Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity

by Dale B. Martin

Early Christians frequently used metaphors about slavery, calling themselves slaves of God and Christ and referring to their leaders as slave representatives of Christ. Most biblical scholars have insisted that this language would have been distasteful to potential converts in the Greco-Roman world, and they have wondered why early Christians such as Paul used the image of slavery to portray salvation. In this book, the author addresses the issue by examining the social history and rhetorical and theological conventions of the times.

Genres: Christianity

272 pages, Hardcover

First published October 24, 1990

About the author

Dale B. Martin specializes in New Testament and Christian Origins, including attention to social and cultural history of the Greco-Roman world. Before joining Yale in 1999, he taught at Rhodes College and Duke University. His books include: Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity; The Corinthian Body; Inventing Superstition: from the Hippocratics to the Christians; Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation; and Pedagogy of the Bible: an Analysis and Proposal. He has edited several books, including (with Patricia Cox Miller), The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography. He was an associate editor for the revision and expansion of the Encyclopedia of Religion, published in 2005. He has published several articles on topics related to the ancient family, gender and sexuality in the ancient world, and ideology of modern biblical scholarship, including titles such as: "Contradictions of Masculinity: Ascetic Inseminators and Menstruating Men in Greco-Roman Culture." He currently is working on issues in biblical interpretation, social history and religion in the Greco-Roman world, and sexual ethics. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), the Lilly Foundation, the Fulbright Commission (USA-Denmark), and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2009).

Reviews

[Tynan Brooks]

Some interesting analysis of slavery's rhetorical usage in the NT, especially in 1 Cor., but it's too long, with too much historical info. Should just be an essay.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book to be interesting and well-written, but I wasn't convinced by the author's argument. He basically frames 1 Corinthians as Paul advocating for the weak; in the author's view, the "weak" are those with low status in the Corinthian church - slaves and freedmen. He interprets the tension in the church as being between these lower status Christians and the upper status ones, the "strong." The divisions in the church were primarily "due to divisions within the church along lines of social status and economic status" (p. 147). Paul's exhortation to the strong is for the wealthier, free, upper class to submit to the weak, lower class slaves: "...for Paul, the unity of the church demanded that those of high status be willing to place themselves below those of low status. His own leadership is an example of the self-lowering leader, the leader who leads from below" (p. 147). Yeah...maybe...but I don't see how the weak-strong distinction that the author makes is consistent in the passages he uses in his analysis (1 Cor. 8-10). I think it would take considerable hermeneutical gymnastics to interpret the weak as merely lower class when the context seems to clearly suggest that the weak are weak in conscience, not finances. Yes, there may be some correlation between being poor and uneducated and easily swayed by temptation, but one can infer from this that the rich Christians did not struggle with idolatry! I'm not a scholar so maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that in an attempt to make his point, the author is employing a bit of eisegesis in interpreting the text.

[Jesus]

Eleutheria. The word was strange at first to me, Greek not being my mother tongue. Yet, by the time I encountered the concept in this book, the word was familiar to me from an earlier encounter with it in the work of Samuel Beckett. I knew that it was the title of an unpublished play of his. I had not remembered that the word eleutheria means freedom.

Dale Martin’s Slavery As Salvation is so close a concordance to a couple of sections in Paul’s letters to the Corinthinians that it brought me to consider the wider context of these letters. Fortunately, this month’s Atlantic magazine has a nice article about this period of history:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904...