Christians and slavery.

Jennifer A. Glancy

Slavery in Early Christianity 

Fortress Press Edition, paperback, 2006, 203 pp. ($22)

With Slavery in Early Christianity, Jennifer A. Glancy, Joseph C. Geog Professor of Religious Studies at LeMoyne College, may have written the kind of revelatory monograph that comes along once in a generation. As one who is not a scholar of slavery and Christianity, I was confounded initially by the book's dense and detailed information. Reading forward, however, I realized that the work's density of detail facilitates clarity and accessibility.

Glancy has produced a one-of-a-kind study that boldly rethinks old assumptions--placing Jesus, along with select parables of his short ministry, squarely in his geographical place and his real time in history, when human chattel was a natural part of Christian life, when it was taken for granted.

"I work from the understanding that both slave and slaveholders were more pivotal in early Christianity circles than has been generally acknowledged," Glancy states at the outset of the book. "The centrality of slavery affects not only the reconstruction of the social histories of the emerging churches but also theological and ideological analyses of Christian rhetoric. I stress the corporeality of ancient slavery. Christians who argued that true slavery was spiritual in nature often depended on somatic metaphors."

The efficacy of Slavery in Early Christianity is that it focuses on the physical "body." All five chapters of the work, in fact, emphasize aspects of the slave's body: Chapter 1, "Bodies and Souls: The Rhetoric of Slavery"; Chapter 2, "Body Work: Slavery and the Pauline Churches"; Chapter 3, "Body Language: Corporal Anxiety and Christian Theology"; Chapter 4, "Parabolic Bodies: The Figure of the Slave in the Sayings of Jesus"; and Chapter 5, "Moral Bodies: Ecclesiastical Development and Slaveholding Culture."

Glancy offers evidence, which is disturbing in some Christian circles to say the least, that slaves' bodies were property--objects of physical violations of all kind, surrogates for torture and vessels for sexual pleasure and sexual crimes.

Chapter 4, "Parabolic Bodies," shows that Jesus clearly apprehended the slave's integral role in Christian society, and he used slave imagery and allusions in many of his parables, which are central to his teachings.

"In the parables of Jesus, the bodies of slaves are vulnerable to abuse," Glancy argues. "Beaten, stoned, and executed, the figure of the parabolic slave is repeatedly the locus of corporal discipline and other bodily violations. New Testament critics, however, have been reluctant to acknowledge the violence implicit in the parables' representations of slave bodies. Averting their gaze from the bloodied bodies of slaves, New Testament critics have found it easier to focus on other facets of the parabolic representation of slaves...."

All New Testament scholars should read Slavery in Early Christianity because, as Glancy argues, they have routinely discounted or underestimated the broad reach of slavery and its singular impact on every aspect of the development of Christianity. Doubtless, Glancy demonstrates that early Christians had the blood of slaves on their hands, even as they saw themselves as people of God.