The Bible and Beyond Podcast Episode

The Complicated Lives of Enslaved Women of the Bible

An Interview with Dr. Christy Cobb

Dr. Christy Cobb

Bible readers tend to skip over the stories of enslaved people because they seem to be treated as props for the ‘real’ meaning or main message of the biblical account. But a closer look at the lives of these marginalized enslaved people in the stories—such as sex workers who were might have been sold to brothels against their will—enriches our understanding of the Bible. Recognizing the invisible attitudes and forces help us rethink the stories’ meanings.

Dr. Christy Cobb is an Assistant Professor of Christianity in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Denver, and she is also an Affiliated Faculty in the Gender/Women’s Studies Department. She is a biblical scholar with a focus on the New Testament and early Christian texts, and her scholarship and teaching focuses on issues of slavery, gender, and sexuality in antiquity, and she writes on texts such as Acts, the Gospels, the Apocryphal Acts, and other ancient narratives. ​

Audio

Video

Some Bible and Beyond podcast episodes are made available as video podcasts on our YouTube channel. This month’s episode can be found here.

Interview Transcript

Shirley Paulson

I always like it when I find a scholar who opens my eyes to things right in front of me that I’ve never noticed before. Our guest today is Dr. Christy Cobb, who is editor of a new book on ancient slavery in its New Testament context, I think like most people, I have just skipped over what happens to enslaved people in Bible stories, kind of like they’re just props for the real story, and I am embarrassed to admit that, but I realized how true that is when I read your book. So thank you, Christy, for coming today to talk to us about this rather eye-opening subject on ancient slavery.

Christy Cobb

Thank you so much for having me.

Shirley Paulson  

Well, before we get going, let me just mention that Christy is Associate Professor of Christianity at the University of Denver. She’s written a couple of books recently on the subject of slavery and Christianity, including this one on ancient slavery that we’re going to talk about today. Christy  is also a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Feminist Studies and Religion. And her research and interests include gender, sexuality, slavery, early Christian families, acts, and the Apocryphal Acts. Of course, one of the reasons slavery was never discussed in my biblical education is precisely one of the points in your book that the silence about enslaved people represents the fact that they were thought of and treated as less than human. So it didn’t matter what they thought or felt. And so we skip over them to look for the real meaning of Bible stories, right?

Christy Cobb  

That’s true. Yes.

Shirley Paulson

And here’s my first question to you. You got my attention with the opening story in your book about the enslaved man whose ear was cut off by Peter the night of Jesus’ arrest. So could you tell us how you see that story from the enslaved man’s point of view?

Christy Cobb  

Yes, absolutely. So I also really appreciate this story, I think as an example of what you said in the opening, which is that we read right over the presence of enslaved persons in our readings of biblical stories. And so this story of Jesus’s arrest is one that comes up, especially around Easter time. And there is the enslaved man that’s present there that is not named by three of our gospel writers. So Matthew, Mark, and Luke don’t name him, but John names him Malchus. So I will call him Malchus. And thinking about this story from the enslaved man’s point of view is really interesting because I think that we should note that his presence there was not voluntary. He was brought there by his enslaver as he is found in this scene. And then he’s caught in a moment of violence as a result of this, which also often happened to enslaved persons. They were constantly experiencing and navigating violence from their enslavers, but also from other people. Like in this scene, it wasn’t the enslaver who attacked Malchus, it was a disciple of Jesus who did that.

And I think another sort of interesting piece of this story is that in three of the gospels that would be Matthew, Mark, and John, the enslaved man leaves without an ear, right? He is ultimately violated, experiences violence, is disabled from this story. In Luke’s gospel, though, interestingly enough, Jesus heals the ear. And so only Luke has the scene where Jesus puts the ear back on and Malchus leaves whole. Now, this doesn’t erase his enslavement, it doesn’t erase the violence done to him, but he is healed from this sort of violent, tragic act. And so thinking about it from the enslaved man’s point of view, I would point out that he’s sort of thrust into a situation that he didn’t choose. We don’t know whose side he would’ve been on the arresters, or maybe he was even familiar with Jesus and Jesus’s message. And then of course, the violence he experiences I think is very tragic and traumatic, and we often overlook that aspect of the story.

