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Slavery and Power in Ancient Households

Introduction

The image of an enslaved woman painted on a wall in Roman Ephesus reveals how slavery was foundational—not incidental—to ancient household codes, including those in the New Testament. This conversation examines how New Testament texts commanded enslaved people to “hyper-listen” to enslavers while navigating impossible contradictions as someone’s property yet simultaneously someone’s child, possibly someone’s spouse. From Aristotle’s assertion that slaves were merely tools to biblical commands reinforcing hierarchies, household codes created idealized power structures that served free men at the expense of the enslaved. Yet resistance existed, even if it was not necessarily tied to Christian communities. We will also explore how these ancient texts were later weaponized to justify modern enslavement and consider the ethical implications of contemporary biblical interpretation.

Dr. Katherine A. Shaner is associate professor of New Testament at Wake Forest University School of Divinity and teaches courses on New Testament and early Christian history with implications for contemporary communities. An ordained Lutheran (ELCA) pastor, she preaches and teaches regularly in churches across the nation.  She and Chrisy Cobb co-edited Ancient Slavery and Its New Testament Contexts, the basis of this Bible and Beyond Discussion.

Texts:

Aristot. Pol. 1.1252a–1252b,

Ephesians 5:21–6:9

Transcript

Click here for a printable transcript (pdf file, opens in a new tab).

Shirley Paulson

Welcome to our June 2025 Bible and Beyond Discussion. I’m your host, Shirley Paulson, and it’s a real treat to be able to introduce our guest scholar this evening, Dr. Katherine A. Shaner. The title of our discussion tonight is “Slavery and Power in Ancient Households”. Katherine is going to help us become more aware of the issues of slavery in the Bible that we may never have noticed before. I certainly hadn’t. I have to say that. Katherine is co-author of a new book that has caught my attention. The book is titled Ancient Slavery and Its New Testament Context. So let me introduce Katherine for just a moment. She’s Associate Professor of New Testament at Wake Forest University School of Divinity and teaches courses on New Testament and Early Christian History with implications for contemporary communities. She’s also an ordained Lutheran pastor, ELCA, and she preaches and teaches regularly in churches across the nation. So welcome Katherine. So glad to have you with us.

Katherine Shaner

Thank you. I’m so delighted to be here. How much fun is this? It’s a very heavy topic, so you have to have a little fun just getting to see folks to talk about it.

Shirley Paulson

I feel the same way. We usually do get into very heavy topics, but we also sort of have a feeling of being together and supporting each other with it. So we’re glad you can help us get through this one too. So thank you so much for being with us. So I have to say that having read your book, which I really, really enjoy, I’ve become much more conscious of the presence and actions of enslaved people in the Bible that I had never noticed and even wondering more about them than I had before. So I was wondering maybe if you could get us started with why you have felt compelled to publish this book on a subject that I hadn’t even been paying attention to. What got your attention?

Katherine Shaner

You’re hitting the nail on the head actually in what got my attention too, in that it had never occurred to me that slavery was so implicated in the New Testament. And when I was in graduate school, I started reading some of the new literature that was coming out. I mean, Jennifer Glancy was brand new back then, and Jennifer Glancey’s Slavery in Early Christianity is sort of the book to read about slavery in early Christianity. But she had just come out with it, and I remember reading it and just being astonished because I knew I’d known about Onesimus, I’d known about the household codes, the ways that I Peter says, “Slaves keep slaving for your masters even if they beat you.” I knew about the clobber verses around slavery, but one of the things that Clancy’s book helped me to see was how infused slavery was both in our texts and in our theologies.

And so I wrote my dissertation on slavery in the ancient church. It’s now a book called Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity, and it really looks at some archeology, and I’m sure we’ll get into some of that archeology a little bit later tonight. But in the pandemic, Christy Cobb, who’s my co-editor on this book, she and I had gotten together over Zoom just to have a conversation. And what we realized was we both taught classes called “Slavery in the New Testament” at very different institutions. She focuses more on undergraduate teaching. I focused more on divinity school professional formation, but neither of us had a textbook that we were willing to give to our students. I mean, Clancy’s book is great, so is Albert Harrell’s book Slaves in the New Testament, but it’s a little bit too highbrow scholarship for an 18-year-old who’s just out of high school to just sort of drop into. And so that was our goal with this was we started thinking, okay, well maybe we’ll co-write something. And then what we realized was, no, let’s get our favorite scholars from all over the world to write about what they know best and ask them if we can edit very heavily so that it’s readable. And that’s what we did. So we’ve got classic scholars and Roman historians and Greek historians and Patristics scholars and scholars from all over who were willing to write for us their basic intro lecture on their scholarship. And then Christy and I did a lot of editing to make sure that the book was very readable, and I hope that it is.

Shirley Paulson

I thought it was when I read it. Yes, very readable.

