Slavery and Abolition:�How the Early Church Got it Right
Mako A. Nagasawa
Slavery Today
Slavery Today
Slavery Today
Slavery Today
Moral Foundation for Abolition: Christian Faith?
Moral Foundation for Abolition: Christian Faith?
Christian Emancipation
• ~90 AD: Clement of Rome observes, ‘We know many among ourselves who have given themselves up to bonds, in order that they might ransom others.’
(1 Clement 55)
Christian Emancipation
• ~90 AD: Polycarp of Smyrna (69 – 155 AD) and Ignatius of Antioch (~50 – 117 AD), second generation Christian leaders, free their slaves.
Christian Emancipation
• 95 – 135 AD: Ovidius, appointed bishop of Braga (in modern day Portugal) under Pope Clement I in 95 AD, emancipates 5,000 slaves.
Christian Emancipation
Christian Emancipation
• Epitaphs in the Roman catacombs mention manumission of slaves, exact dates unknown.
• 284 – 305 AD: Chromatius emancipates 1,400 slaves after they are baptized with him
Christian Emancipation
• 379 AD: Gregory of Nyssa, in a sermon during Lent, reminds his audience, ‘Since God’s greatest gift to us is the perfect liberty vouchsafed us by Christ’s saving action in time, and since God’s gifts are entirely
irrevocable, it lies not even in God’s power to enslave men and women.’ He also said God gives the creation to each person, so to possess a slave’s belongings is wrong.
Christian Emancipation
• 390 – 400 AD: The Apostolic Constitutions, a summary of Christian teaching to that point, directs Christians, ‘As for such sums of money as are collected from them in the aforesaid manner, designate them to be used for the redemption of the saints and the deliverance of slaves and captives.’
Christian Emancipation
Christian Emancipation
Christian Impact on Law & Policy
• 315 AD+: Constantine
Christian Impact on Law & Policy
• 595 AD: A council at Rome under Gregory the Great permits a slave to become a monk without any consent from his master.
Christian Impact on Law & Policy
• 649 AD: Clovis II, king of the Franks, frees and marries his British slave Bathilde. Together, they dismantle slavery in France.
• 1000 AD: Stephen I of Hungary abolishes slavery.
Christian Impact on Law & Policy
• 1102 AD: The London Church Council forbids slavery and the slave trade, which abolishes both throughout England. This decree emancipates 10% of England’s population.
• 1117 AD: Iceland abolishes slavery.
• ~1300 AD: The Netherlands abolishes slavery.
• 1335 AD: Sweden (which included Finland at this time) makes slavery illegal.
Christian Impact on Law & Policy
• So how did these Christians understand the Bible?
The Early Christian View �of the Old Testament
Adam and Eve’s ideal ‘Garden Life’
‘I acquired slaves and slave girls.’ [Eccl.2:7] What is that you say? You condemn a person to slavery whose nature is free and independent, and in doing so you lay down a law in opposition to God, overturning the natural law established by him. For you subject to the yoke of slavery one who was created precisely to be a master of the earth, and who was ordained to rule by the creator, as if you were deliberately attacking and fighting against the divine command.’
Bishop of Nyssa (Cappadocia, Asia Minor) (372 – 376, 378 – 395)
The Early Christian View �of the Old Testament
Marriage between slaves is just as valid. Slaves are just as human.
Bishop of Caesarea (Cappadocia, Asia Minor) (370 – 399)
The New Testament: �One Factor Affecting Slavery
The New Testament: �One Factor Affecting Slavery
‘[Joseph, though a slave, did not yield to being a sex slave.] In fact, there are limits set to slaves by God Himself; and up to what point one ought to keep them, has also been determined, and to transgress them is wrong. Namely, when your master commands nothing which is unpleasing to God, it is right to follow and to obey; but no farther. For thus the slave becomes free. But if you go further, even though you are free you have become a slave. At least he intimates this, saying, Be not ye the servants of men.’
- John Chrysostom (c.349 – 407 AD), Homily on 1 Corinthians 7
Bishop of Antioch (386 – 397)
Archbishop of Constantinople (397 – 407)
The Early Church and Prostitution
‘Prostitutes were supposed to register with the authorities; a state tax on these registered prostitutes was introduced in the first century A.D. A woman who had once registered as a prostitute retained that stigma for the rest of her life, even if she ceased all professional activity. Although the Church fathers fulminated against the commerce of the body with the same ferocity as against other sins of the flesh rampant in the Roman world, prostitution, being a social phenomenon rather than a personal sin (such as fornication), did not, strictly speaking, lie within the spiritual jurisdiction of the Church. Despite its condemnation of all premarital and extramarital sexual activity, the Church recognized prostitution to be an inevitable feature of worldly society, which it had no hope or ambition to reform. Saint Augustine even warned that the abolition of prostitution, were it possible, would have disastrous consequences for society; the practice, he believed, was a necessary evil in an inevitably imperfect world…
The Early Church and Prostitution
‘Canonical wrath was focused, rather, on those who profited from this commerce, for, while prostitution was regarded as a social phenomenon distinct from the sin of fornication, procuring was considered by the Church to be synonymous with the sinful act of encouraging debauch (since the latter is usually associated with a pecuniary motive, whereas fornication can be committed out of passion as well as out of desire for money). Procuring was therefore considered to be a matter of spiritual jurisdiction, and strong measures were taken against it at the Council of Elvira (c. 300), whose canons were included in most of the major canon-law collections of the Middle Ages.’
- Leah Lydia Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 12 – 13