Human Rights” in Shah and Hertzke, eds, Christianity and Freedom: Volume 1, Historical Perspectives, 183-202. Lantigua does a great job of bringing to life the unbelievable legacy of Las Casas. Many historians find that the works of Las Casas may have inspired the Latin American tradition of universal rights. See here and here. And Las Casas was far from the only one. Francisco de Vitoria, the Catholic theologian and Spanish jurist who is sometimes described as one of the founders of international law, also defended the rights of the natives of the Americas at length. Pope Paul III issued the Sublimus Dei in 1537, which, in a couple of paragraphs, denounces the enslavement of natives and advocates that they maintain their full liberty. (To no ones surprise, Pope Paul III was strongly opposed by the Spanish Empire’s monarchy and its most powerful administrative organ, the Council of West Indies, and so cowardly backed off and annulled this bull the next year. Nevertheless, the bull continued to circulate and individuals like Las Casas quoted it.) And on and on.
Clearly, Christians were by no means silent. However, the Christian wave of opposition to slavery in the first half of the 16th century failed to morph into a movement. Condemnations continued generation by generation, but not nearly enough opposition was secured. However, the second time a Christian wave of opposition to slavery emerged in the second half of the 18th century, the entire world of slavery as it was known collapsed. One British man named William Wilberforce (1759-1833) realized that slavery was a disgusting antithesis to his evangelical values. When he was just 14, he wrote an article in a York newspaper against slavery. By adulthood, he, alongside the evangelical Calpham Sect that he lead (which wasn’t an actual “sect” at all) lead the abolition movement to to abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire by 1807.
At the same time, the Christians who were using their religion to advocate for the maintenance of slavery often resorted to deception or theories based on wishful thinking and misrepresentation of the biblical text. Much of the time, the “Christian” drive for slavery had nothing to do with Christianity or the Bible itself but instead the political whims of whoever happened to be Pope. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued a papal bull titled Dum Diversas, which authorized the king of Portugal to conquer Saracens and pagans and assign them to slavery. Similar bulls were reiterated by several popes over the next few few decades. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued a bull called Inter caetera, where the Americas themselves were authorized for conquering. Christian Hofreiter has also provided a short documentation for how the biblical passages describing Joshua’s conquest of the Canaanite’s, which solely applied to the Canaanite’s, were totally reinterpreted to justify the conquest of the Americas (see his Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide, Oxford, 2018, pp. 197-201). The following is a brief summary. The “major intellectual apologist for Spain’s conquest”, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573), referred to the destruction of Amorites, Perizzites, and other Canaanite judgements to justify the conquests. A 1513 letter by Martí Fernández de Enciso makes good use of the conquests and claims that ‘God had assigned the Indies to Spain … just as the Jews had been given the Promised Land’. If the Indians did not surrender their land, de Enciso argued, they can be killed and enslaved, as the Pope had granted that land to Spain’s king. This theology, accepted by the court theologians, lead to the writing of the Spanish Requirement of 1513. Thus, the conquest of Canaan was the theological framework for conquering the New World. Vasco Núñez de Balboa tried to use the conquest to convince the king to kill the Indians of Caribana in 1513, but he ended up executed. Hernán Cortés threatened to kill all the Indians in Tlaxcala in their war, but ended up sparing the women and children, but this did not happen when he attacked Tenochtitlan in 1521, where a similar influence existed (but without direct scriptural quote).