Shirley Paulson

Well, I had not only overlooked him, but I overlooked the idea that he’s only healed in one of the gospels. I just thought that’s the story. And yeah, I didn’t think about the fact that in the other gospels, he went away without an ear.

Christy Cobb

Right, he does. Interestingly, some people have used this to say that in Luke, this illustrates Luke’s care for the poor, the oppressed, right? This is often said about Luke’s gospel because in this moment Jesus heals Malchus’s ear. And I mean, I think that that is one interpretation, but I also like to point out, at that moment, Malchus was still enslaved. So even as he is healed, he isn’t freed. He’s still not named in Luke’s gospel. So it’s still a sort of difficult story to think about from the perspective of the enslaved, I think.

Shirley Paulson

Wow. Okay. So that really does help me think more about what’s going on in these stories. I have totally overlooked it, but thank you for that. So in the first chapter of your book, you also brought to my attention the way our language or even translations influence our thinking about these issues. For instance, some translators use the term ” servant;” others use the term “slave” and still others use “enslavement” all for the same Greek word “doulos”. What is the issue with this translation thing?

Christy Cobb

Yes, that’s such a good question and one I think scholars have been wrestling with. So the translation of “doulos” or “doulo” to “servant” was what most people are familiar with, I think. The problem here is that it’s not historical. It brings the idea into our minds that a person is a servant, maybe like indentured servanthood. That would’ve happened in our more recent history, but actually, slavery is what happened in the ancient world and not servanthood. And so when we are translating people like Malchus from the previous story, and we’re calling them a servant that softens the idea of slavery for the text. So that might make it easier for people to read in the Bible that we’re thinking about the stories in terms of servants rather than slaves. But one of the very first moves that especially black biblical scholars suggested, the first person that I know about is Clarice Martin, who wrote an article in the1980s  arguing: We should translate “doulos” as “slave”, not “servant” because of the history of slavery, especially experienced by the black community in the United States. And so it’s really important that that is recognized in the biblical text.

And so that was sort of the first move. More recently, scholars have been suggesting terms like “enslavement”, “enslaved persons”, “ enslaved workers”. And what this does is shifts it even further. So the idea of a slave is still sort of objectified, viewed as a person able to be owned, but humans have agency. And of course we want to think about the ways we can center the humanity of enslaved persons. So there’s a more recent move to translate “duolos” as “enslaved.” Not all scholars are on board with this. There’s differences in opinions because some people want the sort of harshness of slavery to show in the text because the writers of the New Testament were living in a slave society. It was a daily occurrence for them to interact with enslaved persons and slavery. And so there are different ways to address it. I think all of these conversations are good because it does elevate the humanity of these enslaved persons who have been historically treated as objects.

Shirley Paulson

So I won’t read “servant” the same way I used to. That’s very helpful. Oh boy. Alright, so the main focus of your own research has to do with gender and sexuality as you’ve said, which we will get to in a minute. But I wondered if you could also first give us an overview of the whole book because there’s so much in there. You and your colleague, Katherine Shaner, are actually the editors of a book with quite a few contributors. What were you looking for when you pulled this book together? What did you want?

Christy Cobb

Yes, thanks so much. We really wanted a book that was accessible. So we recognized that many people were interested in ideas of slavery but weren’t reading the sort of heavy academic texts that many of us in the scholarly world were reading. And so we really were seeking an accessible book that could be read in say, classrooms, undergraduate and graduate classrooms or in church groups, and a bible study group, for example, people who are interested could approach this book without any prior knowledge of ancient slavery. So we wanted to give a very introductory presentation about how the New Testament is sort of centered in this world of ancient slavery. So first of all, we did talk about writing the book together, but we decided to invite contributors in order to broaden the perspectives because the two of us work on slavery in the New Testament, early Christianity.

We pulled in people from Jewish studies. We have several classicists who were writing in the book. We have a Christian ethicist talking about the ethics of the ideas of slavery. And we included several scholars who deal with issues of race and ethnicity and the way that this affects our reading of the New Testament. So I think it made the book stronger to highlight the strengths of multiple contributors. And then as far as the sort of overview of the book, it’s set up in sort of a chronological fashion in that the first few chapters give us a historical overview of slavery in the ancient world. So what was slavery like in the Roman Empire is our very first large chapter. And of course Christianity develops within the Roman Empire, so that’s important. And we have a chapter on Jewish slavery because there’s also a sort of perception that within ancient Judaism, slavery was a sort of a different entity, and that’s just not true either, right? In ancient slavery or ancient Judaism, slavery was as present as it was in the Roman world. And then we moved to issues such as the slave trade, how did people become enslaved? How did people obtain freedom, which is called “manumission” in the ancient world?

