Abstract
Early Christian practices of slaveholding disturb me. I began to write about slavery in early Christianity because I wanted to know how it could happen that, twenty centuries ago, my fellow Christians saw nothing wrong with owning slaves. In the course of my research, I encountered the writings of many Christian scholars who asserted that slavery in the Roman Empire wasn’t that bad. I knew that wasn’t true. Roman slavery was different in significant respects from the images of plantation slavery familiar to most Americans. Roman slavery was not based on race, for example, and Romans ultimately freed a higher percentage of their slaves than Americans. Nonetheless, Roman slavery was brutal, vicious, and dehumanizing—a system of corporal or bodily control sustained by violence and the threat thereof. One dehumanizing practice common in the Roman Empire as well as the Americas was the treatment of slaves as the sexual property of their owners.
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Notes
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980) 56.
Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) 108.
For a fuller treatment, see Margaret Y. MacDonald, “A Reassessment of Colossians 3:18–4:1 in Light of New Research on the Roman Family,” New Testament Studies 53 (2007) 94–113.
Seneca, Trojan Women, lines 87–91. Translation adapted from Elaine Fantham, Seneca’s Troades: A Literary Introduction with Text, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) 132.
At the outset of her kaleidoscopic treatment, Carlin A. Barton identifies pudor as an “inhibiting emotion.” Barton, Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) 202; discussion of pudor, 197–269.
Noted by Fantham, Seneca’s Troades, 227; Atze J. Keulen, ed., L. Annaeus Seneca Troades: Introduction, Text and Commentary (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2001) 141.
Seneca, Controversies 1.2, esp. 1.2.3; Seneca, Declamations, trans. M. Winterbottom (2 vols.; Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
Ambrose, On Abraham 4.26; Ambrose, On Abraham, trans. Theodosia Tomkinson (Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2000) 14.
Italics original. Kimberleigh Jordan, “The Body as Reader: African-Americans, Freedom, and the American Myth,” in The Bible and the American Myth: A Symposium on the Bible and Constructions of Meaning, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics 16; Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999) 105–121, esp. 107.
Eliza Poitevent Nicholson, “Hagar,” Cosmopolitan 16 (1893) 10–13.
Janet Gabler-Hover, Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2000) 131.
Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993) 15–33; 245f, n. 2.
Livy 1.58.10; The History of Rome, trans. B. O. Foster (14 vols.; Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919–1959).
Basil of Caesarea, On Psalm 32 5; Saint Basil, Exegetic Homilies, trans. Agnes Clare Way (Fathers of the Church 46; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963).
For further discussion of Lucretia in early Christian writings, see Dennis Trout, “Re-Textualizing Lucretia: Cultural Subversion in the City of God,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994) 53–70.
Augustine, City of God 1.17; Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. George McCracken (7 vols.; Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957–1972).
Elizabeth Kennedy, Victim Race and Rape (Waltham, MA: Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, Brandeis University, 2003), http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/slavery/slav-us/slav-us-articles/slav-us-art-kennedy-full.pdf (accessed June 19, 2009)
Jennifer C. Nash, Black Women and Rape: A Review of the Literature (Waltham, MA: Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, Brandeis University, 2009), http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/slavery/slav-us/slav-us-articles/Nash2009-6-12.pdf (accessed August 3, 2009)
For related analysis, see Toni Irving, “Borders of the Body: Black Women, Sexual Assault, and Citizenship,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35 (2007) 67–92.
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© 2010 Bernadette J. Brooten
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Glancy, J.A. (2010). Early Christianity, Slavery, and Women’s Bodies. In: Brooten, B.J. (eds) Beyond Slavery. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113893_9
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