The Christian New Testament is criticized in some quarters for its attitude to slavery. But one thought occurred to me. By directing its message directly at slaves, it must have been pretty ground breaking, even if the message “obey your masters” is not exactly progressive.
Are there any other earlier writings that are directed at slaves themselves? (not quoting them, or quoting something some higher class individual says to slaves)
I would suggest the Bible’s message concerning slavery is a bit more complex than that, and is fairly subversive all considered.
Not exactly, or at least, not in that context. We have a fair amount of graffiti, much of which was directed at slaves, and even things like game rules or diviniation instructions, at least some of which specifically included slaves as part of the audience (or market).
Subversive? Really? I have always understood the biblical take on slavery to be about the same as that of the average ante-bellum plantation owner.
Which biblical texts do you have in mind?
I can’t speak for the ‘biblical’ take (the bible isn’t one book), but I’d say the New Testament (and patristic-era Christian) take on slavery is neither ‘subversive’ nor ‘supportive’. It accepts slavery as a fact of life, and then discusses how masters and slaves should relate to each other. It doesn’t explicitly take either a pro- or anti-slavery stance.
I would guess he might be thinking of Galatians 3:28–
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
There’s also the book of Philemon, which Paul wrote on behalf of Onesimus, an escaped slave:
“For perhaps he therefore departed for a season, that thou shouldest receive him for ever; not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved, specially to me, but how much more unto thee, both in the flesh, and in the Lord? If thou count me therefore a partner, receive him as myself.” (verses 15-17)
Slaves are everywhere in the plays of Plautus, and were present in his original audience. Slaves in the audience are addressed directly by the speaker of the prologue in the play Poenulus, and probably other places that I can’t remember offhand. This was a few hundred years before the New Testament.
Of course, who knows what writings no longer survive? Slaves, for example, are known to have been members of Epicurean communities.
As for the “ground breaking” nature of the New Testament, here is the take in the article “Slavery” in the Oxford Classical Dictionary (2012):
“Christianity likewise displayed no interest in social change from which slaves might benefit, and the result of the Christian attitude symbolized by the repeated injunction that slaves should obey their masters ‘with fear and trembling’ (e.g. Eph. 6:5; Didache 4:11) – a vigorous reaffirmation that slavery was an institution based essentially on violence – was to make slavery even harsher in late antiquity than in earlier eras.”
If it doesn’t take an anti-slavery stance, then , by default, it is endorsing the status quo, which means it takes a pro-slavery stance.
Subversiveness isn’t open; telling people to endure the status quo isn’t the same thing as telling them to accept it.
I don’t agree with that. It’s possible for a moralist (religious to otherwise) to talk about proper conduct for soldiers and officers without endorsing war, it’s possible to talk about rules for honest business dealings without endorsing capitalism, it’s possible to talk about rules for divorce without endorsing divorce, and so forth. The New Testament writers and the early Christians treated slavery as a fact of life (which, in that society, it was), and issued rules for how masters and slaves were to interact in that context, they didn’t particularly portray it either as good or evil.
Agreed.
These days, such a message might sound quite bland, or even expected. At the time, this was rather like a firing a battleship cannon across the deck of a luxury yacht.
Lounging on the deck of that yacht would be Seneca the Younger, Nero’s adviser and member of the Roman super-rich with a net worth of 300 million sesterces according to Cassius Dio. Having read his 47th letter to Lucilius, I can’t see why the treatment of slavery in the New Testament would be like “firing a battleship cannon across the deck”. Or do you suggest that Seneca was also shooting things up?
The writings that comprise the New Testament were not written from a position of social power, or written to be the “New Testament”, for that matter. On the contrary. These were small, beleaguered, apocalyptic communities communicating with each other. They addressed slaves because they had slaves in their communities, and they saw their communities as separate from the world. Within them, there were (theoretically though certainly not always in practice) no slave or free, man or woman, etc. In that sense the message was revolutionary, and I would argue that it did have a significant long-term impact, albeit one not planned by the writers.
