Slavery in Early Christianity by Jennifer A. Glancy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Very good book, a wealth of information. Jennifer Glancy is at times hindered in her analysis by assuming too much purported differences between different authors of Scripture, and this gets in the way at times. She doesn’t reason with any expectation that Scripture harmonizes. At the same time, she provides an amazing amount of detail on slavery in the New Testament era, not to mention the early centuries of the church. She is particularly strong in showing how much slavery plays a surprising role in the parables of Jesus.
The churches, she shows, grew to maturity with the assumption that slaveholding was the norm, and welcomed both slaves and slaveholders as members. Trying to imagine my favorite pastor from Moscow Idaho dealing with the dynamics of that! Glancy draws attention to the importance of the body in the thought and practice of ancient slavery. To be a slave was to be a body subject to coercion and violation, with no rights to corporeal integrity or privacy. Reads astoundingly like the Democrat/Republican (Uni-party) Party platform, doesn’t it? I have the book in my Amazon cart and will add it to… Read more »