Katherine Shaner

Excellent, excellent. That was the main goal of it. But it’s also a way of introducing folks to this whole complex of slavery that the New Testament is infused in because, of course, the New Testament is written in the context of the Roman Empire. And in that context of the Roman Empire, I don’t think many of us really know exactly how crucial slave labor systems were for the success of the Roman Empire, and just how infused into everyday life enslaved folks were. And so that was one reason we wanted folks to see this. But the second reason then is that slavery was infused in the American context for a very, very, very long time. And fortunate or unfortunate, that’s actually our history. And so part of it was about us really leveling with that history of the way the Bible helped create slavery in the American context as well. We are very clear about our ethics on this so that we can combat it—so that we can start to reassemble something different that isn’t dependent on structures of slavery or logics of slavery or assertions of slavery in order for Christianity to start to be this liberative space within the American context in particular.

Shirley Paulson

Could I ask you a question for just a second here? This is so helpful to get a context for why we’re doing this. You mentioned a word I’m not sure everybody is familiar with. When you talk about clobber passages, what do you mean by that?

Katherine Shaner

Yeah, so when I talk about clobber passages, it’s a term that I’ve borrowed from queer studies actually. They’re often the passages that get quoted in the context of trying to keep someone in subordination or trying to tell someone that they are abject sinners. So for women who are ordained… so I’m an ordained woman in the Lutheran church. I often get quoted 1 Timothy 2: “Women be silent in church, ask your husbands at home if you have questions.” I often get quoted that as justification for why I shouldn’t be preaching. And there are several places in the New Testament where it says, “Slaves obey your masters, even if they beat you, slaves be subject to your masters.” It’s this direct address to enslaved people that  was often used, and I would say and sometimes it still is, sadly. But it was often used to keep enslaved folks, to justify enslaved folks being subordinate to their masters, even in the horrific conditions of antebellum slavery, even in some of the horrific conditions of Roman slavery.

Shirley Paulson

So these clobber passages are those that justify clobbering people.

Katherine Shaner

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Shirley Paulson

I was interested in the way you established the idea that we need to think more about our language when we even think of people who are living in slavery. What were the issues that you wanted to bring to our attention in terms of language?

Katherine Shaner

Yeah. Well, so what I’ll note is that Emerson Powery has a chapter in this volume that really talks about the dilemmas around language. And he goes all the way back to 1990 with Clarice Martin who writes an article about translation of the Greek term Doulos, “D-O-U-L-O-S. And she asked the question of the analog in Hebrew eved also, but she really asked the question of, well, wait a minute for so long, that word, and oftentimes even in the NRSV, but especially in the RSV, the Revised Standard Version, the King James Version, even the New International Version, the word “doulos” is translated as servant. And for most of us in the American context, that word ‘servant’ simply means a paid person who’s doing a job.

But in the Greek context, when you use the word doulos, you’re talking about someone who is conscripted to do that job without pay because that job is their means of survival. They have no choice. And so part of what we want to do in this book is to say, look, we need to start using slavery language whenever this term doulos shows up in the New Testament. And there are some analog terms in Greek also, there’s some other terms—pec(??), and a couple of other terms, economos—that are terms that we would argue should be translated with language of slavery as well. But there’s a further move that Powery makes and that Christy and I—that Cobb and I—will also take on, which is to say that if we are to call someone a slave and that is their only identifying marker, then suddenly what we’ve done is we’ve put a human being into a category of property that doesn’t respect their human dignity and that doesn’t look at the larger life that they lead, that might, while still conscripted by slavery… We’re always really clear that slavery is all encompassing to someone’s life. There is nothing one does outside of slavery when one is enslaved.

But it is to say that if we talk about an enslaved person, then we’re talking about a human being who is in the condition of enslavement. And so suddenly we have a much more complex person who appears within the historical record. And that complexity for us is the first step toward thinking about liberation.

Shirley Paulson

Oh, that’s so helpful to think about a language, because you’re right, I read the King James Version of the Bible for many decades of my life and thought that there were just a lot of servants around, never really thought about people being slaves, and that’s a very different kind of idea. And also, is their identity a slave? No. There are people who are in a condition that’s not fair, to put it mildly. Alright, so could you maybe give us a sense of the numbers or percentages of people who were enslaved and also even how many people were slave holders, people had nothing to do with enslavement.

Katherine Shaner

That’s right. That is a difficult question because while it’s difficult even in the antebellum South to come to these numbers in part because not everybody registers who’s enslaved and who’s not. I know that that sounds a little difficult given that slavery in the antebellum US really was racially tense. And so there was a color marking, and there are some kinds of ethnic markings on slavery and antiquity as well. But you asked a demographic question, and Walter Scheel is the big name on this, and we were not able to get him to write for the book, but he makes the estimate that somewhere between 10 and 25% of the population in the Roman Empire were enslaved. And I know that that’s a huge variation in percentage, but let’s go with even just 10%. That means we’ve got 26 people on this call, two to three people on this call alone would be enslaved. Or if we go with the 25%, we’re looking at six, eight, or ten of the people on this call being enslaved. And that’s an enormous number of enslaved people because the Roman Empire covers an enormous swath of geography, which is also then a lot of people. So in real numbers, I don’t know in terms of millions of people, but in terms of percentage wise, what that actually means is that there are very few people who live within the boundaries of the Roman Empire who are not touched in some way by enslavement.

Shirley Paulson

Wow.

