Slavery in the New Testament: Part 1 Masters and Slaves

Slavery is America’s original sin, but it is also deeply embedded in the Bible and the New Testament. Searching it out is an important moral imperative.

Getting Real

The King James Version (KJV) translated kurios as “lord” and doulos as “servant.” A good example of this appears in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant. “Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt” (Matthew 18:27 KJV). The Revised Standard Version (RSV; 1952) follows the KJV: “And out of pity for him the lord of that servant released him and forgave him the debt.” The New International Version (NIV; 1978) shifts to master but keeps the servant: “The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.” The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV; 1989) takes the opposite tack, shifting to “slave” but keeping “lord”: “And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt.” Nobody seems to know what to do.

Slave

A slave is a servant, but not all servants are slaves. Since doulos has both of these senses; how can you tell the difference? Context, but often context is not clear. We face yet another issue. The Roman Empire was a slave economy. It ran on and was fueled by slave power. Estimates are problematic, but between 30 and 40 percent of the population were enslaved. Slaves were ever present in all aspects of life. Cicero’s scribe Tiro was a slave. Those defeated in war became slaves. Sixty to one hundred thousand Judean slaves from Titus’ conquest of Jerusalem built the Colosseum in Rome. Slaves are everywhere and often unseen. A painting from Pompeii pictures a couple making love with a slave hovering in the background. Slaves were present at all levels of society and everywhere in the economy.

The ever presence of the enslaved argues that we should translate doulos as “slave,” unless overwhelming contextual evidence dictates “servant,” which it seldom does. Doulos as slave casts light on kurios. A kurios is a male who has power over others, that is, a master. In a slave culture, a master has power over slaves.

Modern scholars of slavery have argued that “enslaved” better represents the situation than “slave,” because someone enslaved them. They are not naturally slaves. I completely support this position. The word slave hides the person who enslaved another human being and makes slavery appear acceptable as natural or deserved. 

Ancient societies disagreed with this conclusion. For them slavery was natural. When Aristotle asks whether slavery is against nature, the answer he says is easy. “And it is not difficult either to discern the answer by theory or to learn it empirically. Authority and subordination are conditions not only inevitable but also expedient; in some cases things are marked out from the moment of birth to rule or to be ruled” (Politics, I.II 8, 1254a, 30). Although a very capable thinker, Aristotle finds it impossible to really entertain that slavery might be against nature. He thinks the answer is obvious. It’s completely natural. No problem. The authors of the biblical books made the same assumption and found no problem with slavery. Even though the Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt, they enslaved others in Israel and Judea. Spartacus, who led a major slave revolt in Italy that terrified the Romans, himself enslaved captives. He opposed being enslaved, not enslaving.

This has important implications for translation. Translating doulos as “slave” agrees with the ancients’ assumptions about slavery. But they were wrong. Slavery is not natural. So, a sensitive translation would vary by context, translating doulos as “slave” and “enslaved,” forcing a modern reader to struggle with assumptions.

In the prescript to the Letter to Romans, Paul introduces himself as the sender.

Paul a servant of Jesus Christ

Paul a slave of Jesus Anointed

Paul enslaved by Jesus Anointed

While each of these translations are technically correct, their semantic import is very different and provokes different hermeneutical responses.

Master

The Greek kurios can denote a god, YHWH in LXX, an emperor, a master of slaves, a husband. A kurios is a male who rules over others. It is a patriarchal and authoritarian word. Latins translated kurios as dominus, the head of domus, a house. Dominus has the same semantic range as kurios. The “Dom” in Dom Corleone is an abbreviation of dominus. And Dom Corleone directly descends from the Roman Emperor as Dominus. The Mafia is a small-scale Roman Empire.

English translated kurios and dominus as “lord,” an old English word denoting “The male head of a household; a man who has authority over servants, attendants, or slaves” (OED). Lord and master are synonyms. Lord, from earliest times, was also an honorific title. Master derives from the Latin magister, a master. Lord has a sense of honor missing from master. One can argue that lord as an honorific title better translates kurios when applied to God or Jesus or the emperor, and master in the case of masters and slaves. But I think there is another issue that tells against translating kurios as “lord” in favor of “master.”