This wasn’t the only way in which Christianity or the Bible was twisted in order to justify pre-existing political plans to subject foreign peoples and extract as much money and labor from them as possible. The following discussion is useful for shedding some context on the critics who try appealing to the fact that “both” abolitionists and slaveowners appealed to the Bible to justify their positions, because it shows that the slaveowners were thoroughly misrepresenting the Bible in the process of their justifications, out of an attempt to make themselves feel like God’s wrath wasn’t really upon them for manipulating human life in the way they were. One manipulation used by slave traders included the idea that the Bible described black skin as a curse. Genesis 9:20-25 is a biblical text describing the curse of Canaan and his descendants. Centuries later, despite being nowhere in the biblical text, tradition developed that the curse meant that Canaan’s descendants would be black and/or that they would be consigned to slavery. It took until 2017, for example, for the Southern Baptist Convention to admit that their use of this passage during the slave debates was totally wrong. The fact is that we’re dealing with a prominent theory that distorted the Bible to justify racism and slavery. The way this theory developed across history is described in David Goldenberg, Black and Slave: The Origins and History of the Curse of Ham, 2017. For those who don’t want to read the book, Goldenberg offers a shorter summary of the history of this idea here (where the Castro quote above is from). Keep in mind the following, however. The Curse of Ham was the most important biblical argument used by slaveowners to justify slavery. And it wasn’t even in the Bible.
Nevertheless, Christians eventually got their act together and realized that actually believing in what they profess to believe is more important than making money. The following of what I describe is based on the essay of Christopher Leslie Brown, “Christianity and the campaign against slavery and the slave trade” in Brown and Tackett eds., The Cambridge History of Christianity: Enlightenment, Reawakening, and Revolution 1660-1815, 2006. The crucial context for understanding the Christianity-based abolition of slavery is the evangelical revival swept the Western world in the late 18th century. Brown writes;
The evangelical revival instilled within particular individuals and groups a commitment to seek religious purity in this world, to campaign vigorously against earthly sins. To long-standing inert antislavery impulses, the revival brought an inclination to act. In the context of a history of Christianity, Anglo-American abolitionism may be understood as one part of the much broader effort during the evangelical revivals to give religion greater sway over both public and private life. At the same time, in that attempt to extend the influence of Christianity, abolitionists would invite, inadvertently in many instances, the radical reinterpretation of Scripture by Africans and their descendants, who would find in the Christian tradition a message of liberation that their erstwhile guides had feared or had failed to see. (Brown, “Christianity and the campaign against slavery and the slave trade”, pg. 519)
Before these religious concerns took effect, the first general idea among Christians was to humanize the practice of slavery to be more consistent with the extremely humanized version that we saw advocated in the New Testament and even, to a good degree, in the Old Testament. Brown writes;
It seemed more practical and most useful to find ways to civilize slavery, to make slaveholding conform with the ideal of Christian servitude, and to render the institution more humane and more just, so that ‘servants’ and masters recognized and honoured their duties and obligations to each other. An attack on slavery, all understood, entailed also an attack on private property and the social order. The promotion of Christianity, by contrast, seemed to offer the most promising way to sanctify human bondage and restrain its worst abuses without fomenting revolutionary change. (Brown, pg. 521)
Thus followed a process for quite a long time where Christians generally invested in preserving slavery but under better conditions and to convert the slaves to Christianity. However, that was a big problem for the slaveowners, who generally (though not always) wanted anything but their slaves becoming Christian. We’ve already seen several ways how many Christian slaveowners relied on deception to promote and defend slavery, and so the following should come as no surprise;
Some masters worried that admitting slaves to the Christian fellowship would blur the social boundaries essential to the preservation of slavery. Some thought that too much attention to religion would distract workers and compromise profits. Most disliked the prospect of ministers meddling in plantation life. And some feared that Christianity would encourage enslaved Africans, typically of diverse ethnic backgrounds, to view themselves as a community of believers, perhaps equal to those who held them in bondage. Masters, as a consequence, typically harassed those zealous for Christian conversion, especially in those colonies where slave labour produced great wealth. Some slaveholders might tolerate the baptism of slaves. Most plantation owners thought rather less of allowing enslaved men and women regular access to Christian counsellors. (Brown, pg. 523)
Can’t have the slaves become Christians! Might lead them to … not want to be slaves. And that’s exactly what happened. As Brown goes to show, Christian clerics began spending increasing sums of time ministering to black slaves. They began developing sympathy with them. They wanted better treatment for them, for their needs to be attended to, and so forth. Soon, Christian clerics were beginning to threaten the social separation between blacks and whites in favor of a unity in Christ;
By treating enslaved men and women as members of the faith, by training black catechists, holding separate worship services, and allowing for the development of a black religious leadership, the Jesuits seemed to undermine the perpetuation of social distance and racial difference upon which slavery depended. Similar anxieties arose among landholders in the Chesapeake region during the evangelical revivals that commenced in the mid-eighteenth century, as black men and women attended open-air meetings with whites, sharing with them the love feasts and prayers that bound together the community of believers seeking salvation. This nascent sympathy for the enslaved and the persistent obstruction by the planters drove some missionaries to open criticism of the slaveholding elite. (Brown, pg. 524)
And so missionaries started to grow and ferment in their opposition to the slaveholders and slavery. They began asking questions: Why were the slaveholders preventing them from humanizing slavery more in line with Christian servitude? Why was slavery consistently making a slave unable to choose to live free from sin? Why were slaves being banned from marriage? Why were they being left in spiritual darkness by their masters? Weren’t slaveowners – engaging in pride, cruelty, pursuit of profit, sexual exploitation of their slaves, and so forth – themselves being morally corrupted? Weren’t they worse heathen than the slaves themselves? Why were slaveowners consistently ignoring any laws that tried to humanize slavery?