Katherine Shaner

And part of that is we can talk about enslavers, and in Italy for example, we think that there were enslavers who owned a lot more slaves. So someone who was an enslaver in Italy, we think owned tens and dozens of slaves, in part because after the Judean war, and actually even before, as Rome moved from Republic to Empire, they started to consolidate estates on the Italian peninsula. And this consolidation of landowners meant also a consolidation of enslaved labor because you needed large concentrations of enslaved labor to run these estates.

So we see that early on in the first century in the Roman Peninsula, but then most of the New Testament events are taking place in Greece and Turkey and Roman Palestine, modern day Israel. And as you get there, you have fewer and fewer of these large slaveholders. So we have fewer and fewer plantation slaves, for example, or minery slaves. One of the places that slaves often worked were in the silver mines and the salt mines and the iron mines and some of the mining industry, which was up in Britain. That was one of the reasons that the Romans wanted to go up into Britain was because they were very mineral rich. But you have a lot of folks in Asia Minor, Greece and Israel who own one or two slaves. Small landowners who own one or two slaves to help with the work. So we would call them hired farm hands today, but they’re often more like conscripted laborers and they become part of the family. And so sometimes we can talk about the ways that enslavers are close to their enslaved people in part because they do, they work in close quarters, they probably work together very closely, but the conditions of slavery are still there. The power conditions are still there, whether they’re exercised or not, the power possibilities are still there.

Shirley Paulson

And an enslaved person simply is not free to go do whatever they feel like doing.

Katherine Shaner

No. Right, right. That’s true. And I mean some of my newer research that didn’t show up in this book shows there are these towers in Greece, archeological towers that are sort of leftover and they have sort of very weird markings on them. They can only be closed from the outside and they go up high, but they’re not on a hillside, so they’re not for defense. And there are a couple of scholars who are suggesting that these were oversight towers for vineyards and mines in ancient Greece. And that the reason that they would close from the outside was because during the high season, you want your slaves out in the field. And so you’d keep them there in the tower overnight for the season, but you’d also not want them running away. And so I mean, the issue of slaves running away is a big issue in the ancient world, just like it was in nearer US history.

Shirley Paulson

Oh, fascinating. So you found a very interesting image of an enslaved woman painted on a wall in Roman Ephesus that sets the stage for your research on the subject of slavery in antiquity. Could you describe it and tell us why it’s so significant to you?

Katherine Shaner

I’ll tell you a little bit of background. I wrote my dissertation mostly on Roman Ephesus, so I spent some time with the excavators of Roman Ephesus in order to get a closer look at some of the archaeology in ancient Ephesus. So if you ever travel to Western Turkey, I would highly recommend seeing ancient Ephesus. It’s an incredible city. And there’s this group of what I call urban condos, like urban luxury condos in the middle of Ephesus that are called the terrace houses. And in the back room of one of these terrace houses… So these are condos that are built into the hillside onto terraces. And so there are certain rooms in these condos that kind of tunnel into the hillside that are sort of cave-like rooms. We think they were used for refrigeration and storage and all kinds of things like that. And just off the entrance of one of these cave-like rooms is this image, and she stands on the wall. It’s a fully white wall plastered wall, and she’s only about six inches high.

And you notice she’s holding a tray of something and she doesn’t really have an expression on her face. Some of it’s been lost to time. But some of it is that she probably didn’t really have a discernible expression on her face. But she seems to be just standing there in a hospitable position. And as I came across her, what I realized was that it was mostly enslaved people who would have been in this particular room. Because it was mostly enslaved people who would come to the place where they needed to get dishes for the kitchen or extra food for the banquet or something like that. This woman then became, for me, almost a paradigm of how enslavers were trying to show their enslaved people how they should operate in this particular house. So there’s a whole rhetoric to this particular image as well.

Shirley Paulson

My goodness. So I just also wanted to ask you related to this relationship between the enslaved and enslaver, you used the term” hyper listening” to enslavers. What did you mean by that, and why was that an important issue for you in this context here?

Katherine Shaner

Yeah, well, especially in this context, because what we get is an image that’s on the wall that enslaved people are passing by, but not enslavers. But it’s also very clear because this is a fresco image and frescoes were fairly expensive to commission in antiquity. It’s pretty clear that someone with wealth, probably an enslaver, was the one who commissioned this particular image. And so where my imagination went was to this idea that from Ephesians (which was the text for the night), especially, that slaves were supposed to hyper-listen. So hypakuo is the Greek verb that Ephesians use to say, “Slaves, obey your master!” “Akuo your masters.” And hyp is the word where we get the word ‘hyper’ from, and akuo is to listen. And so this literally means to hyper-listen. So, “Slave, hyper-listen to your enslavers!” And so as I look at this image on the wall that I know is an image that was created by an enslaver precisely for their enslaved people to walk past and see every day. Images have a formational power in our world, particularly when we see them day in and day out. And most of the time we tune them out when we see them that much.

But they still have a formational power on us because they’re so prevalent in our world. So I started to realize that this was part of the hyper-listening that was expected of enslaved people, particularly in these condos in this world of the uber wealthy who were trying to show their wealth and their power and their influence and their leadership capabilities, quite frankly, by having slaves who were perfectly obedient, who displayed perfectly the kinds of order that they would want their household to have. So I think this image is part of that program of trying to create slaves who can hyper listen, who know their master’s wishes even before their masters know them.