Aristotle in his Politics analyzes the family as a society’s basic unit and model for the state. “The primary and smallest parts of the household are master and slave, husband and wife, father and children” (Politics I.II.1, 1253b, 5). For Aristotle, the primary model for a family is master and slave, not husband and wife. The husband is the master, the wife a slave. As he argues, “The household in its perfect form consists of slaves and freemen.” 

Aristotle employs the master/slave model for understanding and organizing society at all levels, from the family to the empire. The husband is the wife’s master, and the father is his children’s master. The emperor is the master of his subjects. The master/slave model is so central and ubiquitous that people find it difficult to question or to think outside of it.

Thinking within Slavery

A group of Jesus parables use the master/slave model. Stereotypes are followed. Masters are harsh, and some slaves are hardworking, while others are conniving. But there is no hint of criticism of slavery.

The Q-Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas preserve a saying about masters and slaves. Multiple attestations argue for its authenticity. “No one can be a slave for two masters. Because he will hate one and love the other, or cling to one and despise the other. For you cannot be a slave for God and wealth” (Q 16:13, my translation). Thomas 47 reads: “Jesus said: It is impossible for a man to mount two horses and to stretch two bows, and it is impossible for a slave to serve two masters, otherwise he will honor the one and offend the other.”

This saying summarizes the enslaved’s dilemma. The enslaved is the master’s property and has no free will. The Q-Gospel saying speaks of being enslaved to God and sees that as perfectly describing a believer’s relation to God. A believer is God’s slave, enslaved by God. The description of the relation between master and enslaved falls completely within Aristotle’s description.

When Jesus’ followers contest for leadership roles, a saying attributed to Jesus encourages those who want to be leaders to become instead slaves. “But whoever among you wants to become great should be your table waiter (diakonos), and whoever wants the first place should be the slave of all” (Mark 10:43–44, my translation). The saying makes a wordplay on diakonos (table waiter) and doulos (slave). Table waiting is a slave activity. This saying uses the status of the enslaved as a way of thinking about ambition among Jesus’ followers. The author of Mark’s gospel probably added a son of man saying to conclude the pericope. “For the son of man did not come to be waited on at table but to do the waiting on table and to give his life as the cost for many” (Mark 10:45, my translation). Significantly, the slave language is not directly applied to Jesus. Doulos does not fit his status as kurios.

Double-Consciousness

Jesus and his followers lived within an empire, a society, and a culture in which the master/slave model was the dominant (Latin dominus, master) organizing model. From the emperor to the father, masters ruled slaves. As Aristotle argued, this was the natural way of things. “Authority and subordination are conditions not only inevitable but also expedient; in some cases things are marked out from the moment of birth to rule or to be ruled.” As a result, they apparently not only did not question the model, but they used it to understand their situation. Masters think enslaving others is natural, and slaves think they should be masters. The slave is always contesting the master’s power, as many of the parables make evident. W. E. B. Du Bois and post-colonialism have examined this phenomenon under the heading of double-consciousness. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903).

Early Jesus communities experienced this double-consciousness in multiple ways. As Jews they were a conquered nation. Their “king” was a client of the Roman emperor. They were an enslaved nation. When that enslavement erupted in revolt in 68 CE, the followers of Jesus Messiah faced an acute double-consciousness. Since Rome had executed their cult hero, they were in conflict with Rome, expressed by the saying, “No one can be a slave for two masters.” Now they had to decide where they stood on the revolt. Mark 13 attempts to work this out.

The eschatological view of the early Jesus communities turns values upside down. They stand against the values of the empire, which is expressed by “whoever wants the first place should be the slave of all.” This saying exposes the double-consciousness. They want to be first but are told to be the slave of all. Do they really? The saying’s very existence argues they did not.

The labor of the enslaved enriched the American colonies from their earliest days and slavery haunted the Constitutional Convention and ruptured the country by a civil war. Coming to terms with slavery in America has proved to be an intractable problem, even to this very day.

The traditional translation of kurios as “lord” and doulos as “servant” hide both the ancient world’s and the New Testament’s enmeshment in slavery. Jesus and his communities lived and participated in a slave culture. They employed the master/slave model as a way to think about their community life. Christians need to evaluate the impact of slavery on their religious life and language. Do we really want to address Jesus as lord and master? Are we slaves of God? What happens to Christology and theology without the master/enslaved model? Is any slave language appropriate in our religious life? What do we do with the slave language in the New Testament? 

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