The Reverend James Ramsay, an influential figure in the early antislavery campaigns in Britain during the 1780s, came to espouse slave trade abolition only after two decades of failing to persuade plantation owners in his St Kitts parish to endorse the conversion of slaves to Christianity.
… slaveholders in the British plantation colonies, in particular, left themselves unusually vulnerable when they blocked attempts to bring slavery in line with the ideal of Christian servitude. Their resistance to Christian conversions helped certain uncompromising seekers of moral purity decide that slavery was not only unpleasant (and perhaps, therefore, justifiable on pragmatic grounds) but also a sin, and therefore a violation of divine law. This meant that slaveholding could be listed among the many other wicked habits that true Christians could and should renounce, such as gambling, cursing, intemperance, and profanation of the Sabbath. The institution of slavery could be seen not as the inevitable consequence of the sinful condition of humanity but, instead, as a voluntary and unfortunate choice of the sinner (Brown, pg. 525)
Towards the end of the 18th century, evangelicals began realizing that enough was enough. Slavery had to go, and the revolutionary evangelical revival sweeping the Anglo-American world was a political force of unbelievable power. During and in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War which lasted between 1756-1763, the Quakers, a small denomination of Christianity whose historical influence is utterly disproportionate to its size, decided they needed to put the heel on slavery. So they pioneered the movement against slavery. Their members in Philadelphia were banned from purchasing slaves in 1761 and they decided in 1774 that any member who bought a slave was to be disowned. Brown continues;
Several opponents of slavery, the Methodist leader John Wesley most famously, took their cue from the writings of Anthony Benezet and other Friends who devised in the 1760s and 1770s a detailed case against the Atlantic slave trade. The Quakers helped guide antislavery tracts into print, subsidizing, in many instances, their publication and distribution. Perhaps most importantly, Friends organized the first antislavery societies, not only in Britain but also across the new United States from North Carolina to Rhode Island. Quaker networks facilitated the sharing of information, ideas, and personnel and helped create the impression that the sometimes discrete initiatives constituted a movement. Friends in England represented the first petitioners and fundraisers for the cause of abolition in the 1780s. Their example would lead other denominations in Britain, particularly the Methodists and Separate Baptists, to make support for antislavery one measure of a commitment to the faith. (Brown, pp. 528-9)
In Britain, many seized the event of the American Revolution to claim that the British Empire was being punished by God for their slavery. Soon enough, a full blown evangelical abolition movement was at hand. The British abolition movement emerged in 1787 out of an evangelical urgency for national redemption and quickly succeeded;
Through the campaign against the Atlantic slave trade, some British abolitionists hoped to make the British people better Christians. That was the possibility first anticipated by Anglican evangelicals gathered at Barham Court in Teston, Kent during the 1780s and subsequently at Clapham Common south of London. These evangelicals within the Church of England – Hannah More, William Wilberforce, James Ramsay, Charles and Margaret Middleton – had grown uncomfortable with the distaste for earnest Christianity among certain elements of polite and fashionable society. Like many of their contemporaries, they had been profoundly affected by the humiliating outcome of the American War. Unlike their peers, however, they responded by looking for ways to enhance the role of religion in private and public life. For these purposes, abolitionism looked like an ideal cause. It would not alarm those usually suspicious of moral reform movements, since the crusade against the slave trade could be understood also as a campaign for liberty, a triumph of the humanitarian sensibility, and a blow against outworn tradition. These pious and well-placed men and women did think of the slave trade as a sin, and hoped for the gradual abolition of slavery. Yet what gave the antislavery movement unusual importance to them was the opportunity to bring Christianity into politics. Slave trade abolition, accomplished with overwhelming public support in 1807 but orchestrated by Clapham Sect leadership, offered concrete proof that the British people had come to embrace in form and substance a devotion to practical Christianity. The evangelicals’ crusade for the reform of British manners and morals in the early nineteenth century would be indebted to the moral capital the Clapham Sect first accrued during the campaign against the slave trade. (Brown, pg. 528)
