Chapter Seven

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 p.202 n.1 For a historical analysis of this text, see Candida R. Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 100-122. For a discussion of the historical incidence of persecution in the first three centuries, see my Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2013). As I am regularly misunderstood on this point, I should state that while I am skeptical about the extent to which Roman authorities persecuted (i.e., deliberately targeted and sought out) Christians before the Diocletianic persecution, I do not deny that early Christians died as martyrs during this period (even if their number is exaggerated). 

p.202 n.2 The story of Blandina is part of the Letter of the Churches of Lyon and Vienne, which is preserved by the fourth-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea (Hist. eccl. 5.1–2). My reading of the story of Blandina draws heavily on my earlier work on martyrdom as well as on Ronald Charles, The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts (New York: Routledge, 2019), 166–70.

     The term “blandus” was often associated with childlike charm. Blandina is described as small and weak, though the text supplies no rationale for this characterization (5.1.18). The word I have interpreted as puffy and suggestive of illness is aeid­e, which is used by Hippocrates (or Pseudo-Hippocrates) to describe the bloated complexion of women with uterine difficulties (On Natural Women 41). It was also used to refer to disfigurement and unsightliness (Josephus, Jewish War 7.5.5). The word eukataphroneta, often rendered as “contemptible” in English translations, suggests that she was easy to despise, and, in my version of events, blame. In my retelling of this story, I attribute her physical weakness to the conditions of her enslavement. In the ancient imaginary, these may also have been linked. Bryson advises the putative slaveholder about how to treat enslaved people so that they do not become too weak (§67). Martial’s epigram about the corpulent Gaul with an emaciated enslaved attendant might hint at a stereotype of Gauls mistreating and starving their workers (Ep. 8.75). Given that Blandina is portrayed as ugly and cheap, it is unlikely that she was a pedisequa (a more attractive enslaved woman who was decked out in fine clothing as an ornament to her ‘mistress’). Plautus describes ancillae as those who weave, grind grain, cook, and take a beating (Mercator, 396–98). On cleaning and domestic work, see Plautus, Curculio 577; Cicero, Tusc. 5.20.58. 

     On the expense of having ancillae, see Plautus, Truculentus 533: “Do I need more ancillae to feed?,” and Richard Saller, “Women, Slaves, and the Economy of the Roman Household,” in Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. David Balch and Carolyn Osiek (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 185–206. On women’s roles in Roman households, see Susan Treggiari, “Jobs for Women,” American Journal of Ancient History 1 (1976): 76–104. In agrarian and mining contexts, enslaved women were the support staff: the instrumentum instrumenti or “equipment of the equipment” (Digest 33.7.12.5-6). See discussion in Matthew D. C. Larsen, “Carceral Practices and Geographies in Roman North Africa: A Case Study,” SLA 3.4 (2019): 547–580. On enslaved women in the New Testament, see Christy Cobb, Slavery, Gender, Truth, and Power in Luke-Acts and Other Ancient Narratives (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019).

     One domain in which ancillae exerted influence was food and drink preparation. Given this, we might reasonably infer that Biblis, who refuted accusations of cannibalism and asserted the bloodless character of the Christian diet earlier in the account (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.26), was also an enslaved kitchen attendant.

p.203 n.3 I here follow Charles: “Blandina is presumed to have had a body that is habituated to corporal punishments, which would enable her to receive the blows” (Silencing of Slaves, 180). Ancient elites were aware that corporal punishment made enslaved people better at withstanding pain than freeborn people (Cicero, Tusc. 2.41; Plautus, Comedy of Asses 557). Insensibility to pain is a theme in martyrdom accounts in general. See L. Stephanie Cobb, Divine Deliverance: Pain and Painlessness in Early Christian Martyr Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). 

p.204 n.4 Blandina: Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.17; 5.1.41; Charles, Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts, 166–70, utilizes the important work of Trouillot to frame his analysis. In my earlier work, which is generously referenced by Charles, I too argued that Blandina’s identity was elided in the text. See Other Christs, 62–63, 92–94, and Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 113. What Charles amplifies in his own work is the importance of Blandina’s enslaved status and the way that she, like other enslaved martyrs, is used to advance particular theological interests. If, as I argue below, spiritual possession is articulated using the logic of masterly extensibility, it makes a perverse kind of sense that Blandina is the model martyr. 

p.204 n.4a “While Blandina is the one who dies, it is less clear if she is the one acting.” I am mindful of the work of Saba Mahmood, which explores how Western liberal descriptions of freedom and agency train us to equate agency with resistance. My question here is who the text means to portray as being in control. See Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16.2 (2001): 202–36. For an overview of the history of traditional debates about agency in the reception of Paul, the major figure in this chapter, see John M. G. Barclay, “Introduction,” in Divine and Human Agency in Paul and His Cultural Environment, ed. John M. G. Barclay and Simon J. Gathercole (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 1–8.

p.204 n.5 “Scholarly interpretations of this story have been divided.” For the view that Blandina is the active agent, see Elizabeth A. Goodine and Matthew W. Mitchell, “The Persuasiveness of a Woman: The Mistranslation and Misinterpretation of Eusebius’ Historia Ecclesiastica 5.1.41,” JECS 13.1 (2005): 1-19, and Cobb, Divine Deliverance, 75–77. For the view that Blandina is eclipsed, see Charles, Silencing Slaves, 166–70. For Felicity, see Passion of Perpetua and Felicity 15.6, trans. Thomas Heffernan, in The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 132. Heffernan argues that the physical residence of Christ in Felicity and other martyrs “owes something to Justin’s notion of the pre-existing seed of the Logos, which exists in everyone but which Christians share more fully because they worship and participate in the life of the Logos,” 309.

     The dating of the Letter of the Churches of Lyon and Vienne and the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity is derived from the chronology of the events provided in the text. As I and others have argued, the dating of both accounts can and should be contested. See Ellen Muehlberger, “Perpetual Adjustment: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity and the Entailments of Authenticity,” JECS 30.3 (2022): 313–42. On Felicity’s neglect by modern scholars, see L. Stephanie Cobb, “The Other Woman: Felicitas in Late Antiquity,” JLA 15.1 (2022): 1–27.

p.205 n.5a “Many believed that supernatural entities could inhabit human bodies, to cause them great harm, control them, endow them with great powers, or even provide them with comfort.” On the materiality and proximity of the supernatural realm, see Dayna S. Kalleres, City of Demons: Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 1–23, and Peter R. L. Brown, “Sorcery, Demons, and the Rise of Christianity from Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages,” in Witchcraft: Confessions and Accusations, ed. Mary Douglas (London: Tavistock, 1970), 17–45.

p.206 n.6 See Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 102–29; Sheila Briggs, “Can an Enslaved God Liberate? Hermeneutical Reflections on Philippians 2:6–11,” Semeia 47 (1989): 137–53. Metaphorical language of enslavement: Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse: Double Trouble Embodied (New York: Routledge, 2018), 21–46; Sam Tsang, From Slaves to Sons: A New Rhetoric Analysis on Paul’s Slave Metaphors in His Letter to the Galatians (New York: Peter Lang, 2005); de Wet, Unbound God, 7. Shaner too hints at this when she writes “some liberation perspectives arguing for egalitarian trends in early Christianity tend to ignore or downplay the ways in which logics of masters and slaves are embedded into the structures of leadership,” in Enslaved Leadership, 111–12. I take her to mean that the logics of slavery permeate more than just texts about enslavement.

p.206 n.7 Shively T. J. Smith, Interpreting 2 Peter through African American Women’s Moral Writings (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2023). Smith allows for the possibility that those involved in the composition of the Petrine epistles were not enslaved but found the model useful for Christian identity and community imperatives. 

p.207 n.8 On the ways in which the notion of redemptive suffering harms black women, see Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993).

p.208 n.8a “The human body was known to be porous…” The porosity of the female body is one reason that women were often highly regarded as prophetesses and oracles who could channel spirits in their bodies—in social contexts ranging from the Pythia at Delphi to the enslaved fortune-tellers of urban marketplaces and alleys. On the penetrability of women’s bodies, see Candida R. Moss, “The Man with the Flow of Power: Porous Bodies in Mark 5:25-34,” JBL129.3 (2010): 507-519. On gender, see the recent study by Brittany Wilson, Unmanly Men: Refigurations of Masculinity in Luke-Acts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 

p.209 n.9 On Philippians (2:6–11): Theologians describe this as kenosis and debate what exactly it entails. In Herm. Mand. 43.14, the same language is used to describe the desertion of the Spirit from a person. Among the divine qualities and powers that Christ emptied from himself was a singularly powerful self-actualizing will. The God of the Hebrew Bible need only voice things to have them done. This incarnational process involved not just self-abasement but a new state of obedience. Arguably, the Spirit hovering over a formless creation is a type of possessive power (Gen 1:1-2 spirit is here translated as “wind”). See Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.48. 

p.209 n.10 Blandina: Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.18. 

p.210 n.11 Exorcism in the New Testament: See Matt 12:43; Mark 1:23–26; 3:30; 5:2–8; 7:25; 9:25; Luke 8:29; 11:24. Note that the language is also used in Zech 13:2 and may reflect a first-century Jewish idiom. On possession in various forms of Jewish thought contemporaneous with the Jesus Movement, see David Frankfurter, “Master-Demons, Local Spirits, and Demonology in the Roman Mediterranean World: An Afterword to Rita Lucarelli,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 11 (2011): 126-31. On pre-baptismal exorcism in the early church: Hippolytus, Trad. ap. 20.1–4. On Kiss of the Peace: Hippolytus, Trad. ap. 18.3. 