Those kinds of issues were really important for us to set the sort of historical stage. Then we moved into more topical issues. So I wrote the chapter on gender and sexuality, and there’s one on race and ethnicity, and then there’s a chapter on household codes as well. And then in the later chapters we moved to sort of the reception of this topic. So for example, what did early church fathers say about slavery? That’s a chapter on early Christians and slavery. And then our final chapter is this idea of now what. So we have a chapter on the ethics of interpreting the New Testament in light of slavery, and one that’s called slow down ethics, which is like, let’s slow down and pay attention to the repercussions of slavery in our global world.

Shirley Paulson

It is interesting because it’s a topic that, as you’ve pointed out, I never thought about. It didn’t seem important to me because it didn’t seem to be important in my goal of reading the Bible. But I think what you’ve done for me is to help me realize that you can’t really read the Bible without understanding the dynamics of the lives of the people who are telling the stories, and that the enslaved people were just part of the story that I can’t ignore anymore.

Christy Cobb

I think so too. So I’m glad that you had that effect when reading the book too.

Shirley Paulson

Yes. Also, I have to say that I appreciated the questions that you have at the end of the chapter because they were very thought provoking questions that I can see happening in a classroom or a Bible study group. They’re very nicely put together. Well done. Alright, so let’s move into your own chapter on gender and sexuality. You introduced that topic with a story also, and it’s the one that’s right after Peter’s incident in the garden with Malchus, and then we find Peter again dealing with another enslaved person quite soon afterward. This is the girl who recognizes him. So why don’t you tell us that story, why does it matter here?

Christy Cobb

Yeah, so Peter is in the courtyard of the Jewish high priest and this is where Jesus is being interrogated and Peter is outside, and this is the scene many Christians are familiar with, which is when Peter denies Christ. And what most people do overlook is that the first questioner in our gospels is an enslaved woman. And so she is the first person she notices Peter and she says to him, you are one of them. I know you are. And he of course denies it. And so then different gospels kind of differ.  In some gospels the second questioner is also enslaved, but an enslaved man. And then the third questioner, especially in Luke, for example, is a free person. And that is when Peter denies three times. But the third free person affirms the words of the enslaved woman who is never named, by the way.

And so I think this matters especially pertaining to gender because first of all, it shows the presence of enslaved women in these stories. She’s there, she’s outside. I mean in my imagination, she might be on a break. She has been serving food or preparing the table, welcoming guests. She’s doing all the labor that a typical enslaved woman in a domestic context might be expected to do. And so she’s present, but what she does in this scene that is sort of out of the expectations or doesn’t meet the expectations of an enslaved woman is she speaks out. And that is something that enslaved women were expected not to do. So the fact that she speaks up and she speaks up first and she basically calls out Peter for his identification or connection with Jesus. So I see her as a truth teller in that scene. I see her as someone speaking truth to power, recognizing Peter in the firelight. She knows that he is a disciple of Jesus. And so while she is enslaved, I also see this as a moment when an enslaved woman speaks. And she is the seer of truth in this scene. And so that’s why it would matter within the New Testament, when there are very few enslaved women mentioned in the New Testament,

Shirley Paulson

It also struck me thinking about that story that she was defending her enslaver.

Christy Cobb

Yes, I think so. Yes, she was. And who knows what the motivations might have been for her in that moment. But it’s interesting because we think about it in connection with Malchus. You have Peter’s attack on the enslaved man in the previous chapter, and then this moment where an enslaved woman is sort of calling him out as right. And then he lies ultimately.

Shirley Paulson

Alright. So then you talked about the difference between enslaved people and free women, for example. So the girls and women were often working in the household with their enslavers, like in this case. How would you describe the difference or the relationship then between the enslaved women and the free women in that kind of context?