Despite the slaveholding oppressors, the slaves themselves were starting to get it. Despite their clergy denying it, many said that their conversion to Christianity gave them the rights of anyone else. Black slaves revolted in Virginia in 1730 when rumor spread “that British instructions to free enslaved black Christians had been suppressed” (pg. 529). Evangelicals were hard at work equipping these slaves with the ability to seize their freedom. They began teaching them to read and write. Brown writes;
The first black abolitionists – Phillis Wheatley, Lemuel Haynes, Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, among others – were steeped in Calvinist theology. It was conventional for these writers to cast their personal salvation in terms that recommended the potential for repentance and purification for society as a whole. Their position within the faith allowed them to question whether Christians who owned slaves were Christians at all. These new students of Scripture did not find in the Bible a justification of slavery or the enslavement of Africans in particular. The mixed-race clergyman Lemuel Haynes and the African-born Ottobah Cugoano in London denied that blacks bore the Mark of Cain or suffered from the Curse of Ham. (Cugoano, indeed, thought that the Canaanites perhaps had come to settle in the Americas as West Indian slaveholders.) These writers instead called for a shift in emphasis in the definition of Christian ethics. They found in the Bible the principle of justice and charity, not a sacred basis for servitude and oppression. They found an avenging God who humbled the great and raised the meek. ‘How hateful slavery is in the sight of God’, wrote the black Methodist preachers Richard Allen and Absalom Jones in 1794, ‘who hath destroyed King and Princes for the oppression of slaves’. Following the lead of both Quakers and the Calvinist theologians of the New Divinity, this first generation of black abolitionists insisted that religious purity and the laws of God must take precedence over the laws of man. (pp. 529-30)
The influence and pioneering of the antislavery movement as a result of the evangelical revival was strong enough that after the American Revolution, most of the Northern States banned slavery. This meant that the first black churches were now being built and the evangelical revival was now being spread to tens of thousands of black people themselves. It may have been in these churches that the desire for emancipation remained strong over the next few decades, where the will for abolition in the rest of America began to wane. (This is where discussion by Brown ends, and so we continue based on other sources.) The proslavery arguments of the first decades of the 19th century began to mount and undermine the antislavery position of the Protestant denomination such that abolition was a minority position by 1850. However, this was instantly reversed in a political explosion caused by the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1952). Next to the Bible, this text became the best-selling book in the entire 19th century, and its religious argumentation against slavery and defining of abolition as a Christian imperative swung the consensus of the population against slavery. Less than 15 years later, America had abolished slavery. The argument of Stowe’s novel is described in Patricia Hill’s article Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a Religious Text made available by the University of Virginia’s Harriet Beecher Stowe Centre (see their archive here). The Centre describes the impact of Stowe’s novel here. Ultimately, Christianity pioneered and lead to the success of the antislavery movements that freed the West from slavery today. And that’s history.
EDIT: I recently came across and actually well-recommend this article on further understanding the slavery in the OT: https://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2021/12/21/re-bound-to-bad-interpretations-slavery-in-the-old-testament/
Faithful Philosophy 