    The use of exorcism in modern baptismal liturgies varies from denomination to denomination and, in the Anglican Communion, on a geographical basis. In the Roman Catholic tradition, Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults and the Rite of Baptism for Children both call for minor exorcisms (which should be distinguished from the more dramatic solemn or major exorcisms performed by priests and depicted in horror movies). On these, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church §1673.

p.211 n.12 The discussion that follows draws a great deal on recent scholarship on spiritual possession by Giovanni B. Bazzana, Having the Spirit of Christ: Spirit Possession and Exorcism in the Early Christ Groups (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020) and Bazzana, “Negotiating the Experience of Possession in Hermas’s Shepherd,” in Experiencing the Shepherd of Hermas, ed. Angela Kim Harkins and Harry O. Maier (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 9–29. Bazzana’s work is important for the ways in which it seeks to subvert secular biases against the language and concept of possession. It also forms part of a broader recent pattern of academic interest in Christian anthropology and spiritual possession. Most of this literature remains unconcerned with the relationship between enslavement and possession. For a notable exception, see the work of Chance Bonar, discussed throughout this chapter. 

p. 212 n.13 Herm. Man. 5.1.2–4, trans. modified from Chance Bonar, “Enslaved to God: Slavery and Divine Despotics in the Shepherd of Hermas,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2023. Conversations with Bonar inform not only my reading of the Shepherd of Hermas but also my thought about the Spirit as instrument of divine extensibility. Carolyn Osiek connects the Holy Spirit’s desire for space to a low-status anthropomorphism: “The anthropomorphism of the sensitive Holy Spirit that feels suffocated when forced to share its dwelling with the evil spirit of bad temper (v. 3) could well be inspired by the stifling, poorly ventilated close quarters of three-to-five-story apartment houses or insulae, in which most of the urban underclass of a Roman city live,” in The Shepherd of Hermas: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 119. 

p.212 n.14 If these ideas strike you as teetering on the edge of superstition, then you should know that you are not alone. Scholars, both ancient and modern, have tended to distinguish between possession by an alien entity and the difficulties that some people had keeping themselves in order. The invasion model is often seen as a ‘popular’ belief held by uneducated people of lower status, while the imbalance model is more regularly cited as a philosophical and medical view. 

      One first century pagan medical writer: Celsus, On Medicine 4; Herm. Man. 5.1.2–4. The term rendered as double-souledness here is dipsuchia, which is often translated as “doubt,” “indecision,” or “double-mindedness.” On double-souledness in Hermas, see Bonar, “Enslaved to God,” who draws on Andrew Crislip, “The Shepherd of Hermas and Early Christian Emotional Formation,” Studia Patristica 83 (2017): 231–50. 

      The language of the “Christian biome” comes from John David Penniman, “Blended with the Savior: Gregory of Nyssa’s Eucharistic Pharmacology in the Catechetical Oration,” SLA 2.4 (2018): 512–41. For examples of Christians attempting to regulate the Christian biome, see also Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis. The perspective of Clement and Origen is not so different from that of Galen, who believed that the character of the soul could be destroyed by bad habits. On this, see Heinrich von Staden, “The Physiology and Therapy of Anger: Galen on Medicine, the Soul, and Nature,” in Islamic Philosophy, Science, Culture, and Religion: Studies in Honor of Dimitri Gutas, ed. Felicitas Opwis and David Reisman (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 63–87; Blake Leyerle, “Clement of Alexandria on the Importance of Table Etiquette,” JECS 3.2 (1995): 123–41.

p.213 n.15 Bazzana, Having the Spirit of Christ, 136.

p.213 n.15a “If Blandina was an instrument of divine will, it is only because she allowed herself to be.” I think here not only with Hartman but also with the theory of archival counterfactual history and accountability to the enslaved developed by Stephanie Smallwood in her book Saltwater Slavery. In Smallwood’s own words: “[The method I developed was] taking its cues from such openings and aiming to tell the history that is accountable to the enslaved—the counter-history the archive tells only reluctantly. Its narration entails theorizing what we might call the counterfact, by which I mean the fact the archive is seeking to ignore, marginalize and disavow—the detail it does not want to animate and make narratable,” in Stephanie Smallwood, “The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved,” History of the Present 6.2 (2016): 117-32 [125]. I am also influenced by Cavan Concannon’s call to “create Paulinisms that can change the world,” in Cavan Concannon, Profaning Paul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), and Concannon, “Paul is Dead. Long Live Paulinism! Imagining a Future for Pauline Studies,” Ancient Jew Review, 1 November 2016. Concannon’s approach is prefigured by the wealth of nineteenth-century voices (many of which are collected together in Bowens, African American Readings of Paul) that did just this. As Matthew Novenson has remarked to me, academic scholarship on Paul is still catching up to the work of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and others.

p.214 n.16 On Vettius Epagathus: Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.9–10. The Spirit is here referred to as the Paraclete, a conceptual synonym for the Holy Spirit used in the Gospel of John. On Acts 16:6-7: It is worth noting that “Asia” here refers to Turkey, not the continent known to us as “Asia.” In his commentary, Willie Jennings describes Acts as “a history yielding to the Spirit” and returns to this motif throughout the work in Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2017), 4. For Christians as temples of the Holy Spirit, see 1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19; 2 Cor 6:16. For Paul’s language of being “filled by the Spirit,” see Eph 3:19; 5:18; Col 1:9 (note that the authorship of these letters is disputed). I have gendered God as male here because, in formulations of masterly extensibility, the body of the “master” is always male. 

     “God extends his reach…”: The language of extension draws on Brendon Reay’s concept of “masterly extensibility,” on which, see below. 

     Possession was so critical to the cultural grammar of ancient Greece and Rome that it affected how people talked about language itself. Greek and Latin are case-based language systems in which the cases of words denote the role that a word plays in a sentence. In an expansive volume explaining Greek syntax, the second-century C.E. grammarian Apollonius Dyscolus describes the genitive case not just as the case of possession but as being intrinsically linked to domination. Having laid out a theory of language based on domination, he then worries that in noun phrases, “it’s the one who is master or owner whose name is put in the genitive case, and the possessed one is in the nominative,” and supplies the example Aristarchou [genitive] doulos [nominative],” or “slave of Aristarchus.” On one level, he is simply describing how language works, but the description frames language using the despotic idea of elite possession. When the system doesn’t quite work, he worries that others will criticize him for turning the matter “upside down,” and is troubled that language does not precisely replicate his structures of power. Apollonius Dyscolus, Syntax3.174–5, trans. Fred W. Householder, The Syntax of Apollonius Dyscolus (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1981), 218.  Apollonius’s problem is illustrative of the jerky elliptical relationship between the elite conception of slavery and the practice of slavery. As Ibram Kendi has written, particular ideologies of enslavement often follow and, in turn, reinforce what is already happening on the ground. Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: PublicAffairs/Bold Type Books, 2016), 21. Apollonius cannot force language into his despotic box because language precedes enslavement. The desire to naturalize a particular view of possession and domination by hardwiring it into ‘Nature’ or language is constantly dashed on the rocks of real-world evidence.  

    Apollonius directs us to the rotten foundations of enslaving ideology. Try as people did to naturalize slavery, it is a cosmic aberration that can only avoid its own destruction through constant reinscription. As Page duBois has put it, slavery is not a “static object”; every attempt to assert possession or ownership of others, to threaten or to break them, is “an act, a taking of a position in an ongoing struggle to maintain authority and mastery on the part of ancient slaveholders.” (duBois, Slaves and Other Objects, 31). In a similar vein, see the work of Katherine Shaner, who writes of despotic order: “It was an argument that continually needed assertion.” (Enslaved Leadership, 26).

p.214 n.16a “Imagining ourselves alongside them as they listened, we might find ourselves reading Paul’s language about the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12 with fresh eyes.” Paul calls body parts “members.” The image of a group of people as a body was not a Pauline invention. On the contrary, it’s highly likely that the recipients of his letter found it familiar to the point of banality. Both ancient Greeks and ancient Romans thought of groups as bodies that had to be regulated and protected. Both the city (polis) and the household (domus), the conceptual cornerstones of Greek and Roman societies, respectively, were described and pictured in this way. For a recent study of Paul’s ideas about the body in the context of ancient philosophical thought, see Michelle V. Lee, Paul, the Stoics, and the Body of Christ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29–45. For Pauline bodies in general, see Joseph Marchal, Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures Before and After Paul’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). “Putting on” Christ is also Pauline language; see Rom 13:14.

p.215 n.16b “They would have heard themselves described as—and sometimes even named after—hands, feet, and implements” See, for example, Scarus and Nastas, two children of the Palatine schoolroom who likely waited at table (Graf. Pal. 1.22, 261, 262), and discussion in Keegan, “Reading,” 69–98.

p.216 n.17 City as body: Margaret M. Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation: An Exegetical Investigation of the Language and Composition of 1 Corinthians (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993). Others see the model of the body as resonating with ancient Stoicism. In Stoic metaphysics, the spirit (pneuma) that animates all things and ripples like an undercurrent through the world is a material force. See Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010). For the connection between Stoic materiality, spirit possession, and the body of Christ, see Bazzana, Having the Spirit of Christ, 135. On masterly extensibility, see Brendon Reay, “Agriculture, Writing, and Cato’s Aristocratic Self-Fashioning,” Classical Antiquity 24.2 (2005): 331–61. 

     Palestinian Talmud: y. Peah 4:6, 18b and y.Qid. 1:3, 60a. Quotation on the “faithful [enslaved worker]” is from Fabian Udoh, “The Tale of an Unrighteous Slave (Luke 16:1–8 [13]),” JBL 128.2 (2009): 311-35 [330]. See also John Bodel, “Villaculture,” in Roman Republican Villas: Architecture, Context, and Ideology, ed. Jeffrey A. Becker and Nicola Terrenato (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 45–60. The idea of the enslaved worker as a prosthetic device akin to a stylus has been thoughtfully explored by Sarah Blake, “Now You See Them: Slaves and Other Objects as Elements of the Roman Master,” Helios 39.2 (2012): 193–211; Blake, “In Manus: Pliny’s Letters and the Arts of Mastery,” in Roman Literary Cultures: Domestic Politics, Revolutionary Poetics, Civic Spectacle, ed. A. Keith and J. Edmondson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 89–107. 

p.216 n.18 Bryson §61 (trans. Swain). Bazzana sees the Spirit as connecting body parts (Having the Spirit of Christ, 136). Bonar sees an analogous process at work in the Shepherd of Hermas. In a recent article, Matthew Thiessen offers an alternative explanation for Christ’s simultaneous possession of multiple bodies that draws on readings of the Septuagint. See Matthew Thiessen, “‘The Rock Was Christ’: The Fluidity of Christ’s Body in 1 Corinthians 10.4,” JSNT 36.2 (2013): 103–126. Thiessen draws upon Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 

p.217 n.19 See Peter of Alexandria, Canons 5-7, and discussion in Daniel Vaucher, “Glaubensbekenntnis oder Sklavengehorsam?—Petrus von Alexandrien zu einem christlichen Dilemma,” VC 72.5 (2018): 533–60. Peter of Alexandria condemned the practice, recognized that they had been coerced, and suggested the penalty of a year’s penance (Canon 6).

p.217 n.20 Bryson §61 (trans. 12). On prosthetics, see Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1990), 75; David Wills, “Preambles: Disability as Prosthesis,” in Derrida Downunder, ed. Laurence Simmons and Heather Worth (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 2001), 35–52. Wills here builds on Derrida’s idea of the “dangerous supplement” that both assists and signals inadequacy. The fantasy of elite masterly superiority often depended on the denigration of people considered ‘slavish’ and ‘womanly’ and on fictions that portrayed enslaved people and women as dependent on elite men (e.g., Seneca, On the Tranquility of the Mind 8.8). See Joy Connolly, “Mastering Corruption: Constructions of Identity in Roman Oratory,” in Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations, ed. Sandra R. Joshel and Sheila Murnaghan (New York: Routledge, 1998), 130–51. Often the language of body parts is seen as a gentler form of enslaver rhetoric. At least, the argument goes, becoming a body part humanizes enslaved workers in as much as they aren’t seen as “property” or “tools.” Since the late 1960s and the pioneering work of classicist Moses Finley, sociological models of enslavement that try to analyze and compare different systems of slavery often focus on the idea of the “slave as property” as one of the hallmarks of a “genuine Slave Society.” See Moses I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Viking Press, 1980).

