Paul's epistle to Philemon is one of the shortest books in the entire Bible, and it certainly leaves plenty to the imagination. From the pen of an accomplished New Testament scholar, this vivid historical fiction account follows the slave Onesimus, fleshing out the lived context of first-century Ephesus and providing a social and theological critique of slavery in the Roman Empire.
New Testament scholarship and Paul have had a complicated relationship over the question of slavery. For many decades there has been a struggle to reconcile the abolitionist cause with a biblical text that seemingly supports the institution of slavery. Then the more recent discovery of inscriptions and documents referring to slaves in antiquity has added new dimensions to the debate. Furthermore, new interpretative approaches to the New Testament, including social-scientifi c criticism, rhetorical criticism and postcolonial criticism, have challenged earlier interpretations of Paul's statements about slavery. The issue has even more recently taken on a new shape as descendants of former North American slaves have engaged with the way Paul has been interpreted and used to justify the enslavement of their ancestors. In this volume, John Byron provides a survey of 200 years of scholarly interpretation of Paul and slavery with a focus on the last 35 years. After a general overview of the history of research, Byron focusses in turn on four specific areas: African-American responses to Paul, Paul's slavery metaphors, the elliptical phrase in 1 Corinthians 7.21, and the letter to Philemon. An epilogue highlights four areas in which scholarship is continuing to change its understanding of ancient slavery and, in consequence, its interpretation of Paul. New Testament students and scholars will fi nd the volume a valuable specialist resource that collects and analyses the most important developments on Paul and slavery.
This history of African slavery from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries examines how indigenous African slavery developed within an international context. Paul E. Lovejoy discusses the medieval Islamic slave trade and the Atlantic trade as well as the enslavement process and the marketing of slaves. He considers the impact of European abolition and assesses slavery's role in African history. The book corrects the accepted interpretation that African slavery was mild and resulted in the slaves' assimilation. Instead, slaves were used extensively in production, although the exploitation methods and the relationships to world markets differed from those in the Americas. Nevertheless, slavery in Africa, like slavery in the Americas, developed from its position on the periphery of capitalist Europe. This new edition revises all statistical material on the slave trade demography and incorporates recent research and an updated bibliography.
It is a common—and fundamental—misconception that Paul told people how to live. Apart from forbidding certain abusive practices, he never gives any precise instructions for living. It would have violated his two main social principles: human freedom and dignity, and the need for people to love one another. Paul was a Hellenistic Jew, originally named Saul, from the tribe of Benjamin, who made a living from tent making or leatherworking. He called himself the “Apostle to the Gentiles” and was the most important of the early Christian evangelists. Paul is not easy to understand. The Greeks and Romans themselves probably misunderstood him or skimmed the surface of his arguments when he used terms such as “law” (referring to the complex system of Jewish religious law in which he himself was trained). But they did share a language—Greek—and a cosmopolitan urban culture, that of the Roman Empire. Paul considered evangelizing the Greeks and Romans to be his special mission. “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” The idea of love as the only rule was current among Jewish thinkers of his time, but the idea of freedom being available to anyone was revolutionary. Paul, regarded by Christians as the greatest interpreter of Jesus’ mission, was the first person to explain how Christ’s life and death fit into the larger scheme of salvation, from the creation of Adam to the end of time. Preaching spiritual equality and God’s infinite love, he crusaded for the Jewish Messiah to be accepted as the friend and deliverer of all humankind. In Paul Among the People, Sarah Ruden explores the meanings of his words and shows how they might have affected readers in his own time and culture. She describes as well how his writings represented the new church as an alternative to old ways of thinking, feeling, and living. Ruden translates passages from ancient Greek and Roman literature, from Aristophanes to Seneca, setting them beside famous and controversial passages of Paul and their key modern interpretations. She writes about Augustine; about George Bernard Shaw’s misguided notion of Paul as “the eternal enemy of Women”; and about the misuse of Paul in the English Puritan Richard Baxter’s strictures against “flesh-pleasing.” Ruden makes clear that Paul’s ethics, in contrast to later distortions, were humane, open, and responsible. Paul Among the People is a remarkable work of scholarship, synthesis, and understanding; a revelation of the founder of Christianity.