Shirley Paulson

And then you also point out that there’s an impossible contradiction with hyper-listening and then being someone else’s child or spouse or whatever. How did that work?

Katherine Shaner

Yeah, no, this is absolutely correct. So the idea is that legally, when someone was enslaved in antiquity, their enslaver had the power of life and death over them. Their enslavers literally owned their bodies. And so all of the connotations of that are then in play as we start to think about how slaves operated in the ancient world. But what it means is that if you have other relationships, if you’re an enslaved person, let’s say you’re this woman on the wall, if you’re an enslaved person on the wall and you have other relationships, one of the things that I think is really powerful to think about is how enslaved people would be able to operate and function in these other relationships. Because let’s say she was a daughter, and maybe she even knew her father, maybe her father was even enslaved to the same family that she was, is she beholden then to her father’s wishes or her mother’s wishes, or to her enslavers wishes? So suddenly, if she’s compelled to care for her mother, let’s say, who’s sick, but her enslaver says, no, you need to serve the banquet tonight. Which relationship is she most beholden to? And how do those contradictions come into play?

Particularly when we think about these sort of idealized relationships that come down to us in the household codes in Ephesians, especially of the New Testament.

Shirley Paulson

Oh, so that is complicated. So you recommended for our reading tonight, the passage in Ephesians in chapter 5, which basically tells us to be cooperative slaves, as you mentioned, where we are on the hierarchy ladder.. What do you make of that passage? I mean, how do you live with that in the Bible right now?

Katherine Shaner

How I live with it gets into a larger question, but how I describe that passage I think might be helpful to start.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, let’s go there

Katherine Shaner

That passage is very embedded in the ways of ordering social and political life in the ancient world of its time. And it’s Ephesians 5 starting at verse 21, and it goes through chapter 6, to the end of the slavery section. And what’s really interesting about this passage, we see passages like this in Colossians. We see passages like this in first Peter. We see them also briefly in first Timothy and in Titus as well. But what they do is they go through three main relationships within a household. And Martin Luther called these the household codes. He was really the first one to use that term. And in using that term, what he did was he put an idea in our head that this is how households were ordered in the ancient world. And what I would argue is this isn’t how they were ordered necessarily. It is how power was consolidated in the ancient world. So in this Ephesians text, it starts off great, it starts off “subordinate yourself to one another.” So it starts off with this sort of communal ethic of, look, none of you are individuals. Everyone is beholden to everyone else within this community and Christ. And that is actually true in terms of community life, I would say. But then it moves on and it addresses wives or women directly. And in Greek it’s the same word. There’s no difference between wife or woman, which of course leads to all kinds of questions. But it says, wives submit yourselves to your husbands,  hupotasso to your husbands, marshal yourselves under, right? It’s a military term of ordering. So think about the troops getting into their lines, but it’s done in the middle voice in Ephesians. And so it’s basically “wives decide for yourselves that you are going to be ordered underneath your husbands”.

So there is some modicum of decision that women get to make in this. It’s not as strong as I Timothy’s “women be silent”. But nonetheless, it is saying women should be subordinate to their husbands in all things. And it even pulls in the image of the church, just as the church is submissive to Christ, women should be submissive to their husbands or should be subordinate to their husbands. This gives a really interesting parallel then between Christ and husband and church and wife. And I don’t know, my husband is not Jesus. And even when I suggest to him that maybe he’s trying to be Jesus, he’s real clear he is not!

Katherine Shaner

But nonetheless, we get that piece. Then it says, children honor your parents so that it may go well for you. So we get a different admonition to children and then we get slaves, hyper listen, obey your masters in all things without questioning. And so it’s these three relationships, women, children, slaves who are all in relationship to in fact the same person, the husband, the father, the enslaver. And what I would argue is if you go back all the way to Aristotle and Aristotle’s politics, Aristotle is suggesting that it is the enslaver, the main male head of a household who’s the one who has the ability to govern, to be representative in the democratic governance of the city.

And in taking this over, early Christians have done the same thing in order to say, look, there’s a male householder who should actually have the power in the household. And the problem is most of us as women who hear this, think, oh my goodness, what is this? Because I have a husband who’s not my father, who’s not my enslaver. And if I were a woman in the ancient world who was enslaved, I would say I have a father who’s not my enslaver, or maybe is, but maybe isn’t. I also might have a partner, someone who I have borne children with, who I want to continue to be in a relationship with. Who is it that I’m supposed to be obedient to and subordinate to and honor in this list of folks when the only one who can actually fulfill all of those orders in the household codes is the male head of household. He’s the only one who can fulfill all those duties without any contradiction. So I have to ask some questions then as a biblical scholar and as a faithful Christian, well, I would consider myself a faithful Christian. There’s some who wouldn’t. I’m okay with that too, but as a faithful Christian, I would have to ask some questions about how it is that the dignity of every human being can come out in these household codes when it’s really the dignity of one singular human being that is at stake in them.

Shirley Paulson

Wow. Yeah. I can’t help but think about this picture that you’re painting for the general community here, but how does Jesus fit in there? Would you say that there’s any difference between people who follow Jesus and the general population, or does Jesus condone slavery as it appears in Ephesians? Where’s Jesus in this?