    There is no doubt that the description of enslaved people as property is dehumanizing, but there is no need to adjudicate between better or worse models of slavery. Comparison tends to have the inadvertent effect of rehabilitating the so-called “kinder” systems. For enslavement as a structuring device, see Lenski and Cameron, What is a Slave Society?, and Enrico Dal Lago and Constantina Katsari, Slave Systems: Ancient and Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). As useful as the model has been, the interest in the idea of enslaved people as private property often obscures the perversely varied ways in which ancient elites tried to dehumanize and degrade their workers. Picturing people as bodyparts is a form of psychic violence that attempts to strip people of their identity, humanity, and autonomy. I am grateful to Joseph Howley for conversations on this question that have shaped my own views. See Howley, “Despotics,” forthcoming. There is a tension, as Hartman discusses in Scenes of Subjection, between dehumanization, which denies the humanity of enslaved people, and abjection, which acknowledges the humanity of enslaved people and criminalizes them. 

p.217 n.20a “Indeed, some have understood this passage as an optimistic reworking of an intrinsically harmful image.” See Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 103. Ahmed draws upon Gerald R. Bray, 1-2 Corinthians (Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 21.

p.218 n.21 See Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 103. Compare here Epictetus, who makes a very similar analogy (SVF 2.366 and 368). Epictetus is noteworthy because he was formerly enslaved and was voiced through the words of his elite former student, Arrian. Other stories also explore the interconnectedness of various parts of the body in despotic terms. Aesop’s Fable of the Belly and its Members (P130) cautions the parts of the body not to rebel and refuse to feed the lazy stomach because without it they will all die. It is a political class-oriented fable that, according to Plutarch, was used by Menenius Agrippa in an attempt to persuade the people to respect the decisions of the Roman senate (Plutarch, Coriolanus 6.3-4). Another version of the fable can be found in Livy 2.32.9-11. Shakespeare also provides one in his Coriolanus, I.1.93-151.

p. 218 n.21a “The flourishing of the united will of the body of Christ was predicated on the withering of plural voices, desires, and perspectives.” We can see this later in the letter when Paul seeks to retrict the languages used in worship services. Though his intentions might be practical, we might see this as a form of ethnic and linguistic alienation that operates, like natal alienation, to control and erase. On language and ethnicity in 1 Corinthians, see Ekaputra Tupamahu, Contesting Languages: Heteroglossia and the Politics of Language in the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). For the emphasis on obedience, see 1 Cor 7:15, 9:13; Rom 6:16–18; Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery, 18.

p.218–19 n.21b “This is the logic that runs throughout the Pauline corpus; it is made more powerful by the fact that it does not name itself.” I am influenced by de Wet’s use of the term “doulology” to refer to the process by which “slavery and mastery operate together as a concept ‘to think/communicate with’” about a whole range of theological concepts. See Chris L. de Wet, The Unbound God: Slavery and the Formation of Early Christian Thought (New York: Routledge, 2018), 8. It is important to acknowledge, as de Wet does, the influence of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s concept of “kyriarchy” here. Schüssler Fiorenza uses this language to refer to what she calls the “complex pyramidal political structure of dominance and subordination, stratified by gender, race, class, religious and culture taxonomies and other historical formations of domination,” in Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 115. See also Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1994).

p.219 n.22 Amy Richlin, “Cicero’s Head,” in Constructions of the Classical Body, ed. James I. Porter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 190–211 [194]. Logic of Slavery: Chris L. de Wet, The Unbound God: Slavery and the Formation of Early Christian Thought (New York: Routledge, 2018), 8. See Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40 [22], who draws on Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26.4 (2000): 821–65. 

p.219 n.23 Blandina: It is important to note that she only works as a Christian exemplar because of her obedience and the fact that her will aligns so precisely with that of God. Compare Benjamin Palmer’s statement that enslaved people should pray only for “what is agreeable to the will of God,” in A Plain and Easy Catechism, 32. Mitzi Smith notes, “While the slave is to take her desires to God, those desires must align with God’s will as taught to her in the catechism,” in “U.S. Colonial Missions to African Slaves,” 83. It is not accidental that, in narratives of loyal enslaved people, the will of “good slaves” is recognized only in and after self-sacrificial deaths. These stories repeat the fiction of “happy slaves” who obey, place themselves in harm’s way, and are warmly remembered by others. See Richard Hofstadter, “U. B. Phillips and the Plantation Legend,” Journal of Negro History 29.2 (1944): 109–124. 

p.219 n.24 Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, ed. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul Olscamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 333. The appeal to destruction and disorder here manifests a “state of exception” in which order must be enforced by any means necessary. This state of exception structures sovereignty. See Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 4, 38.

p.220 n.24a “Most people did not have an understanding of what it meant to be a Christ follower that drew upon all of Paul’s letters or an idea of discipleship that was assembled from multiple Gospels so we will not attempt anything similar.” We do not know the precise circumstances under which people encountered the texts we now call the New Testament, but we do know that they were dissimilar from our own. It is impossible to talk about even a loosely held canon of texts until the fourth century; we must assume that people heard writings attributed to Paul or to another apostle read aloud and in a fragmentary form. 

p.221 n.25 The language of the “slave market” and the importance of sale in 1 Corinthians come from Laura Salah Nasrallah, Archaeology and the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 40–75. See also Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics, 339n8: “After all, a slave is not expected as a slave, to care for himself too, but precisely for his master.”

p.221 n.26 On the incomplete manumission of slaves to deities and the qualified ‘freedom’ it provided, see Theophrastus, Economics 1344b15–22; Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 118; de Wet, Preaching Bondage, 21. For sale to the god Apollo: SGDI II 1735 (170–156 B.C.E.), lines 1–8, with discussions in E. Leigh Gibson, The Jewish Manumission Inscriptions of the Bosporus Kingdom (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 40. For the modified sale of the paramone inscriptions from Delphi whereby a person continued to work for their former enslaver, see SGDI II 2066 (188/7 B.C.E.), lines 6–16. For Leukoptra: IL 16 (184/5 C.E.). For the Bosphoran Kingdom, see CIRB 1123 (41 C.E.), CIRB 70, 71, 73; SEG 43.510. For workers in synagogues in Pantikapaion, Phanagoria, and Gorgippia, see CIRB 70, 71, 73; SEG 43.510 with discussion in Gibson, The Jewish Manumission Inscriptions, 126–27, 144–50,160–62, 172. On Gods as theo-economic agents, see Jennifer A. Quigley, Divine Accounting: Theo-Economics in Early Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). Chance Bonar discusses this kind of enslavement in his forthcoming work; I am grateful for conversations with him on this. For a recent example of the view that enslavement to deities was fictitious, see John Byron, Slavery Metaphors in Early Judaism and Pauline Christianity: A Traditio-Historical and Exegetical Examination (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 1–16. For the role of enslaved workers in temple cults in Ephesus, see Shaner, Enslaved Leadership. 

p.221 n.26a “Ancient papyri and inscriptions reveal that enslaved workers were sometimes jointly “owned” by multiple members of the same community.” See, for example, Poplius Granius and Lucius Arellius, two enslaved workers, mentioned in a list of magistrates from Delos ca. 125 B.C.E. (CIL 3.14203), who were co-held by two (different) sets of brothers. I am grateful to John Kloppenborg for this reference. An enslaved woman called Elpis from Tebtunis was divided into quarters: according to a census, one half of her ‘belonged’ to Sarapammon, with the remaining part being divided between Kroniaine and Taorsis (P. Fam. Tebt. 48). See also the work of Katherine Burgett, who, in a talk in 2020, argued that Plautus provides evidence of negotiating these familial dynamics even without legal co-ownership: Katherine Burgett, “Choosing the Right Master: Negotiating Liminal Ownership in Plautus and Romans 6,” Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, 2020. Compare also Matt. 6:24: “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

p.222 n.27 MacLean, Freed Slaves, 162. Contrast here John 8:36. Inscription for a sixteen-year-old: ILS 7479, discussed in Jane Gardner, “Slavery and Roman Law,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 1, ed. Bradley and Cartledge, 414-437 [420], and Nasrallah, Archaeology, 44n14. On the adoption of freedpersons, see Jane F. Gardner, “The Adoption of Roman Freedmen,” Phoenix 43.3 (1989): 236–57; Hugh Lindsey, Adoption in the Roman World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Gardner, Family and Familia in Roman Law and Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 179-90. Vineyard parable in the Shepherd of Hermas: Herm. Man.5

