Slavery in the New Testament: Literary, Social, and Moral Dimensions (review)

This is a work of great scholarly width, some depth, and much energy. It is dense (the text itself is only 196 pages in length, and the rest of the book is apparatus), ambitious, informative, and about as prominent an example of a book in need of a strenuous editing as I have encountered in some time.

With this book Harrill joins the long list of scholars who have attempted to explain the intersection of a new Christian faith, social identity, and community, and its various ideological formulations, with a reality, the practice and ideology of ancient slavery—more specifically, he engages with the “meliorist” school of thought that sets Christianity up (literally higher) in a position where the manifold evils of slavery could not exist, even if slavery as a system could exist. His views and interpretations are neatly laid out in seven chapters plus a brief, and pungent, Epilogue (in the seventh chapter the author engages the 19th century American debate over the Biblical warrant for slavery—this is the comparatively mild sting in the book’s tail).

In Chapter 1, on the Apostle Paul and “the slave ‘I’” Harrill correctly dissects Greek from Roman concepts of the slave’s “inner subjectivity” and, for good measure, makes sure that we know that “Paul” was himself a quasi-fictional construct (in Chapter 2 the author notes that the description of Paul himself—or “Paul”—inserted into 2 Corinthians is, most likely, a collection of vituperative tropes used by his rivals, not any sort of true, physical description). The lesson in this chapter, at any rate, is that Paul, in discussing the slave (and Paul does discuss the slave a good deal) is using the image of the slave as a rhetorical or communicative device, tapping into “the same set of cultural assumptions, literary tropes, and social stereotyping of the slave” as any pagan writer would have used, and in fact often did use (32).

Chapter 2 expands on the stereotypical rendition of “the slave body,” a physical amalgam of moral weakness and “brute” strength, with other somatic features, including strange skin and hair color, posture, facial expression, and so on, but the author emphasizes that this “language of physiognomy” (which was, in the Mediterranean context, directed against both the slave and the barbarian) was not at all universally accepted in the pagan thoughtworld—both Stoics and Epicureans questioned its images, assumptions, and demeaning attitudes and platitudes. With Chapter 3 Harrill gets down to the esse, that is to those images used in “the comedy of slavery,” the widespread use of stereotypes of the servile as characters in the New and Roman comedic formulae. His examples here include the “running slave” (directionless, emotional, mentally unstable, infantile), and such familiar dramatic Types as the Parasite and the Clever Slave (images well-known to us, but not really congruent, I think, to the specific discussion of Christianity and the servile condition). The image of the “running slave” is set into Acts 12; the slave is the pathetic Rhoda, and Harrill submits that Luke (here and elsewhere) is inserting “a little humor” into his narratives, and perhaps playing slightly and obliquely to a Jewish audience as well. “Audience,” at any rate, is the operative word.

For another aspect (and use) of the “character” or image of the slave we open, in Chapter 4, the important topics of authority and subordination, and the regula describing these states. Here we are introduced to the Household Books, those popular Hellenistic compilations that set forth the rules by which the domestic oikomēnē should be governed—and these are quite different, as Harrill rightly notes, from the indirect persuasions of Paul. When converted to a Christian use Harrill suggests that these domestic Haustafeln may have supported the redirected system of authority, the congregation formed under its new director or leader (97). The idea of command and subordination continues into the discussion of the vilicus or the trusted “slave manager...