Christy Cobb

Yes, it was a very complicated relationship. There were ways in which an enslaved woman might have  been in very close quarters with their enslaver, who was a woman. We know that enslaved women might have done their hair, helped with makeup, helped to dress them, helped to bathe them. Sometimes enslaved women slept beside the bed of their enslaver. So they were available in the middle of the night if anything was needed up to the first thing in the morning for them. So in a lot of ways, this has been viewed in ancient literature and artwork as a very intimate relationship. And enslaved women have said, I really trust my enslaved woman with her secrets or I trust her in lots of ways. But as a feminist reader of the New Testament, I read that a bit with caution. So while that relationship appears intimate, there is a very clear power dynamic at play between the free women and the enslaved and maybe the enslaved women played along with that intimacy.

But in the end, there would’ve been a very distinct power dynamic. Enslaved women who were exposed to violence could be sold at any time, their bodies were used sexually, and also to produce more enslaved children and to nurse children. So they were constantly subjected to things that they might not have been able to choose for themselves. And so I think this is why I would label the relationships as sort of complicated. I think there are many stories we can find that are told from an enslavers perspective where that relationship might seem really kind and reciprocal. But knowing the history of slavery, we have to think cautiously and read carefully in those moments.

Shirley Paulson

So then what did it mean to be a man then to become enslaved other than having to do what an enslaver orders them to do? How did they get enslaved in the first place? And are they superior to women?

Christy Cobb

Yes. Good question. To answer, how did people get enslaved? There are many different ways for this to happen. People were born into slavery, so if your mother was enslaved, all the children of the mother would be enslaved. So that was a very common way for people to be just born into slavery, but then also acts of war. So if Rome went into another city or region and took over, then the people within that region would be enslaved and might have lived their lives free up until then. So you could be enslaved by being a captive of war. There are stories of kidnapping, children who are exposed, meaning they’re born free but then are abandoned by their parents. Those children often were born up into slavery. And then a few people, the debt slavery happened in the ancient world where if someone couldn’t afford their bills, then they might basically sell themselves into slavery. That happened maybe a bit more rarely than the other instances, but also occurred as well. So a lot of various ways that people would become enslaved. And then, I mean, the difference in that moment is really stark. I mean, once you are enslaved, you are basically labeled in a particular way for the rest of your life, even if you obtain freedom.

So even after you are manumitted, you don’t become free. You become freed. Does that make sense?  So there were particular laws and labels placed on manumitted persons that weren’t placed on completely free citizens. So a freed person might have had to make connections with their enslaver still, they might still have to work for them. Some of them had to give portions of their earnings back to their previous enslaver, even though they were freed. So it was a severe, stark difference between the free and enslaved in antiquity. And then the final question, you asked about the differences between men and women. So many people might even say gender differences didn’t matter in the sense that a woman that was enslaved and a man who were enslaved were mostly on the same social level in that they were both enslaved. Both had potential to find a better job in some circumstances, and both women and men.

And they could also be forced into a situation beyond their control in unfortunate circumstances. But as far as jobs go, some men were placed in really harsh circumstances when we’re thinking about construction work in the mines, what we might call chattel slavery. It did exist in antiquity, and most of that work was given to men. Most women were placed in domestic contexts. Though again, this is not all right, some men were in the domestic context, some women were out doing this kind of labor too. But generally speaking, more men were often placed in those sort of hard active labor kinds of positions.

Shirley Paulson

You think about them, the enslavers too. Again, I read the Bible not even thinking about who’s an enslaver and who’s enslaved, but this is going on all the time. What percentage of freed people were enslavers? How many people were doing this?

Christy Cobb

Oh, yes. So it depends on where you are in the city. Let’s say in Italy, in the urban areas or in the city, up to 25% of people were enslaved in a city. So this is one fourth, it’s large. In the rural areas, that number is a little lower. So 15%, let’s say, in rural Italy in the first century, would be enslaved. So it kind of depends on where you were. There are a lot of numbers about this in that it was expensive to purchase enslaved persons in the first century, so not every poor person would have been able to own one. But let’s say even a lower income family that was free might have had one enslaved partner in their family, and then if that was a woman who got pregnant, then they could have two without having to purchase the second one. So there were ways in which even smaller households might have one. And then of course, very poor people would not have any enslaved workers. Very rich people had hundreds. So we see a huge discrepancy in terms of who was able to enslave them.