     On sonship and inheritance in Paul see Caroline Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); John Goodrich, “Guardians, not Taskmasters: The Cultural Resonances of Paul’s Metaphor in Galatians 4.1­–2,” JSNT 32 (2010): 251­–284; John Goodrich, “As Long As the Heir is a Child: The Rhetoric of Inheritance in Galatians 4.1–2 and P.Ryl. 2.153,” NovT 55 (2013): 61­–76; and Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

p.222 n.28 Terence, The Brothers, 455-6, trans. Mouritsen, Freedman, 37. Mouritsen notes that a similar connection is made for comedic purposes in Plautus, The Rope, 1265-6. Cicero, For Rabirius 15: “servi, si libertatis spem propositam non haberent, ferre nullo modo possent,” trans. Mouritsen, Freedman, 144; Ulrike Roth, “Men Without Hope,” Papers of the British School at Rome 79 (2011): 71–94. On manumission in early Christianity, see Harrill, Manumission.

p.223 n.29 The theological conversation about faith is nuanced and vast. I cannot possibly hope to do justice to it here. On pistis, see Teresa Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). On pistis in Paul, see Jennifer Eyl, Signs, Wonders, and Gifts: Divination in the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 170–212, and Eyl, “Soldiers, Slaves, Sons, and Brides: Expectations of Fidelity in Paul’s Letters,” Paper Presented in the Redescribing Christian Origins Working Group, Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, 2021. On the question of whose faith saves human beings, see David J. Downs, The Faithfulness of the Risen Christ: Pistis and the Exalted Lord in the Pauline Letters (Waco, TX: Baylor University, 2019), and Karl Friedrich Ulrichs, Christusglaube: Studien zum Syntagma pistis Christou und zum paulinischen Verständnis von Glaube und Rechtfertigung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007).

p.223 n.29a “It was a facet of many relationships but, as an attribute, it appeared more regularly in literary portrayals of “good slaves” and freedpeople than any other virtue except deference.” See Kelly L. Wrenhaven, Reconstructing the Slave: The Image of the Slave in Ancient Greece (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Paul echoed the same sentiment when he identified himself as a servile overseer and wrote that it is “required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.” 1 Cor 4:1–2. For Paul as “overseer,” see 1 Cor 9:17. His language is tricky, but it is suggestive that he hints that while he finds satisfaction in the task imposed upon him, he may have been somewhat unwilling to receive it. So, Teresa Morgan, The New Testament and the Theology of Trust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 282–323. I am grateful to Morgan for sharing prepublication work with me. 

    On “good slaves” and “bad slaves,” see G. Fabre, Libertus: Recherches sur les rapports patron-affranchi à la fin de la république romaine (Rome: École française de Rome, 1981); Joshel, “Slavery and Roman Literary Culture”; MacLean, Freed Slaves, 37–38; Annalisa Rei, “Villains, Wives, and Slaves in the Comedies of Plautus,” in Joshel and Murnaghan, Women and Slaves, 92–108; Kathleen McCarthy, Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); C. W. Marshall, The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 194; Roberta Stewart, Plautus and Roman Slavery (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); J. Albert Harrill, “The Dramatic Function of the Running Slave Rhoda (Acts 12.13–16): A Piece of Greco-Roman Comedy,” NTS 46.1 (2000): 150–57; Cobb, Slavery, 28, 125-27.

p.224 n.29b “it often sounds like the loyalty expected of enslaved people…” This is striking precisely because Christianity, following a particular line of Protestant interpretation, has so effectively reified the notion of faith. Today, many people see faith as an exclusively cognitive process: we have faith, we believe. The most influential instantiation of this definition is that of Martin Luther, whose notion of justification by faith alone is a sturdy foundation stone in the many declensions of Protestantism generated by his writings. The whispered alternative to salvation by faith alone is salvation through works or actions. In simplistic caricatures of Protestant and Catholic theology, this binary is the distinction between the faith-focused descendants of Luther and the works-righteousness children of St. Peter. Our understanding of what faith is has been shaped both by fierce post-Reformation intra-Christian debates about salvation and by the ubiquitous way in which faith has become a synonym for religion and religiosity. In predominantly Christian countries, ‘faith’ is now the default intellectual and affective state in which people ‘do religion.’

p.224 n.30 On reciprocity: Teresa Morgan, Roman Faith, 4: “Pistis is a relational concept whose meaning is always defined in part by the relationship in which it operates: the faithfulness of a slave towards her master is not the same as that of a client towards his patron or that of a believer towards Christ.” On wives, sons: Eyl, “Soldiers, Slaves, Sons, and Brides.”

p.224 n.31 On Pistis/Fides and freedmen: Mouritsen, Freedman, 61. For Cicero on Tiro, see Fam. 16.16.2; Att. 9.17.2. It is significant that Tiro’s work was literary. As Talitha Kearey has argued, it is during this period that the “slavish” quality of “faithfulness” came to be applied to texts. See Kearey, “Editing,” in Coogan, Moss, and Howley, Writing,Enslavement, and Power, forthcoming. Epictetus, Disc. 2.22 (26-20).

p.225 n.32 On the economics of divine gifts and the obligations of repayment, see Quigley, Divine Accounting, and Devin Singh, Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). On freedom as a gift that demanded gratitude, see Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 209–247. For the importance of context to readings of Paul, see Concannon, Profaning Paul, and Concannon, “Paul Is Dead. Long Live Paulinism! Imagining a Future for Pauline Studies,” Ancient Jew Review (November 1, 2016).

     On gratitude to the enslaver: Funerary inscriptions of freedpersons indicate that it was through continued obedience and other servile virtues like industry, honesty, and loyalty that manumitted people secured an afterlife of commemoration (CIL 5.5930; 6.10021, 26926, 33903; 9.4796; 10.4915; AE 1968, 74, AE 1968, 164, AE 1987, 196). So, too, argues MacLean with respect to Romans 6: “Working in a Judeo-Christian idiom, Paul identifies submission as a step toward glory; here, liberation from sin and willing enslavement to God hold the promise of immortality through salvation… To those who seek glory, honor, and immortality through endurance in doing good, he will give eternal life. But for those who are ambitious, disobey the truth, and obey evil, there will be wrath and anger,” in Freed Slaves, 67–68. Christian epigraphy, even more than that of contemporaries, stressed the importance of fidelis. See Maureen Carroll, Spirits of the Dead: Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 268, and Hanne Sigismund Nielsen, “The Value of Epithets in Pagan and Christian Epitaphs from Rome,” in Childhood, Class and Kin in the Roman World, ed. Suzanne Dixon (New York: Routledge, 2001), 166–177. On enslaved people in funerary art, see Cobb, Slavery, 19-24.

p.225 n.33 For imperial and senatorial efforts to re-enslave “ungrateful freedmen,” see Suetonius, Claudius 25.1; Dio Cassius, Hist. 60.28.1 and 68.13. It does not seem to have been the case that the re-enslavement was prescribed until Constantine, but the fact that it was discussed is evidence of what Manning calls an “almost obsessive concern” about the obligations of freedpersons to their patrons. See C. E. Manning, “‘Actio ingrati’ (Seneca, De Benef. 3, 6-17: a contribution to contemporary debate?),” Studia et Documenta Historiae et Iuris 52 (1986): 61-72 [69], and discussion in Mouritsen, Freedman, 55-118.  

Acte inscription: CIL 6.20905. There are two inscriptions on the altar: the first a more straightforward epitaph to the child (from which the child’s name has been scratched out) and the second on the back of the altar. My source for this analysis is Javal Coleman and Dan-el Padilla Peralta, “Rhetoric,” in Coogan, Moss, and Howley, Writing,Enslavement, and Power, forthcoming. The statement about how there was nothing Acte could do to erase the debt she owed her former enslaver turned husband was made verbally by Padilla Peralta in the workshop that preceded the publication of the volume. Compare Katherine P. D. Huemoller, “Freedom in Marriage? Manumission for Marriage in the Roman World,” JRS 110 (2020): 123-39. Seneca, Ben. 3.

    “The unrepayable gift was a yawning chasm of obligation: If it did not necessitate repayment, that was only because there was no way to repay it.” 2 Cor. 9:15: “Thanks be to God for this unreckonable gift.” I thus agree, in a modified way, with John M.G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015). Barclay is not interested in freedpersons, explicitly choosing “to leave [them] to one side,” 36n94. Articulating this in the terms of enslavement seems, to me, preferable to translating the language and logic of slavery into theologically familiar categories like “the message of God’s grace in Christ” or “a massive unremitting sense of answerability to one’s Maker.” Certainly, it can explain some of the “paradoxes” in Paul’s writing. For these terms, see Stephen Westerholm, “The ‘New Perspective’ at Twenty-Five,” in Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 2: The Paradoxes of Paul, ed. D. A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 1–38. This is not to say that these more theologically productive readings are less important, but rather that for those, like myself, interested in the political work done by readings of ancient texts, they obscure certain dynamics. On Paul and his political afterlives, see Concannon, Profaning Paul; Matthew V. Novenson, Paul, Then and Now (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), 1–12.

p.226 n.33a “Pistis was always reciprocal, but as in all hierarchies, these duties and obligations weighed more heavily on the side of the enslaved.” On the social status of Paul’s addressees and of first- and early second-century Christians in general, see Chapter One. I should add that, regardless of their social status, everyone was aware of the social hierarchies and expectations that governed the relationship between enslaver and enslaved. On reciprocity and action, see Morgan, The New Testament and the Theology of Trust. Even though God, unlike other masterly figures, had the ability to know the hearts and minds of his formerly enslaved, this did not augment the character of the relationship. On the contrary, this made it impossible to feign gratitude. Roman elites could only fantasize about the capacity to know the minds of those they dominated. 

p.226 n.33b “Discipleship began with familial alienation and financial precarity” Everyone in the Roman empire, even the confidantes of emperors, agreed that wealth was corrupting, but their solution was to avoid protracted tasting menus and conspicuous displays of consumption. Rendering oneself destitute was another matter entirely. Subsistence workers were only a bout of illness or dry spell away from starvation. For even the slightly well-off, this instruction was difficult to accept.

p.227 n.33c “Bills of sale from ancient Egypt dispassionately relate the trade in enslaved “homebred” children who learned the hard way that they had no home.” Children were often apprenticed in the households of business contacts in order to learn a trade, or were moved abroad through alien markets and foreign ports. Almost 100,000 Judeans, including followers of Jesus, were trafficked in the aftermath of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. As discussed in Chapter One, enslaved Judeans were swallowed both by the engine of slavery and by a historiographical tradition that does not acknowledge them as Jesus followers, much less as missionaries.

p.227 n.33d “or any others first met their “mistresses” or “masters” in the flesh” is borrowed from Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.18. On alienation from family and enslavement, see Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 13. On separation from family, see Bradley, Slaves and Masters, 48-53. On kinlessness as a constitutive part of slavery, see Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, 77. 