I’ve noted on the boards before that the first and apparently only voice in antiquity to condemn the institution of slavery as inherently, unequivocally wrong wasGregory of Nyssa, a 4th century Christian Bishop making an explicitly religious argument from scripture. He went further than Paul and further than Seneca. In fact, his arguments are not just notable for how strong they were, but for how unique they were too, to the point where you wouldn’t hear similar arguments until centuries later. His arguments did come up again, though, and in general the development of an abolitionist morality illustrates well how societies shape religious traditions and how religious traditions shape societies.
This statement would have surprised Aristotle, who notes (Politics 1.1253b) “…others however maintain that for one man to be another man’s master is contrary to nature, because it is only convention that makes the one a slave and the other a freeman and there is no difference between them by nature, and that therefore it is unjust, for it is based on force.”
It is, in any case, dangerous to argue from silence about “pagan” attitudes compared to Christian ones given the haphazard nature of the survival of “pagan” texts.
If you want to argue against the position taken in the Oxford Classical Dictionary cited upthread, that the rise of Christianity led to slavery getting worse, not better, you would have to explain away the uncomfortable fact that it got, well, worse.
I appreciate you bringing this passage by Aristotle to my attention; I hadn’t read it before. I think Gregory’s position of relative authority, that we have first-person accounts of his debatably abolitionist position, and his intellectual continuity with modern abolitionism still make him unique, but I’m very intrigued at “owning a person is inherently wrong” argument being made even earlier and I’ll investigate it more.
True, but I see it more in terms of how, for example even though Columbus was not the first European to visit the Americas, his experience mattered in a way the Viking ones didn’t. Granted, pagan attitudes and intellectual traditions played a huge role in shaping the development of Christianity.
This is straying a bit from GQ, but what I see as really unjust about slavery is the idea of owning another person; treating them well might absolve one from other crimes but it doesn’t make the slavery itself any more justifiable. I don’t really have a problem with how the Oxford Classical Dictionary characterizes the practice and justification of slavery after Christianity, since in that regard I think Christianity has historically played both positive and negative roles. I prefer that the slave’s perspective be privileged when it comes to describing slavery in any era.
Roman slaves were considered to be regular people, and many educated Romans were technically slaves.
Antebellum Dixie considered slaves to be sub-human hominids, and kept many of them uneducated.
Same word, different approaches to caste.
I don’t see anything especially revolutionary about it. More than a few writers suggested that good treatment of slaves was wise and virtuous. Christianity dug deeper, or if you like, undermined deeper.
I wasn’t confining my comments simply to the institution of slavery. Christianity suggested that slaves could be the superior of the master, something the Roman mind would have found impossible. Christianity questioned the very basis of Roman society, certainly including the relationship of rich and poor. The latter included, but would not be limited to, slaves. In practice, the gap between poor men and slaves was not that wide.
Got a bit off topic. But it doesn’t look the assembled dopers have come up with an answer to the question in the OP (Are there any writings before the New Testament that are directed at slaves themselves?)
One point I should add is I wasn’t asking specifically about Greco-Roman or European writings. Do any other cultures have writings aimed at slaves that pre-date the New Testament?
My understanding is that the Achaemenid Persians didn’t practice slavery on a significant scale. (I’m sure many more primitive societies didn’t either, but they stand out as being an advanced civilization that on the matter of slavery was quite, well, advanced).
Of course, this was precisely my point in post #10.
I was, given the OP and all. Just trying to correct some peculiar misconceptions that seem to be floating around. I’m not so interested in getting into a wider-ranging discussion on how “Christianity” was supposedly questioning the “very basis of Roman society, certainly including the relationship of rich and poor”, while coming to power amid increasing authoritarianism in the state and increasing stratification in the economy. I know the Lord works in mysterious ways, and I recognize that my mind is not subtle enough to grasp the finer theological aspects of world history.
That’s funny. I thought I had. Here are the lines spoken directly to the slaves in the audience in the prologue to Plautus’s Poenulus:
servi ne obsideant, liberis ut sit locus,
vel aes pro capite dent; si id facere non queunt,
domum abeant, vitent ancipiti infortunio,
ne et hic varientur virgis et loris domi,
si minus curassint, quom eri reveniant domum.
Do they somehow not qualify??