Katherine Shaner

That is a hard question, and that’s a loaded question too, right?

The answer is not good news. If we go to the gospels to see where Jesus is on slavery, we see Jesus using enslaved logics and slavery throughout the gospels. So you see Jesus, for example, in Luke 17:10-17. Jesus is talking to the disciples and he says, who among you who has a slave says to the slave after a day’s work in the field, come in and sit down and rest while I make you dinner? No, you tell the slave to go make you dinner. And that’s always been a very disturbing passage to me because Jesus seems to be using the logic of enslavement because ultimately then what he says to the disciples is, you are the slaves. And so you should call yourselves worthless slaves at the end of the day. And that’s disturbing to me because it not only paints Jesus as one who understands slave logics quite well and is willing to use them, but it also paints God in the role of enslaver. And this is sort of the theological question that I have, is how can we start to have a theology of God that doesn’t depend on slavery logics? How can we start to understand a God who isn’t dependent on us being enslaved? Now, Jesus does. There are some hints in the Jesus narratives that Jesus is willing to look at enslavement a little bit differently. So in John, Jesus says, “ I no longer call you slaves, but friends.”

This is in the high priestly prayer and it’s a beautiful passage. And I actually see that as one of the very few places where we get an abolitionist sentiment that pops through our ancient texts, because that’s one of the places where I think Jesus is saying, look, I know the issues with slavery and I know what it means to be a friend instead of a slave, and I’m calling you friends, not slaves. So he kind of undoes some of that logic there.

Shirley Paulson

Oh, Katherine, we have to turn this over to our people here. We promised them a half an hour to talk to you too. And I have a feeling that there are going to be a lot of good questions here for you. And I know, Martha, you had your head up a while ago and you’re ready to go. So go ahead and you start.

Martha Hotz

Okay, thanks. What about the term redeemer that has applied to Jesus? Doesn’t that mean… I mean, in the Old Testament when they talk about, well, there were debt slaves and then they were supposed to be freed every 50 years, the Jubilee and the person who freed them was, or if they weren’t freed every 50 years, someone could bring money and buy them out, and they were the redeemer. So if Jesus is a redeemer, isn’t that kind of an anti-slavery word?

Katherine Shaner

Honestly, it may be. I haven’t considered that, so I’m going to think about that a little bit more. But what I will say though is that debt slavery is a thing by the time we get to the Roman Empire, but it is still under the category of enslavement. And there’s, I think, some different structures of enslavement in the Old Testament than there are in the New Testament. And I think that the idea of Jubilee, while it’s a great idea, there isn’t a lot of historical research that shows that it was actually in practice. So here we start to see the difference between practice and ideal. I think that that’s also really helpful for us to see when we start to look at the New Testament and the Old Testament, because oftentimes there are ideals that are in the text that are not quite fulfilled within the ancient world. Even in the Roman world, we haven’t even talked about freed people yet, which is this category of people who were formerly slaves who are no longer slaves, but they often are still beholden to their former enslavers for certain kinds of labor. The chapter by Chance Bonar really explains that quite well in our book. And I can talk more about it if folks are interested, but I know there’s other questions.

Shirley Paulson

What a great question. Martha, thank you for raising the question. And I will just point out Katherine and Christy’s book again is Ancient Slavery and Its New Testament Context, and there are lots of essays in there, and it’s readable because they’re short essays. You can actually read them one at a time, and they will probably answer a lot more questions than we can possibly do tonight. So I just want to remind you about that. So great, thank you. And then as Santou, go ahead.

Santou

I see another question above mine, and if I may, I’m going to ask that question on behalf of the other person. They don’t have their hand up. How did slaves get into slavery in the first place? Were they mainly spoils of war?

Katherine Shaner

That is a great question, and thank you for whoever asked it in the chat. So enslavement in the ancient world—in the Roman world, which is primarily my specialty: Yes, many war captives were funneled into the slave markets, but the slave markets were already established even before the wars happened. So one of the things we know from Josephus, for example, is that he talks about when the Romans finally take Jerusalem, they pull all the war captives together and they pick out the most beautiful ones to take to Rome and to parade through the streets so that they can show all the beautiful people that they’ve conquered. But then the others, they sell on the slave market to the East. And those slaves then probably get funneled back in through Ephesus. I saw a question about slave markets in Ephesus, so they get funneled back in through Asia Minor and Greece, and even on the slave markets in Rome.

So we know several places where there were fairly robust slave markets in antiquity, Ephesus being one of them. There’s one up in Cavalla near Philippi. There’s another one in Rome and Austria, there’s another one in Delos, which is a little island right off the coast of Greece. But slaves were also gotten by kidnapping. Folks would go to remote islands and just kidnap people and sell them into slavery. There was a thing such as debt slavery. And we also think that there were a lot of slaves, particularly in the late first and early second century of the Roman Empire who were home born slaves. That is, they were born in captivity. And if you were born to an enslaved mother, you were enslaved to your mother’s enslaver. So we see lots of babies who are born into slavery who become enslaved. We also see there’s a practice in antiquity called, oh, I’m losing the technical term. It’s essentially when an unwanted baby is born, you put the baby on a trash heap, and slave traders would often troll these trash heaps for these unwanted, these abandoned babies, and then they would become part of the slave market as well.