     Paradoxically, in this respect, enslavement, as a mirror for discipleship, reflected the ways in which enslaved people were, by virtue of their position, better Stoic philosophers than elites. They were not free to indulge bodily appetites like sex, food, and alcohol, and were forced to control their emotions. That enslavers were aware of this may only have added to the cruelty they meted out; see Moss, “Chronometric Violence.”

p.228 n.34 On God as father, see Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 147ff. On dying daily: 1 Cor 15:31; Mbembe, “Necropolitics.”

p.228 n.34a “the Gospel of Matthew strengthens the connection between discipleship and slavery by likening Jesus’ disciples to enslaved workers and Jesus himself to an enslaver” See the similar analogies in Mark 10:43-45; Luke 12:37-38; 17:7-10; John 13:14-16; 15:20. In a recent paper, Shaner sees this idea at work in the healing of the centurion’s enslaved attendant in Luke (Katherine Shaner, “Enslavement in Early Christianity,” New England/Eastern Canada Regional Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, March 19, 2022).

p.228 n.35 For the view that Matthew presents followers of Jesus as “volunteer slaves,” see Edmund Neufeld, “Vulnerable Bodies and Volunteer Slaves: Slave Parable Violence in the Rest of Matthew,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 30.1 (2020): 41–63. For this view with respect to Luke, see Kyoung-Jin Kim, Stewardship and Almsgiving in Luke’s Theology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998), 128.

p.229 n.36 Valerius Maximus, Memorable Works and Deeds 6.8. Valerius notes that the fides of enslaved people is particularly commendable because it is “less expected” (minus expectatem, 6.8.pr.). One of his most striking examples involves Restio, an enslaved worker who was brutally shackled and branded by his enslaver but who later risked his life—and rescued his enslaver—by pretending that the enslaver was already dead and burning on a funeral pyre (6.8.7, also narrated in Appian, Civil War 4.43; Dio Cassius, Hist. 47.10.4–5). See discussion in Rebecca Langlands, “Roman Exempla and Situation Ethics: Valerius Maximus and Cicero de Officiis,” JRS 101 (2011): 100–122; Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 117. Other examples of tales of “loyal slaves” include Seneca, Ep. 47.4, 11-15, 18; Ben. 3.25.1; Macrobius 1.11.16; Tacitus, Annals 4.29. 

    “Enslavers, thus, deluded themselves” Joshel and Murnaghan, Women and Slaves, 14–15. On Blandina: Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.1.17. 

p.229 n.37 Ign. Rom. 4.3, modified from Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 1.275. Some see the language of the absence of desire as a reference to the things of this world. This reading is confirmed by additions in several manuscripts (See Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 1.275n69). My reading follows Hans-Werner Bartsch, Gnostisches Gut und Gemeindetradition bei Ignatius von Antiochien (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1940), 94–96. 

p.230 n.38 Angela N. Parker, “One Womanist’s View of Racial Reconciliation in Galatians,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 34.2 (2018): 23–40 [37]. See also Glancy, “Slavery and the Rise of Christianity,” 464–480, and Col. 4:1; Eph. 6:1; Kartzow, The Slave Metaphor, 101: “The metaphor of God as a slave owner was not necessarily a liberating one for those who heard these texts. To be a ‘slave of the Lord’ may of course have worked as a comfort for real slaves, since this relationship may have trumped the relationship between slave and owner. Or it may have simply added to the pain and suffering, and given a double burden of slavery. Or the metaphor may have blended into the slave reality in very complex ways, making it hard to grasp what was real slavery and what was metaphorical slavery.”

p.230 n.39 Enslaved workers could not enter into marriage contracts or deny their enslavers sexual access to their bodies. Even some freedpersons found themselves compelled to acquiesce to the coercive sexual demands of their former enslavers. It is unclear whether Christian enslavers viewed sexual relations with their enslaved domestic workers as fornication, or if they saw them as a licit sexual outlet. As mere “bodies,” enslaved workers might not have “counted,” or might have been viewed as what Paul calls “vessels” for their sexual desires. See Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 71–101. Roughly two hundred years later, the Apostolic Tradition suggested that enslaved concubines could participate in the Christian community if they remained “faithful” to their enslavers and raised their children. An accommodation for enslaved women that presupposed that they submit themselves to rape and sacrifice any form of meaningful romantic relationship of their own is deeply horrifying. See Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 50. Joe Marchal explores the possibility that Paul himself may have sexually exploited Onesimus; see Joseph A. Marchal, “The Usefulness of an Onesimus: The Sexual Use of Slaves and Paul’s Letter to Philemon,” JBL 130.4 (2011): 749–70. Roth argues that Paul was, together with Philemon, an enslaver of Onesimus; see Ulrike Roth, “Paul, Philemon, Onesimus: A Christian Design for Mastery,” ZNW 105 (2014): 102–130.

     The Pauline texts that feature in academic conversation about this question are 1 Cor. 5:1–13 (instructions against sexual immorality); 1 Cor 7 (instructions about marriage and social status); 1 Thess 4:3–8 (where Paul instructs people to “obtain [their] own vessel”). On these, see S. Scott Bartchy, First-Century Slavery and the Interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7:21 (Missoula, MT: Society of Biblical Literature for the Seminar on Paul, University of Montana, 1973);J. Albert Harrill, “Revisiting the Problem of 1 Corinthians 7:21,” Biblical Research 65 (2020): 77–94; Briggs, “Can an Enslaved God Liberate?”; Tyler M. Schwaller, “‘A Slave to All’: The Queerness of Paul’s Slave Form,” in Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles, ed. Joseph A. Marchal (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2019), 165–90.

     Later generations of interpreters also struck on the ways in which the practice of slavery forestalled the possibility of full participation in the Christian community. A petition addressed to the governor, council, and representatives of Massachusetts in 1774 argued that slavery “rendered [enslaved people] incapable of shewing our obedience to Almighty God” because it prevented enslaved people from following the commandments and being good family members. The petition, which draws extensively on Paul, highlights the incompatibility of the Christian life and enslavement. “Founders’ Constitution, Slave Petition,” 3:432–33, cited in Lisa M. Bowens, African American Readings of Paul: Reception, Resistance, and Transformation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020), 30. The petition is also discussed in Allen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 34–35.

p.232 n.40 

    For the influence of the household codes in later interpretation: Clarice J. Martin, “The Haustafeln (Household Codes) in African American Biblical Interpretation: ‘Free Slaves’ and ‘Subordinate Women,’” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 206–31; Shively T. J. Smith, Strangers to Family: Diaspora and 1 Peter’s Invention of God’s Household (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 17–43. For liberative reinterpretations of Paul in the context of antebellum slavery, see Allen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Brian K. Blount, Then the Whisper Put on Flesh: New Testament Ethics in an African American Context (Nashville: Abingdon, 2001); Emerson B. Powery and Rodney S. Sadler, Jr., The Genesis of Liberation: Biblical Interpretation in the Antebellum Narratives of the Enslaved (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2016). On Paul and enslavers: Clarice J. Martin, “‘Somebody Done Hoodoo’d the Hoodoo Man’: Language, Power, Resistance, and the Effective History of Pauline Texts in American Slavery,” Semeia 83/84 (1998): 203–33; Vincent Wimbush, “The Bible and African Americans: An Outline of an Interpretative History,” in Felder, Stony the Road We Trod, 89–93; Harrill, Slaves in the New Testament: Literary, Social, and Moral dimensions (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 165–92. For a recent overview that includes examples of subversive readings, see Lisa M. Bowens, African American Readings of Paul: Reception, Resistance, and Transformation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020). 

     For the reception of enslaved obedience, see the 1854 Catechism for Slaves: “Q. Who gave you a master and a mistress? A. God gave them to me. Q. Who says that you must obey them? A. God says that I must.” Cited and discussed in Mitzi J. Smith, “U.S. Colonial Missions to African Slaves: Catechizing Black Souls, Traumatizing the Black Psychē,” in Teaching All Nations: Interrogating the Matthean Great Commission, ed. Mitzi J. Smith and Jayachitra Lalitha (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 57–85 [71]. 

p.233 n.41 Quotation from Benjamin M. Palmer, A Plain and Easy Catechism, Designed Chiefly for the Benefit of Coloured Persons, to Which are Annexed Suitable Prayers and Hymns (Charleston, SC: Observer Office Press, 1828), 32. Cited in Tammy K. Byron, “‛A Catechism for Their Special Use’: Slave Catechisms in the Antebellum South” (unpublished PhD diss., University of Arkansas, 2008), 110–11. I was led to Byron by Smith, “U.S. Colonial Missions to African Slaves,” 83. See also Dave Gosse, “Examining the Promulgation and Impact of the Great Commission in the Caribbean, 1942–1970: A Historical Analysis,” in Smith and Lalitha, Teaching All Nations, 33–56, and Beatrice Okyere-Manu, “Colonial Mission and the Great Commission in Africa,” in Teaching All Nations: Interrogating the Matthean Great Commission, ed. Mitzi Smith and Jayachitra Lalitha (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 15–32.

p.233 n.42 The importance of remembering and not forgetting is emphasized by womanist scholar and Roman Catholic theologian M. Shawn Copeland in her classic book, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2018); Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 64–81 [68]. The use of this quote in this context was inspired by Bonar, “Enslaved to God.”

p.234 n.43 Mark 14: 3–9; Matthew 26: 6–13. Compare Luke 7: 36–50 and a parallel story in John 12: 1–8, in which the woman who anoints Jesus is Mary, the sister of Lazarus.

p.235 n.44 This line of argument is inspired by Angela N. Parker, If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I?: Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021). For African American women involved in the interpretation of scripture, see Shively T. J. Smith, “Witnessing Jesus Hang: A Womanist Reading of Mary Magdalene’s View of Crucifixion through Ida B. Wells’ Chronicles of Lynching,” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, 30th Anniversary Expanded Edition, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2021). Key figures in this interpretive project include Gay Byron, Renita Weems, Vanessa Lovelace, Vincent Wimbush, Mitzi Smith, Fernando Segovia, Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, and many others. For a fuller list of scholars involved in this project and additional resources for locating their work, see the online notes. 

