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

J. Albert Harrill offers an hermeneutical alternative to uncritical readings and outright rejection of New Testament (NT) and other ancient Christian texts that contain slavery imagery. Harrill foregrounds the significance of the wider shared historical and cultural literary context of the Greco-Roman empire as the hermeneutical framework for reading images of slavery in ancient Christian texts. Such a hermeneutic offers a more liberative reading of Pauline and Deutero-Pauline texts, which African Americans have historically either embraced uncritically or ignored and rejected. Africans enslaved in America considered their own experiential context as the appropriate interpretative framework for reading texts that were used to sanction their subjugation.

As many African Americans intuited or suspected, and as Harrill argues, the NT writers did not seek to subvert Greco-Roman ideologies about slaves and slavery. But, as Harrill asserts, they uncritically appropriated images of slaves found in the wider literary culture. "Early Christian writings reflect, participate in and promote the literary imagination about slaves and the ideology of mastery widely diffuse in the ancient Mediterranean, which supported what the Romans called auctoritas" (2). Auctoritas is power attributed to freeborn males through the achievement of the willful submission of their social subordinates and the concomitant admiration of their social peers.

By "ideology" Harrill means "language that colludes with, supports and makes sense of the current structures of authority and domination that a particular society uses to construct and maintain its social 'reality' and in which writers can participate even if the collusion is not altogether conscious" (3). This collusion is found in the broad shared literary culture of the ancient Mediterranean, which includes Jewish, Roman, and Greek literature (e.g. Roman law, agricultural handbooks, handbooks on declamation, and the works of Aristotle and Philo). Harrill compares conventional, rhetorically constructed stock figures located in that broader shared literary culture with images of slaves and slavery in the NT and other ancient Christian writings. He undertakes this comparative endeavor from the perspective of an historian. As an historian, Harrill argues that ancient writers of the Greco-Roman literary world rhetorically conjured up stock or stereotyped characters that reflected and supported prevalent ideologies about slaves and slavery. These stock characters did not necessarily constitute social descriptions of actual slaves or slavery, but constituted prescriptive and polemical literary devices.

Harrill begins his analysis of slavery in the NT with Paul's letter to Philemon, which is the only NT narrative about a "real" slave. Scholars have stereotyped Onesimus as either a runaway (fugitas) or a truant (erro) slave based solely on a reading of Roman law (e.g. Digesta Justinian), and such stereotyped characterizations do not reflect actual history. Roman laws are dated much later than the NT texts, and they are "synthetic and prescriptive in nature". According to Harrill, juridical distinctions between runaway and truant slaves did not represent social practice, but "existed only in the minds of the jurists" (11). Roman law should be used critically and in conjunction with "social, economic and familial considerations" (11).

Harrill's assertion that the distinction between a runaway and a truant slave existed only in the minds of the jurists may be too simplistic. Actual social practice could have at times provided the impetus for juridical discussions. In support of his assertion of the purely academic nature of the deliberations of the Roman jurists, Harrill quotes Cicero. But Harrill also acknowledges that we cannot accept Cicero's judgments uncritically. In any case, Harrill adeptly does not rule out the use of Roman slave law entirely.

Based on the stock formulae found in the genre of the "journeyman apprentice contract" located among the papyri found in Oxyrhynchus in Roman Egypt, Harrill argues that Onesimus was an apprenticed slave. He identifies Paul's letter to Philemon as a "letter of recommendation" wherein Paul recommends Onesimus as an apprentice in gospel ministry (15). The appropriation of these stock formulae reflects Paul's "participation and deep implication in ancient slavery...