Shirley Paulson

Are you talking about exposing?

Katherine Shaner

Thank you. That was the term I was looking for. That just wasn’t on the tip of my tongue.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah. Oh, thank you for that too. This is a difficult subject, and I appreciate you telling us. So the facts and details, and I see we have several questions here. Santou, did you have more you wanted to go with?

Santou

Yeah, that was not my question. So I do have my question, and it flows very nicely with what you just said, Katherine. Mine is around where loyalties lie. So my first question is around whether slaves were allowed to marry someone else outside. Well, I imagine they could only marry someone else who was enslaved if they could marry because a free man would never let his wife be enslaved, right?

Katherine Shaner

Yeah. What’s really interesting is that the answer is yes and no. So legally enslaved people were not allowed to be married. That is the Roman law courts would not recognize the marriage between enslaved people, now enslaved. And part of that was because enslaved people, especially enslaved women, were available to their enslavers for sexual activity.

And so we think that a lot of sex workers in antiquity were probably enslaved. But we also know of many husbands or many men—men who would marry their enslaved women, sometimes would free them in order to legally marry them. But then their offspring, of course, would be enslaved to them. And so it could get really messy, actually. So we have one inscription in the book with Javal Coleman’s article in the Roman Empire. He talks about a grave inscription to Junia Procula, who’s a four-year-old child who dies, and it says that Euphrosynus, her father… and then there’s a blank in the inscription… dedicate this monument to her. And you don’t know what the blank is about until you go to look at the backside. And on the backside, what we learn is that Euphosynus is married to a woman named Acte, who was his enslaved woman who he freed in order to marry her, and she in turn drugs him.

So that poisons him. She then absconds with two other men and a bunch of children from Euphosynus’s household. Now, we don’t know—we think that Acte was Junia Procula’s mother was the mother of the girl who’s deceased. But what we don’t know is whether some of the enslaved children that she took away with her when she escaped were maybe her enslaved children that she bore before she was freed. So this is a very, very mixed kind of marriage. And these loyalties… you know, marriage doesn’t guarantee loyalty—is partly what the tale is in Ephosynus’s case, but we see other cases like these other marriages like these in antiquity as well.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, it’s messy. All right. I think you also, I just want to make sure we covered your questions.

Santou

Oh, yes. A supplementary question about something you said around slaves being able to leave to care for their parents. I always understood that once they were enslaved, they had to, in a sense, cut off ties with their parents. They couldn’t, as Jesus said, you can’t serve two masters. Right?

Katherine Shaner

Right, right. No, and I think that that’s part of the issue. So I was sort of thinking of a hypothetical at that point. Let’s say if you were an enslaved daughter and your mother was also enslaved to your same enslaver, you might still be together in same household, but who you listen to and who you honor, of course follows your enslaver instead of your parental loyalties, when, in fact, emotionally right. I can imagine, at least for me, that my emotions might tend more toward my parents than my enslaver necessarily.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, very interesting. Thank you for those very interesting questions Santou. And Toto, you have written a question, but go ahead and ask it.

Toto Tay

Yeah, I was just kind of curious. I am going to reword it a little bit. I think it’s interesting that there are collaterals that make it relative today. So like slaves for example, what we see today in recent history is we have a marginalized group that are oppressed by hierarchy that were not just slaves, but also women, but also children, but also the disabled. They’re all kind of put as this subhuman class. And it sounds like it kind of echoes this same kind of mentality that they were not human, that they were or subhuman. And even though a lot of the New Testament, it seems Jesus and the other writers do address it, it still kind of bugs me that there’s a lot of talk about the Bride of Christ in that context. Well, it’s the submissive one. It’s the property of God. And I don’t know, it rubs me the wrong way.

Katherine Shaner

You are not alone. You are not alone in the wrestling with that. And what I would say is that it’s no accident that when we start to study ancient slavery, that it looks a lot like what we know in our near histories, in part because Jefferson, Madison, all of our founding fathers, the architects of the slavery system in the US, they were reading all of this literature. They were reading Seneca, they were reading Cato, they were reading Vero, they were reading Aristotle because these guys had all written farming manuals about how to set up a plantation, how to be a good gentleman, farmer, how to be the scholar farmer, the philosopher farmer. And they were reading that and idealizing it and seeing slavery as inherent to the making of oneself as the scholar farmer, the philosopher farmer, the gentleman farmer. There was no other way to do it.

And so there are very much some differences in these slavery systems, of course, but it’s no accident that we hear the same rhetoric echoing across the millennia. And in terms of the Bride of Christ, I mean, as a feminist, that one just is painful anyway I go. And the only way I can do it is to have some generosity to say, okay, how do we start to think in terms of the fullness of the power that God created us to have as human beings, as in relationship to the fullness of God’s relatability. I mean, that’s maybe the only way that I can go with that image in any kind of generosity, partly because I know historically, and even today, marriage is not a guarantor of equality. And for many of us, we want it to be. And we’re working to change that rhetoric. And I think we actually learn a lot from our L-G-B-T-Q siblings in that, because when you don’t have gender differences within a marriage, you have to work out marriage differently than just about women are subordinate and men are not. And so I think that there’s a lot actually to learn from some of those other committed relationships.