p.235 n.45 Translation of 2 Pet 2:1 is from Shively Smith, Interpreting 2 Peter, 133. Quotation from Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 200.

p.236 n.1 My reading of Euclia draws heavily on the work of Charles, Silencing Slaves, 194–200, and Christy Cobb, “Hidden Truth in the Body of Euclia: Page duBois’ Torture and Truth and Acts of Andrew,” Biblical Interpretation 25.1 (2017): 19–38. My discussions of body parts, wholes, and willfulness are shaped by Ahmed, Willful Subjects. The story of Euclia appears in the final part of the Acts of Andrew, also known as the Passion of Andrew. Translations are adapted from Dennis Ronald MacDonald, The Acts of Andrew (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2005), 12–13. References to the Greek text follow the edition of Jean-Marc Prieur, ed., Acta Andreae (Turnhout: Brepols, 1989). Those interested in further information about manuscripts and interpretation of the story should consult the eClavis database entry: https://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christian-apocrypha/acts-of-andrew/ and Jan N. Bremmer, ed., The Apocryphal Acts of Andrew (Studies in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles 5; Leuven: Peeters, 2000).

p.236 n.1a “Increasingly, he seemed to her to be a brutish man” Following the assessment of Anna Rebecca Solevåg, Birthing Salvation: Gender and Class in Early Christian Childbearing Discourse (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 137–197.

p.236 n.1b “She was now a bride of Christ” The term “bride of Christ,” which evolved in Christian tradition to become a synonym for the church, was used from the third and fourth centuries onwards to refer to women (e.g., Thecla and Melania) who chose ascetic lives and thus had a privileged means of acces to God. On female ascetics in general, see, for example, Athanasius of Alexandria, Second Letter to Virgins, 21. I take some liberties in using it with respect to such an early text.

p.237 n.2 “Euclia was young, shapely, and insubordinate” The Greek description of Euclia is interesting. The language translated by MacDonald as “wanton” is phusin atakton; this does have connotations of sensuality, but it also evokes notions of being disordered, out of step, and out of one’s proper place. In some contexts, it means something like “lazy,” but it can also, as an affective state, mean something like “impulsive” or “undisciplined.” Cobb translates it as “sensual by nature,” in “Euclia’s Story,” 43. I have translated it as “insubordinate” to match the interpretation of Euclia as bragging later in the account and due to my interest in her willfulness and refusal to be property. Both Ahmed and Hartman discuss the paradox of the enslaved sexually exploited worker who must be both “will less and always willing” (Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 81–84). My reading here follows Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 22n68: “the danger for a slave is not sexual contamination but the possibility that she will forget her proper place, a conclusion that is hardly a protest against upper-class ethics.”

     “Erotic body double” Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 22, 155. On Euclia’s lack of choice, compare Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 55; Charles, Silencing Slaves, 197; Cobb, “Euclia’s Story,” 42. On the problem of sexual consent in ancient contexts involving enslaved women and women in general, see Rhiannon Graybill, Texts After Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), and the work of the Shiloh Project (https://www.shilohproject.blog). Roman comedy often portrays women and enslaved people as prone to the servile vices of greed and lust. Female sex workers in particular were portrayed as being paid in or demanding jewelry (Plautus, The Twin Brothers, 541-3; The Churl, 272). See discussion in Amy Richlin, Slave Theater in the Roman Republic: Plautus in Popular Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 117, 288.

p.237 n.2a “She may have been pregnant, or perhaps she sensed an opportunity, but in any case she decided to exert what power she had.” On Euclia’s potential pregnancy, see Cobb, “Hidden Truth,” 28-29; Saundra Schwartz, “From Bedroom to Courtroom: The Adultery Type-Scene and the Acts of Andrew,” in Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses, ed. Todd C. Penner and Caroline Vander Stichele (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 267–311 [305]; Solevåg, Birthing Salvation, 191. 

p.237 n.2b Yet like so many freedwomen—if in fact Maximilla legally freed her—Euclia did not leave” It is unclear whether Maximilla had the right to free Euclia or what kind of process was undertaken; it seems to have been, at best, informal. The mistreatment of Euclia suggests that she was not manumitted, but her disobedience and ingratitude may have inspired ad hoc re-enslavement. On conversations about re-enslavement and ingratitude, see Chapter Seven. On the processes of manumission, see Henrik Mouritsen, The Freedman in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 10–35.

p.237 n.2c “who resented her bragging, saw her as a brazen and greedy sex worker” According to the agrarian writer Columella, treating different kinds of enslaved workers in different ways was an effective means of social control because it inspired enslaved workers to compete with one another for resources and to resent those who were better treated. See Columella, On Agriculture 1.9.6-9 and Bryson §73. Perhaps this is why she was betrayed by her coworkers. We might read Euclia’s “boasting” and interest in ribbons and jewelry as a form of resistance. On forms of dress and especially elevated dress as a form of willful resistance to oppressive power, see Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 88–90. 

p.238 n.2d “Maybe Maximilla mumbled something about Euclia’s wantonness, or perhaps she saw this as an opportunity to silence her increasingly difficult worker” The story wants us to read Maximilla as a paradigm of virtue. I do not mean to imply that Maximilla’s life was easy—only that whatever injustice she experienced, she was willing to force onto Euclia. The history of the complicity of women in the domination and violation of enslaved women is long. It begins in the Bible with Sarah and Hagar, and continues into Atlantic Slavery. On the latter, see Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). On Maximilla, see Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Caroline T. Schroeder, “Embracing the Erotic in the Passion of Andrew: The Apocryphal Acts of Andrew, the Greek Novel, and Platonic Philosophy,” in The Apocryphal Acts of Andrew, ed. Jan N. Bremmer (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 110–26; Schwartz, “From Bedroom to Courtroom”; Charles, Silencing Slaves, 194–200.

p.238 n.3 Amputation was a necessary form of surgery in antiquity. War, workplace accidents, and infections meant that amputation was often a treatment of last resort. The risk of bleeding out was real and so, to increase the patient’s chances of survival, surgeons would use ligatures. See my Divine Bodies, 45-52. Wealthy Roman households were often staffed by doctors (themselves often enslaved) who were part of the paterfamilias’s entourage. Given Aegeates’ social station, perhaps we should assume that he had one on staff. I am grateful to Claire Bubb, a historian of medicine, for discussing the probability of ligature use in a case like Euclia’s.

     For evidence of a professional enslaved torturer in Puteoli, see AE 1971, 88, and discussion in Bond, Trade and Taboo, 238n43. See also Petronius, Sat. 49, and discussion in Glancy, “Slaves and Slavery in the Matthean Parables,” 67. My description of this experience draws on the first-person account of Muhammed Sulaiman, an Iraqi man who was victimized in this manner. In the previous chapter, we have already noted the ways in which early Christians were understood to be parts of the body of Christ. It is worth noting here the ways in which the portioning of human beings has been racialized in subsequent iterations of enslavement. As M. Shawn Copeland notes, the “black woman’s body has been reduced to body parts—parts that allowed white men pleasure, however unsettling; parts that afforded white men economic gain; parts that literally nursed the heirs of white racist supremacy,” in M. Shawn Copeland, “Body, Representation, and Black Religious Discourse,” in Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader, ed. Katie Geneva Cannon, Emilie M. Townes, and Angela D. Sims (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 98–112. 

     Mindful of Hartman’s work, I worry that my description here, which draws out the violence of the scene, is prurient. I aim to avoid both the rhetorical pull of the text and an unpleasant academic habit of rendering the violence of Christian stories “abstract,” and an acceptable part of the Christian “moral universe.” On this tendency, see Anders Martinsen, “God as the Great Parasite? Ideology and Ethics in Interpretations of the Parables,” JECH 1.2 (2011): 135–51. On prurience in early Christian literature, see David Frankfurter, “Martyrology and the Prurient Gaze,” JECS 17.2 (2009): 215–45, and Elizabeth Castelli, “Visions and Voyeurism: Holy Women and the Politics of Sight in Early Christianity,” Protocol of the Colloquy of the Center for Hermeneutical Studies n.s. 2; Berkeley, CA: Center for Hermeneutical Studies, 1995), 1–20.

p.239 n.4 “Having introduced Euclia as a narrative device…” In other contexts disabled people are used in this way. On disabled bodies as narrative devices, see David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 

     “Deserving of “punishment,” rather than as a victim of abuse.” As scholars of Atlantic slavery note, using the language of punishment is deeply problematic because it legitimizes the despotic violence used to coerce and control enslaved people. For a pithy summary, see Diana Paton, “Afterword: Punishment, Slavery and Legitimacy,” Journal of Global Slavery 7.1-2 (2022): 203–209, which draws upon Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020). 

“willfulness” In the prefatory material that opens In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), Alice Walker defines a “womanist” as a “black feminist or feminist of color…Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, or willful behavior,” xi.

p.239 n.5 “One unnamed man who provided unexpected evidence” this case is discussed in CJ 6.1.3. Cicero refers to a favored enslaved worker named Strato who was crucified after having his tongue removed at the orders of his enslaver, who worried that his dying words might convict her (For Aulus Cluentius 187). On torture and enslaved workers, see Page duBois, Torture and Truth (New York: Routledge, 1991). “During other periods of history”: On the amputation and the severing of the Achilles tendon of runaways in other periods, see Jenifer L. Barclay, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021), 70, 111. Barclay notes that amputation was sometimes used to enforce antiliteracy laws in the antebellum South (78–79).