Shirley Paulson

And were there any kinds of codes of conduct for the enslavers? Could they get away with sexual violence or mistreatment of their slaves?

Christy Cobb

Yes. Sexual violence against enslaved persons was completely legal and also expected, in a way, because enslaved persons were viewed as property. It was a thing that happened very often. There were laws around how you treated enslaved persons, and especially how, let’s say a person outside the household treated an enslaved person. So for that Malchus story, it could have led to a legal disagreement because if the enslaver was, like, “Hey, you damaged my slave”, then that could have led to a legal disagreement because the laws protected the enslaved. The enslaver could do quite a lot of violence to their owned enslaved workers. But if an outsider did that, there might be repercussions, for example, a fine or something like that, that they had to pay for that. So there were quite a lot of laws. There were also laws around how many enslaved persons you were allowed to free. The laws limited the numbers that people were allowed to free, and sometimes ages of the numbers [to be freed]. So depending on which emperor was in power. And there are different sets of rules that you can look up to see how that enslaved persons were controlled legally and in their own household.

Shirley Paulson

So it’s a good thing then that Jesus healed Malcolm’s ear because he might’ve gotten in trouble with the law.

Christy Cobb

Well, oh my gosh, that’s true. And I hadn’t thought of that aspect of the story until just now, but you’re right. Yeah.

Shirley Paulson

Okay. He was already in trouble anyway. But anyway, what about Paul and his attitude towards sex? He seems to have said a lot about sex workers. Was he concerned about enslaved people or only free people in this?

Christy Cobb

Yeah, that’s a good question. There are ways to interpret Paul. For example, in the First Letter to  the Corinthians, Paul has quite a lot to say about sex. And he also talks in an apocalyptic framework, if an enslaved person can be freed or what they should do in that moment. And there have been a lot of discussions about how we might interpret that, where he says, if you can be free, use it. Does he mean to use your freedom to share the gospel message, or is he meaning stay enslaved because it doesn’t matter because after Jesus comes back, no one will be enslaved. This is sort of the Galatians 3 23 in Christ, there’s neither slave nor free. So I think there are multiple ways of understanding it. As far as what he says about sex workers, he does have a section where he places the sex workers into a category of being sexually immoral. And so he does seem to have not a positive view of that. And I should note, most sex workers in antiquity were enslaved, so not always all, but a majority of them would have been placed in this forcefully without their own choice, which is sort of a different dynamic than when we talk about the agency of sex workers today, for example.

Shirley Paulson

Well, that’s why I think it’s interesting to bring up the whole question of sex workers in the context of enslavement, because it’s not like just people went out to earn money.

Christy Cobb

Yeah. Okay. Exactly. Yes. We should recognize that they were not choosing often, to be in a brothel, but might have been sold there against their will.

Shirley Paulson

Well, this is a fascinating topic. We could talk about this a lot, but let me just ask you what would you like us to take from your research to ponder more? Let’s just sort of end there.

Christy Cobb

Yes, thank you. I think for my research on gender and sexuality particularly, I want us to ponder dynamics between women, how we have read these texts in the past and sort of overlooked these marginalized women. One of the things that I hope that comes out of my research is a centering of women’s experience and a centering of these most marginalized of women in our readings of the text. I think that that’s such an important thing to try to do as we read the Bible, is to find those invisible forces and the people who have been overlooked and dig into the text a bit more. And I think we can learn a lot from this both in ways that we might want to act ourselves and then also in ways that we might want to reject.

Shirley Paulson

Well, I have to say, you’re inspiring me to read these very familiar stories much more carefully, more thoroughly, more open-mindedly, and being more aware of what it must be like to be present in the world with the people who are writing those stories. It’s just very, very interesting. And I think one of the big questions I’m going to have to ponder more is what difference did it make knowing that all that enslavement was going on in these sacred texts that we’re reading? That’s the thing I’m going to be thinking about.

Such an important question. I encourage people to find your book, “Ancient Slavery and Its New Testament Context” published just this year by Eerdmans. Iit is a brand new book, and you can ponder these things with Christy and her co-editor, Katherine A. Shaner. So thank you so much for being with us today, Christy. I really appreciate it.

Christy Cobb

It was a lovely conversation. Thank you so much.