Shirley Paulson

Fascinating question, Toto. Thank you so much for bringing it up. And to switch subjects a bit here, Pat, you’ve asked a really interesting question also in the chat. I think it might be more efficient if you would just say your question out loud to Katherine.

Pat Nester

Yes. Well, I am surprised about how tyrannical the Romans were towards everybody. And one of the things that I remember from Latin class was, I believe when reading Caesar’s Gallic War Commentaries that the Roman army would occasionally draft losing warriors into the army, which means they had access to weapons. And of course there was a great slave revolt under Spartacus where they had weapons. And I know that was a huge fear of southern slave holders in our country, which I suppose contributed to this sort of police state mentality that the Romans had. Just wanted to see if you had a comment about that.

Katherine Shaner

No, that’s really insightful. Thank you for bringing that out. I mean, I think especially just Cephus really helps us with some of this complexity. I do think there’s complexity in the enslaved system. There were enslaved people in the US who knew how to use weapons for hunting, who were very good at that, right? But you’re right about the fear of slaveholders. You don’t want to weaponize or create rebellion through weaponizing and slaves, through slaves who have weapons. But yes, the Romans did. So Josephus, in fact, was a Jewish general who was taken in the battle of Yodfat early on in the Jewish war, and then he befriends Vespasian (the Emperor). So the narrative goes, but I actually think he may have been enslaved. He was a war captive to Vespasian, and it was the Roman emperor who ultimately bankrolled his ability to write both the Jewish war and the Jewish antiquities. So I do think that the Romans knew when they were taking enslaved people who were highly educated, highly skilled, highly valuable, they knew exactly what they were getting. And so they found ways to use those skills to use that education, to use that knowledge within their own system. And in some ways, someone like Keith Bradley would argue that that’s one of the ways that they kept enslaved people happy, was that they gave them jobs that were within their skillset that they used, that honored their skillset, and that made them so-called happy slaves. I’m always reluctant to use that term, but there’s a whole rhetoric about do you keep slaves from rebellion by keeping them fearful, or do you keep slaves from rebellion by keeping them happy? And there’s a large discussion in literature about that for sure.

Pat Nester

Okay, good.

Shirley Paulson

Another fascinating aspect of all this whole subject here. So Honor, you’re next. Go ahead.

Honor Haase

Okay. I hope I can be efficient and say my thoughts. First of all, from everything that you say and that we’ve read prior to this, slavery was just endemic to the world that we knew—probably to the whole earth, actually. But we’re talking about the Mediterranean area. So when it comes to Jesus and his followers’ teaching, can we give them a miss to say, “Well, unless they used all their power and fervor just to get rid of slavery… I mean, that’s a category all by itself, and they have this other kingdom of God thing that they wanted to get across. So maybe they weren’t as wrong. Maybe it wasn’t as terribly heinous as it seems to us, because it was just life at that time. And there are places where Paul refers to himself as a slave of Christ, and he’s of course speaking figuratively and saying, I mean, the definition of a slave is someone who doesn’t have power over his own activity or over his own body or over his own desires.

And Paul was saying that he felt that way with respect to Christ, and he was recommending it to us, and he was recommending to us on the basis of—notably Jesus saying, before the crucifixion, “Thy will be done.” He was willing to go the whole road. And I wouldn’t shy away from thinking that when Jesus used that similarly of a slave coming in from the field, that he, maybe, was accepting that as normal. But he could also have been using it as a figurative teaching tool. So I guess my question is, What would be your wish, Katherine, that people like Timothy and Titus might have said or might have progressed in their thinking rather than what they said about women—Keep your mouth shut, and slaves, submit yourself to your master. Yeah.

Katherine Shaner

Alright. There’s so many questions in that Honor. I love it. So let me go back to make one distinction. I want to make a distinction between what I call with my students jokingly “Jesus, the dude” and “Jesus in the gospels”. Because we have to remember that when we’re reading the gospels, we’re reading a layer of editorial commentary and editorial storytelling that is set into a different context than Jesus who was actually walking on the earth. So I do think that “Jesus, the dude”—the historical Jesus guy—I don’t think he probably was embedded in a slavery system as fully as, say, Paul was even 10, 20, 30 years later, or as the gospel writers were writing from. I think for example, if Luke is written in the Asia Minor area, I think that in that area, he’s much more embedded within slavery systems than in Roman Palestine and Israel.

And so I am fully willing to say that there are different forms of slavery around the empire and that it takes in a different role in everyday life at different points in time in the empire and at different geographic points in the empire. So that is to say that I think one of the reasons we have this memory of Jesus saying you’re no longer slaves but friends, is that I do think the Jesus movement had liberative elements to it. And I think Jesus was friends with enslaved people and did the movement itself tried to generate a rebellion against enslavement. We also know of certain Christian and Jewish groups that rejected slavery. The Therapeutae in Egypt are one group, Qumran, the Essenes in Qumran are another group that we know rejected slavery wholeheartedly. So we do have groups in antiquity who don’t think that slavery should be, even though it is, and it’s fully embedded. When it comes to Paul, I have a harder time.

