Currents in Biblical Research Slavery and the Enslaved in the Roman World, the Jewish World, and the Synoptic Gospels

Scholars have recently noted a reluctance in New Testament scholarship to accept and apply the most recent historical scholarship on ancient enslavement to our readings of the biblical texts. The last century has seen developments in historical and classical scholarship that have moved those disciplines away from an understanding of ancient slavery as benevolent and toward a recognition of the institution's violent and coercive nature. A similar movement can be seen in the study of enslavement among first-century Jewish communities, with recent scholars arguing that Jewish enslavement practices were not as uniquely benign as was once thought. In spite of these developments, scholars of the Synoptic Gospels continue to utilize outdated models for understanding slavery in the biblical texts as a benevolent institution. A handful of New Testament scholars are charting a new course, challenging the rest of us to adopt the new historical consensus and to see biblical enslavement for what it was. Allowing these new critical works to lay the foundation for our understanding of slavery as it appears in the Synoptic Gospels will move us away from tired clichés and toward a more accurate picture of the worlds in and behind these texts.

How to Tell a Slave

After pointing out the significant differences between ancient slavery and modern racialized slavery, this chapter considers the manifold difficulties entailed in distinguishing between enslaved and free persons in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. It stresses the social, economic, and legal importance of maintaining these distinctions even as it acknowledges their elusive nature. It goes on to describe the ways in which behaviours, bodies—often scarred or tattooed, sometimes tortured—dress, disguise, names, and language, revealed or disguised the status of enslaved persons. It ends with a brief discussion of a dramatic text that stages the complexities of policing the boundaries between enslaved and free persons.

Slaves and the Roman Economy

This chapter presents an economic view of Roman slavery and the modern literature about it. The chapter starts by defining slavery and distinguishing positive and negative incentives to work. Roman slavery was ‘open’, while United States slavery was ‘closed’. The related roles of manumission, education, and skills are discussed and evaluated. The chapter considers Roman slavery as part of the Roman labour force, and combines imprecise estimates by various ancient historians into a rough idea of the magnitude of Roman slavery. Finally, Roman slavery continued into the imperial decline. There are three overall lessons. First, economic analysis adds to our understanding of ancient slavery. Second, Roman slavery was nothing like United States slavery. Third, slaves were less than one-quarter of the Roman labour force in the Principate and less than that both earlier and later.

Eieren gooien met Moses Finley

Summary This article examines the long feud between ancient historians Moses Finley and Joseph Vogt on the subject of ancient slavery. Their enmity has often been attributed to differences in character or in political views. However, it is shown here that Finley’s attack was above all directed against the tradition of classical Bildung (the German ideal of self-cultivation) and against the corresponding philosophy of history that informed Vogt’s work. Because the philosophy of Bildung presupposed a linear and exclusive connection between ancient Greece and modern Germany, Finley argued that it was easily turned into an ideological weapon, most fatally so in Nazi Germany. At a time when the alt-right’s political use of classical antiquity resembles Vogt’s views, Finley’s criticism is not only topical, but it also urges ancient historians to reconsider some of their basic concepts.

A Means to an End

Can data-driven approaches help researchers reconstruct Roman history? Scientific methods are now being used to reexamine ancient slavery, wealth distribution, health, and the costs of trade. Such approaches are demonstrated in The Science of Roman History: Biology, Climate, and the Future of the Past, edited by Walter Scheidel. But Alberto Prieto finds not enough of the book’s data to be Roman.

William L. Westermann entre o Antiquarismo e a História Comparada da Escravidão

O livro de William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, publicado em 1955, é até hoje uma referência para o estudo da escravidão antiga. No entanto, este livro é frequentemente criticado por sua estrutura antiquária e, portanto, pela falta de qualquer abordagem teórica sobre a escravidão no mundo antigo. Esse ponto de vista foi enfatizado principalmente por Moses Finley, com sua obra Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (1980), e tornou-se, desde então, um certo consenso na historiografia da escravidão. Este artigo argumenta que tal abordagem negligencia o lugar do livro de Westermann nos debates sobre a história comparada da escravidão que ocorreram nos Estados Unidos durante a segunda metade do século XX. Existem semelhanças entre a tese de Frank Tannenbaum sobre os diferentes níveis de severidade nos sistemas escravistas nas Américas, apresentados em seu Slave and Citizen (1946), e a visão de Westermann acerca dos antigos sistemas escravistas. Essa semelhança é compreensível se levarmos em conta que ambos participaram de seminários sobre a história do trabalho e da escravidão na Universidade de Columbia.