[pnews-news] Bodies and Souls - Slavery in Early Christianity

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  Bodies and Souls
The Rhetoric of Slavery

>From Slavery in Early Christianity
by Jennifer A. Glancy; Oxford University Press, 2002

Sometime in the fourth or fifth century, a Christian man ordered a bronze 
collar to encircle the neck of one of his slaves. The inscription on the 
collar reads: I am the slave of the archdeacon Felix. Hold me so that I do 
not flee. 1 Although the collar purports to speak in the first person for 
a nameless slave, the voice we hear is not that of the slave but that of 
the slaveholder. Felix, enraged by a slave's previous attempts to escape, 
ordered the collar both to humiliate and to restrain another human being, 
whom the law classified as his property. The chance survival of this 
artifact of the early church recalls the overwhelming element of 
compulsion that operated within the system of slavery, with its use of 
brute paraphernalia for corporal control. Contemporary sensibilities 
recoil from such tangible evidence for the inherent violence of ancient 
slavery. We are likely to consider Christian slaveholders to be hypocrites 
and to find the notion of Christian slavery oxymoronic. Felix exhibited no 
awareness of such contradiction: the slave collar he ordered even bears an 
incised cross. Centuries after Paul wrote to another Christian 
slaveholder, Philemon, counseling him to act in love toward the runaway 
slave Onesimus, the otherwise unknown archdeacon, Felix, apparently saw no 
incongruity in proclaiming simultaneously his status as a leader in the 
church and his identity as a slaveholder.

Slaves in the Roman Empire were vulnerable to physical control, coercion, 
and abuse in settings as public as the auction block and as private as the 
bedroom. Since slavery was identified with the body, it is not surprising 
that the experience of slavery was conditioned by gender and sexuality. At 
the same time, a person's experience of what it meant to be male or female 
was conditioned by the accident of slavery. A male slave, for example, had 
no legal connection to his own offspring, thus excluding him from the 
cultural status of fatherhood. Slaveholders had unrestricted sexual access 
to their slaves. This dimension of slave life was most likely to affect 
female slaves and young male slaves. Moreover, slaveholders valued female 
slaves for their biological capacities of reproduction and lactation. 
Problems emanating from the sexual and gender-specific use of slaves are 
central to the understanding of slavery in the early Christian era.

[..]


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