And as a Lutheran, I should love, love, love my Paul. But I have to confess that I have a love-hate relationship with the guy, but I can’t quit him because I keep writing about him. But you’re right, he does say in the beginning of Romans, for example, he calls himself Paul, the slave of Christ. And yet when we get to the end of Romans, and we see Romans chapter 16: 22, we hear a guy named Tertzius who says, I Tertizius, the writer of this letter, greet you, Romans, in the name of the Lord. Well, ‘Tertzius’ first of all, means third. It’s an enslaved name because it’s just like you go and number your slaves. But also we know that one of the things that enslaved people did in antiquity, one of the skills they had was that they were scribes. They knew how to make paper, they knew how to mix the ink and the chemicals to make ink that would stick to the paper.

They knew how to sharpen the quill. They knew how to form the letters even. And there are even enslaved people who knew how to form the rhetoric of letters and knew the proper literary form of a letter. And so as Tertzius, what we see is Paul is both using an enslaved person to write the letter and calling himself a slave of Christ. So he’s using that enslaved logic. So you asked what my wish would be. My wish would be that Tertzius and Paul were co-writers of that letter. My wish would be that Paul found a different metaphor for understanding his relationship to God. My wish would be that slavery just didn’t exist and wasn’t imaginable. In part, it’s because it’s the power differentials that systems of slavery create have the potential for so much horrific abuse that I don’t want to be part of those power differentials even metaphorically. Now, can I do that? No. I mean, there are websites today where you can go and see how many enslaved people hold up your lifestyle today. And I have done it, and I am solidly upper middle class, but I’m also recycling, and I do all the things, and I still can’t get less than 30—because I don’t make my own clothing and weave my own fabric, for example. It’s just one example of that.

Honor Haase

Could I ask just one additional question? I’m just saying: so then, in regard to the writer of Ephesians and Timothy and Titus, we just figure, well, they just didn’t get it and we have to progress from there.

Katherine Shaner

Well, I think in terms of the writer of Ephesians, Colossians, I Peter, Timothy, Titus— so just like there are many things in my world, so I tell my students in 25 years, I hope that they can point out to me all the places that I made mistakes in terms of liberation, because all of us have blind spots. All of us have ways that we don’t see, the ways that we are not perfectly liberative in the world. And my hope is, my hope would have been that perhaps there had been different writers, but we are not immune from the same kinds of mistakes that I see these writers making. That’s partly my point, and that’s where I’m a good Lutheran. I’m both sinner and saint.

Shirley Paulson

Oh my gosh, what an interesting way for us to end this conversation with us thinking about where we all fit in the story. We might think about the past as being the past and what mistakes they made. But you’re right—it’s so important for us to read it in terms of how we are thinking now and not judging them. Rather, what can we take from it? Boy, I appreciate people who’ve left questions and comments in the chat. Also, we didn’t have time to cover all of them, and the questions we’ve had from you tonight have been just wonderful questions. If you would like to know more, I really recommend you read this amazing book because it has so many more answers that we couldn’t even begin to cover tonight. Also, Christy Cobb has done a Bible and Beyond podcast interview that will be aired Wednesday, July 2nd.

So don’t miss that because she’ll be talking about the book also. So we have been so privileged to have both Katherine and Christy to come and talk to us. I’m so grateful to you. And I love Toto’s kind of conclusion here: that the church/religion question is whether we lead by love or fear. I think we kind of leave it that way in our own hearts as well. That was beautifully said. My goodness. What a rich conversation we’ve had tonight. I know we could keep going, but I think you’ve opened up the door to a wonderful conversation for us, Katherine. We want to thank you so much. Really appreciate that.

Katherine Shaner

Thank you. Thank you for the invitation to be here, for the ability to speak, and thank you for all your questions, all your wonderful questions. And thank you, Shirley, for what you do. There are not many women in this sphere, as Christy and I have both said, and we’re so grateful to have the work that you do out there in the world.

Shirley Paulson

It’s just wonderful. Alright, so I’m going to just close this out here and just remind everybody that this was the June, 2025 Bible and Beyond discussion titled “Power and Slavery in Ancient Households” with our guest scholar, Dr. Katherine A. Shaner. Thank you so much for being with us, everybody, for our monthly Bible and Beyond Discussion. We usually meet on the fourth Monday of the month from 8:00  to 9:00 PM Eastern time. So our next Monday meeting will be on Monday, July 28th. Each Bible and Beyond Discussion is led by a knowledgeable scholar who provides a thoughtful overview of texts, and then we provide an opportunity for participants to ask their own questions. Before we wrap up, I do want to remind you that your Patreon support is extremely important for us to keep providing these terrific opportunities to hang out with great scholars like Katherine Shaner. And I want to remind you that all members are entitled to my weekly column on the Greatest Thing I Learned This Week at patreon.com/bibleandbeyond. And now what’s coming next month, Dr. Arthur Dewey will return to talk to us again. He’s going to talk about the meaning of apocalypse in the Bible and ask if we are approaching a new apocalyptic age right now or not. So again, that’s going to be Monday, July 28th. So please give me a round of thanks to Katherine for coming to be with us tonight and giving us quite a bit of food for thought concerning the nearly invisible issue of slavery in the Bible. Many thanks to everybody.