     On the torture of enslaved people in Athenian law, see David C. Mirhady, “The Athenian Rationale for Torture,” in Law and Social Status in Classical Athens, ed. Virginia Hunter and Jonathan Edmondson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 53–74; Michael Gagarin, “The Torture of Slaves in Athenian Law,” Classical Philology 91.1 (1996): 1–18; in the Principate, see P. A. Brunt, “Evidence Given under Torture in the Principate,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiflung für Rechtsgeschichte 97 (1980): 256–65; Jane F. Gardner, “Slavery and Roman Law,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. 1: The Ancient Mediterranean World, 431; Bradley, Slavery and Society, 165–70. On torture and early Christianity, see Virginia Burrus, “Torture, Truth, and the Witnessing Body: Reading Christian Martyrdom with Page duBois,” BibInt 25 (2017): 5–18; L. Stephanie Cobb, Divine Deliverance. 

p.241 n.6 On Thomas and the Cupbearer, see discussion in Chapter Four. On the postmortem exposure of low-status bodies, see Julia Hillner, Prison, Punishment, and Penance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

p.241 n.7 This section on hell is greatly influenced by the work of and conversations with Meghan Henning, Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021); see also Larsen and Letteney, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration. In the Matthew passage, the Greek dichotomesei (v.51) can be translated either as “cut in pieces” or “cut off.” Both punishments are violently forced upon Euclia. On the Matthean parables and hell, see Meghan R. Henning, Educating Early Christians through the Rhetoric of Hell: “Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth” as Paideia in Matthew and the Early Church (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), and Hatter, “Slavery, the Enslaved, and the Gospel of Matthew.”

p.242 n.8 Some of these workers would have been intimately acquainted with their enslavers. Many were overseers charged with managerial tasks and financial affairs. Just as real enslaved workers were not protected from corporal punishment and violence by virtue of their status, so too the parabolic overseers are answerable with their bodies. For the idea that enslaved people were “answerable with their bodies,” see Demosthenes, Against Timocrates 167; Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 299–303; Bradley, Slaves and Masters, 137; Glancy, “Slaves and Slavery in the Matthean Parables,” 74. Enslaved people are explicitly identified in six Matthean parables: the weeds and wheat (13: 24–30), the “unmerciful slave” (18: 23–25), the wicked tenants (21: 33–41), the wedding banquet (22: 1–10), the unjust steward (24: 45–51), and the parable of the talents (25:14–30). I am convinced by Mitzi Smith that the young women in the parable of the ten virgins (25:1–13) are also enslaved (Mitzi Smith, “Slavery, Torture, Systemic Oppression, and Kingdom Rhetoric: An African American Reading of Matthew 25:1–13,” in Insights from African American Interpretation [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017], 87–91), and by Harrill that we should see the prodigal son in Luke as becoming an indentured laborer (see Luke 12:42–48; 15:15; cf. J. Albert Harrill, “The Indentured Labor of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:15),” JBL 115.4 (1996): 714–17).

     On the importance of enslaved people in the parables, see Munro, Jesus, Born of a Slave, 327; Mary Ann Beavis, “Ancient Slavery as an Interpretive Context for the New Testament Servant Parables with Special Reference to the Unjust Steward (Luke 16:1–8),” JBL 111.1 (1992): 37–54; Jennifer A. Glancy, “Slaves and Slavery in the Matthean Parables,” JBL 119.1 (2000): 67–90 [70–71]; Llewellyn Howes, “Agricultural Slavery and the Parable of the Loyal and Wise Slave in Q 12:42–46,” Acta Classica 58 (2015): 70–110. 

On the servus callidus (bad/tricky enslaved person), see Amy Richlin, Slave Theater in the Roman Republic: Plautus in Popular Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Ferdinand Stürner, “The Servus Callidus in Charge: Plays of Deception,” in A Companion to Plautus, ed. Dorota Dutsch and George Fredric Franko (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 135–49; Kathleen McCarthy, Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

p.242 n.8a “Given that the debt was the rough equivalent of 160,000 years’ worth of pay for a day laborer” This calculation comes from Daniel J. Harrington, Sacra Pagina: The Gospel of Matthew (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 270. There are questions to be asked about how the man even accumulated a debt of this size. For an elegant summary of the debate so far, see Hatter, “Slavery,” 168–172. One previously unconsidered possibility is whether he was being held liable for the losses of the Lord (kurios) for whom he had acted as an agent. The enormity of the sum may point us towards despotic injustice in commerce.

p.242 n.8b “In some sense, the anonymous enslaved people are the invisible power” At the same time, we should exercise caution; these stories encouraged enslaved workers to surveil their colleagues and betray them to the “master.” They also hint, in ways that echo despotic fictions, that freeborn enslavers are kinder and that enslaved workers should fear their coworkers and manumitted authority figures. Munro emphasizes that “it is always the slave characters and experiences with which the hearer/reader is to identify,” in Jesus, Born of a Slave, 355–66. This might be evidence of the kind of “moral economy” that Alex Lichtenstein detects in the rationalization of theft by captive women in the American South. Alex Lichtenstein, “‘That Disposition to Theft, with Which They Have Been Branded’: Moral Economy, Slave Management, and the Law,” Journal of Social History 21.3 (1988): 413–40. 

p.243 n.9 Sulfur: Gen. 19:24; Rev 9:17–18; 14:10. Flames of hell: Luke 16:24. Worms: Mark 9:48. For a discussion of early Christian tours of hell, see Meghan Henning, Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). On the torture of Roman slaves, see Bradley, Slavery and Society, 165–70; Gardner, “Slavery and Roman Law,” 431. On the fear of public exposure and execution, see Brent Shaw, “Judicial Nightmares and Christian Memory,” JECS 11.4 (2003): 533–63. On the relationship between judicial torture and hell, see István Czachesz, “Torture in Hell and Reality: The Visio Pauli,” in The Visio Pauli and the Gnostic Apocalypse of Paul, ed. Jan N. Bremmer and István Czachesz (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 130–43.

p.244 n.10 “shuffle of angelic bureaucrats” The notion of “angelic bureaucrats” takes its inspiration from Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 144–166. On Revelation, see Jeremiah Coogan, “Revelation’s Heavenly Tax Office: Roman Provincial Bureaucracy and the Textuality of John’s Apocalypse,” Papyri, Inscriptions, and the Contexts of Early Christianity Program Unit, Annual Meeting on Christian Origins, Centro Italiano di Studi Superiori sulle Religioni, Bertinoro, Italy, October 1, 2021. Parable of the Talents: Matt. 25:30. Outer darkness: Matt 8:12; 22:13; 25:14-30. On cisterns as carceral spaces, see examples in Letteney and Larsen, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration. 

     It is likely that the shackled Pompeian skeleton belonged to an enslaved worker; see H. Etani, S. Sakai, and V. Iorio, “L’indagine archeologica svolta dal Japan Institute of Paleological Studies di Kyoto tra il settembre del 2002 ed il febbraio del 2003,” Rivista di Studi Pompeiani 14 (2003): 312–14. Letteney and Larsen adduce similar examples in Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration. There are various ways to read the “gnashing teeth” of hell. In Roman medical thinking, they could represent fear, but they were also associated with cold; see Hillner, Prison, 242–78.

p.245 n.11 For a typology of prisons and their functions, see Letteney and Larsen, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration. On stocks: Archaeologically speaking, the evidence is limited. Stocks were likely attached to wooden platforms (which do not survive). The prison for condemned people in Cagliari has anchors in the walls for stocks. I am grateful to Mark Letteney for this reminder. 

     Food rations: According to P. Cair. Zen. 4.59707, prisoners were given about 1700 calories’ worth of wheat (probably in bread form) per day. As Mark Letteney, who supplied me with this reference, put it in conversation, “It’ll keep you alive, but just barely.” See Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.4.3. On Blandina, see discussion in the previous section. For other examples of ancient prisoners dying in custody, see discussion in Letteney and Larsen, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration. On the food rations supplied by local authorities and their agents, see Sallust, Histories 3, fr. 15.19;Seneca, Declamations 9.4.20; Seneca, Ep.18.10–11. For food supplied by friends and family, see O. Mon. Epiph. 177. See discussion in Letteney and Larsen, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration. 

     “The air was filled with the noise”: the noise of hell is mentioned in Lucian’s Menippus and Apocalypse of Paul 43. Eyewitness reports of prisoners throughout history testify to the inescapable noise. Evan A. Kutzler, Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 83–103. 

     On fetters: O. Epiphanius 176, in which an incarcerated man was forced to urinate on himself because his incarcerator had “maimed his hands.” Code of Justinian 9.4.1 describes a Constantinian law regulating the use of fetters and stipulating that they should not be too close to the bone. 

     “the slow work of graffiti-making” On Christian graffiti in prisons, see the ship, chi-rho, and crosses from the Prison of the Condemned in Carales (Cagliari, Sardinia), discussed in Letteney and Larsen, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration. As is well established for other periods, graffiti sometimes offered faint resistance to the structures that constrained prisoners. On U.S. prison art, see Nicole R. Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). See examples from San Lucas Prison, Costa Rica, where some twentieth-century pieces were composed in blood, and examples from the seventeenth-century Inquisitors’ Palace in Palermo, Sicily. For the latter, see the discussion in Gianclaudio Civale, “Animo Carcerato. Inquisizione, detenzione e graffiti a Palermo nel secolo XVII,” Mediterranea-Ricerche Storiche 40 (2017): 249–294, who follows others in characterizing them as “screaming without sound” (“urla senza suono” [252]).

p.245 n.12 Only two dedicated “toilets” have been found in gladiatorial prisons: at the prison at Carales and (possibly) the Julian basilica prison at Corinth. See discussion of the layout of the gladiatorial prison at Carales (Sardinia) in Letteney and Larsen, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration. It’s possible that the contamination of food was part of a deliberate strategy to dehumanize prisoners, on which, see again the work of Larsen and Letteney. 