Slaves were ubiquitous in the first- and second-century CE Roman Empire, and early Christian texts reflect this fact. This book argues that enslaved persons engaged in leadership roles in civic and religious activities. Such roles created tension within religious groups, including second-century communities connected with Paul's legacy. -
This volume by William J. Webb explores the hermeneutical maze that accompanies any treatment of these three controversial topics and takes a new step toward breaking down walls within the evangelical community related to them.
Nellie Norton - or, Southern slavery and the Bible is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1864. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.
The letters of Paul—especially the verse in Ephesians directing slaves to obey their masters—played an enormous role in promoting slavery and justifying it as a Christian practice. Yet despite this reality African Americans throughout history still utilized Paul extensively in their own work to protest and resist oppression, responding to his theology and teachings in numerous—often starkly divergent and liberative—ways. In the first book of its kind, Lisa Bowens takes a historical, theological, and biblical approach to explore interpretations of Paul within African American communities over the past few centuries. She surveys a wealth of primary sources from the early 1700s to the mid-twentieth century, including sermons, conversion stories, slave petitions, and autobiographies of ex-slaves, many of which introduce readers to previously unknown names in the history of New Testament interpretation. Along with their hermeneutical value, these texts also provide fresh documentation of Black religious life through wide swaths of American history. African American Readings of Paul promises to change the landscape of Pauline studies and fill an important gap in the rising field of reception history.
This new edition of Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South introduces the vast number of ways in which educated Southern thinkers and theorists defended the institution of slavery. This book collects and explores the elaborately detailed pro-slavery arguments rooted in religion, law, politics, science, and economics. In his introduction, now updated to include the relationship between early Christianity and slavery, Paul Finkelman discusses how early world societies legitimized slavery, the distinction between Northern and Southern ideas about slavery, and how the ideology of the American Revolution prompted the need for a defense of slavery. The rich collection of documents allows for a thorough examination of these ideas through poems, images, speeches, correspondences, and essays. This edition features two new documents that highlight women’s voices and the role of women in the movement to defend slavery plus a visual document that demonstrates how the notion of black inferiority and separateness was defended through the science of the time. Document headnotes and a chronology, plus updated questions for consideration and selected bibliography help students engage with the documents to understand the minds of those who defended slavery. Available in print and e-book formats.
The 'Dictionary of New Testament Background' joins the 'Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels', the 'Dictionary of Paul and his Letters' and the 'Dictionary of the Later New Testament and its Developments' as the fourth in a landmark series of reference works on the Bible. In a time when our knowledge of the ancient Mediterranean world has grown, this volume sets out for readers the wealth of Jewish and Greco-Roman background that should inform our reading and understanding of the New Testament and early Christianity. 'The Dictionary of New Testament Background', takes full advantage of the flourishing study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and offers individual articles focused on the most important scrolls. In addition, the Dictionary encompasses the fullness of second-temple Jewish writings, whether pseudepigraphic, rabbinic, parables, proverbs, histories or inscriptions. Articles abound on aspects of Jewish life and thought, including family, purity, liturgy and messianism. The full scope of Greco-Roman culture is displayed in articles ranging across language and rhetoric, literacy and book benefactors, travel and trade, intellectual movements and ideas, and ancient geographical perspectives. No other reference work presents so much in one place for students of the New Testament. Here an entire library of scholarship is made available in summary form. The Dictionary of New Testament Background can stand alone, or work in concert with one or more of its companion volumes in the series. Written by acknowledged experts in their fields, this wealth of knowledge of the New Testament era is carefully aimed at the needs of contemporary students of the New Testament. In addition, its full bibliographies and cross-references to other volumes in the series will make it the first book to reach for in any investigation of the New Testament in its ancient setting.