     On worms as a form of punishment, see Isaiah 66:24; Apocalypse of Peter 7–9; Apocalypse of Paul 36–37; Latin Vision of Ezra 34–36; Henning, Hell, 96–99. Parasitic infections varied regionally throughout the Roman empire, but fecal-oral parasites seem to have been ubiquitous. Soil samples reveal that roundworm and whipworm (two parasites visible in human excrement) were common in Greece, Anatolia, the Balkans, Turkey, and Serbia. For scientific analysis, see, for example, Marissa L. Ledger, “Intestinal Parasitic Infection in the Eastern Roman Empire During the Imperial Period and Late Antiquity,” American Journal of Archaeology 124.4 (2020): 631–57; Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Toilets, Sewers, and Water Systems (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). On Roman latrines, see Barry Hobson, Latrinae et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World (London: Duckworth, 2009). 

p.246 n.13 Often, prisoners consigned to “public works” ended up in mills and bakeries. Pliny the Elder mentions that in Campania, Italy, there were wooden mortars run by convicts in chains. For discussion, see Bond, Trade and Taboo, 145–46. On mines: Letteney and Larsen, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration; Larsen, “Carceral Practices”; Fergus Millar, “Condemnation to Hard Labour in the Roman Empire, from the Julio-Claudians to Constantine,” Papers of the British School at Rome 52 (1984): 124–47. One intriguing connection made by Letteney and Larsen is that dark prisons could damage the vision of prisoners.

p.246 n.14 “The air was deadly and difficult”: Strabo, Geography 12.3.40 (modified translation). On the relationship of the mines to descriptions of hell, see Letteney and Larsen, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration; Henning, Hell, 42–44. For Christians being sentenced to the mines, see Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. 8.8, 10; Martyrs of Palestine 7.4, 8.1; and Fergus Millar, Rome, the Greek World, and the East, Volume 2: Government, Society, and Culture in the Roman Empire(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 137–45. For archaeological evidence that challenges the dominant view that mines were primarily staffed by enslaved people and prisoners, see Megan A. Perry, Drew S. Coleman, David L. Dettman, John P. Grattan, and Abdel Halim al-Shiyab, “Condemned to Metallum? The Origin and Role of 4th-6th Century A.D. Phaeno Mining Camp Residents Using Multiple Chemical Techniques,” Journal of Archaeological Science 38.3 (2011): 558–69. John Chrysostom, Homily on Matthew 43.5: “But as those who work in the mines are delivered over to certain cruel men, and see none of the people they live with but only their overseers; so will it be then also: or rather not so, but even far more cruel. For here it is possible to go unto the king, and entreat, and free the condemned person: but there, no longer; since it is not permitted, but they continue in the scorching torment, and in such great bodily pain, as it is not possible for words to tell.” (PG 57: 462.56–59, trans. Henning, Hell, 185n104). On fear in John Chrysostom, see Blake Leyerle, The Narrative Shape of Emotion in the Preaching of John Chrysostom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 112–49.

p.247–8 n.15 “Though descriptions of hell also drew upon stories of the underworld from Greek mythology and from contemporary Judaism…” There is a wealth of scholarship on the cultural origins of ideas about hell. For representative examples, see Martha Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Georges Minois, Histoire des Enfers (Paris: Fayard, 1991); Alan E. Bernstein, The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Herbert Vorgrimler, Geschichte der Hölle (Munich: Fink, 1993); Jan N. Bremmer, The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife: The 1995 Read-Tuckwell Lectures at the University of Bristol (New York: Routledge, 2002); Alan F. Segal, Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West (New York: Doubleday, 2004).

    “Under a Roman law passed in the early first century ce, anyone who had been branded, shackled, tortured and found guilty of a crime, imprisoned, or sent to a gladiatorial school was ineligible for citizenship” Instead, they would remain perpetually alienated, sharing the status of defeated foreigners. Well into late antiquity, enslavers displayed an “obsession” with tracking down “runaways.” The enslaver would hunt them down and, if the worker was found, brand their face or envelop their neck in an iron collar. The Lex Aelia Sentia of 4 C.E. describes the status of the manumitted “bad slave” (dediticii). The intentions of the legislation are debated; some have seen it as an attempt to protect the citizen body, while others have suggested that it was about preventing enslavers from manumitting “criminal slaves.” See Gaius, Institutes 1.13-16, with discussion in Gardner, “Slavery and Roman Law,” 427–28; Mouritsen, Freedman, 33.

     An entire section of the Roman Digest (11.4) is devoted to the subject of self-emancipated workers. For examples of collars used to mark workers as “runaways,” see David L. Thurmond, “Some Roman Slave Collars in CIL,” Athenaeum 82 (1994): 459–93. On branding: Rev. 13:16-17. On blasphemy against the Spirit, see Mark 3:28-29, Rev. 13:6. On branding as a way of dehumanizing people, see Karl Jacoby, “Slaves by Nature? Domestic Animals and Human Slaves,” Slavery & Abolition 15.1 (1994): 89–99. 

p.248 n.5a “Some have argued, for example, that parables about enslaved workers dignify them by portraying them as moral agents capable of making ethical decisions.” This argument, like analogous arguments about the regulations governing enslaved workers in the Hebrew Bible, works through comparison. The “biblical models” of slavery are understood to be better because they seem kinder than those of contemporary societies. This argument has two fatal flaws: first, it ignores the simple fact that the enslavement of human beings is fundamentally unjust. Second, it willfully overlooks the fact that these supposedly kinder biblical models have been used to justify the most brutal slave societies in documented history. The abuses of Atlantic slavery were grounded in the interpretation of these same texts. On religion and Atlantic slavery, see David Brion Davis, In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

     “Others engage in philological and cultural gymnastics, pretending that the overseers are freeborn servants and insisting that the parables nestle in the quotidian hierarchical arrangements between wealthy employers and those who depended on them.” In particular they gesture to the relationship between a patron and their client. For summaries and critiques of these opinions, see Glancy, “Slaves and Slavery in the Matthean Parables,” 69–71, 75; Martinsen, “God as the Great Parasite.” Glancy writes, “Although crucial to Roman social relations, the patron-client structure is an unsuitable category for the analysis of slavery… Despite certain similarities, including the asymmetry of power relations, a slave was not a client, and an owner was not a patron. By collapsing master-slave relations into the patron-client paradigm, Scott and other New Testament scholars distort the parabolic representation of slavery,” in Slavery in Early Christianity, 124–25.

     “Others still have argued that these stories are mere metaphors, the most capaciously allegorical part of Jesus’s teaching” Sometimes these impulses are explicitly connected to the religious motivations that underpin them. Snodgrass, for example, writes that “God does not have torturers, and the story cannot be pushed to yield information about the nature of judgement,” in Klyne R. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 74.

p.248 n.16 Tertullian, Of Patience 4.1–2, translation modified from ANF. As Jeremy Williams and Laura Nasrallah describe it, “in the doulology of antiquity, the real enslaved and slave as metaphor cannot be unentwined,” in Laura Salah Nasrallah and Jeremy Williams, “Justice,” in Coogan, Moss, and Howley, Writing, Enslavement, and Power, forthcoming.

p.250 n.17 On the Palermo graffiti, see G. Pitrè and L. Sciascia, Urla senza suono. Graffiti e disegni dei prigionieri dell’Inquisizione (Palermo: Sellerio, 1999). Luca Pinelli, Meditationi utilissime, sopra i quindeci misterii del Rosario, della Sacratissima Vergine Maria. Brescia: Pietro Maria Marchetti (1600). Andrea Celli, Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy: From Muslim Spain to Post-Colonial Italy (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), 133. 

p.250 n.18 Consumption: Angela Y. Davis, “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition,” in James, ed., The Angela Y. Davis Reader, 96–107 [99]. Fears of consumption: Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 110-25. On the persistent association of hell and incarceration among prisoners, see Judith Vasquez, “On the Verge of Hell,” in Hell is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement, ed. Jean Casella, James Ridgeway, and Sarah Shourd (New York: The New Press, 2016), 55–60 [58], and Galen Baughman, “The Freshman,” in Hell is a Very Small Place, 129–36 [131].

p.250 n.19 On cannibalism and the fears about the resurrection it prompted, see Athenagoras, On the Resurrection; Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Dead 32; Methodius, On the Resurrection 1.20–24. See discussion in Moss, Divine Bodies, 78–86.

p.251 n.20 Medieval text: Latin Vision of Ezra 50. Similarly, in the Gospel parables, it is higher-status enslaved overseers who are punished for their mistreatment; see Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 112. For defixiones: Laura Salah Nasrallah, “Judgment, Justice, and Destruction: Defixiones and 1 Corinthians,” JBL 140.2 (2021): 347–67, and Laura Salah Nasrallah and Jeremy Williams, “Justice,” in Writing, Enslavement, and Power, forthcoming. Both pieces draw on Jeremy L. Williams, “Making Criminals: An Analysis of the Rhetoric of Criminality in the Acts of the Apostles” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2021). For an overview of the defixiones, see Esther Eidinow, “Binding Spells on Tablets and Papyri,” in Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic, ed. David Frankfurter (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 351–87. Captives from other historical periods also issue curses. For examples from the U.S. Civil War, see Kutzler, Living by Inches. It may be the case that injustice and captivity generate curses. The language of outlaw justice used by Nasrallah and Williams derives from Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Outlaw Justice: The Messianic Politics of Paul.(Cultural Memory in the Present; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

    For the Christian prison graffiti: C. Breytenbach, “Christian Prisoners: Fifth and Sixth Century Inscriptions from Corinth,” Acta Theologica 36, Suppl. 23 (2016): 302–309.

p.251 n.21 On modern incarceration and its connection to Atlantic slavery and subsequent emancipation, see W. E. B. DuBois, “The Spawn of Slavery: The Convict-Lease System in the South,” in African American Classics in Criminology and Criminal Justice, ed. Shaun L. Gabbidon, Helen Taylor Greene, and Vernetta D. Young (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishing, 2002), 81–88; Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories, 2003); David Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996); Dennis Childs, Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (rev. ed; New York: New Press, 2012).

p.252 n.22 On hell in Christian education, see Henning, Hell.

p.253 n.23 To give but two small examples, the language of “punishing” enslaved people, which reflects ancient slaveholding and biblical sources, suggests that enslaved people were in some way deserving of the unjust violence they experienced. So, too, as public theologian and scholar Esau McCaulley has argued, Christians (including New Testament scholars) continue to refer to Onesimus as a “runaway slave,” as if a person who had been kidnapped and held against their will was in some way at fault for escaping. No one who uses such language supports enslavement, but it reveals that we have not thought deeply about rooting it out, either. These turns of phrase show how deeply embedded ideologies of enslavement are in the interpretation of scripture and how much work still needs to be done. Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope (Westmont, IL: IVP Academic, 2020), 156: “We must stop calling [Onesimus] a runaway slave. To call him a ‘runaway’ in church pews and Sunday Schools centers the opinion of slave holders because when someone runs away, the logical thing is to return them. But Onesimus had no desire to be returned. Onesimus did not run away; he escaped.” On the problem of the language of “punishment,” see Diana Paton, “Afterword: Punishment, Slavery and Legitimacy,” Journal of Global Slavery 7.1-2 (2022): 203–209.