Was Paul a Slave? The surprising argument that Saul of Tarsus was born into bondage. By , Christianity Today,
But Paul was neither a proponent of slavery nor an abolitionist, despite efforts to use his letter to Philemon to make him out as one or the other. In truth, neither option was available to him.
It’s difficult for modern readers to understand that in the Roman Empire of Paul’s time, abolitionist thought was virtually nonexistent. According to Jeffers, “No Greek or Roman author ever attacked slavery as an institution.”
It was a given that slavery would always exist. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “All available evidence suggests that even those ancients who were born slaves and later freed, several of whom have left us very beautiful texts, envisioned servitude in the same light.”
Instead, the first Christians had their minds almost exclusively fixed on the Second Coming, which they believed was imminent. There wasn’t time to reform entrenched Roman injustices.
The article is replete with tendentious statements, attempts to redefine words, and special pleading. It's lying by omission.
What will be next from Christianity Today? That Paul was a tranny?
I can't wait.
Meanwhile, free-born Roman citizen, self-described Pharisee from a wealthy family in Tarsus*, Paul the Apostle, not only endorsed freedom from slavery, Second Coming or no, but well understood the possibility of it under the Roman system:
Were you a slave when called? Never mind. But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity. ... You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men.
-- I Corinthians 7:21, 23.
*A property qualification of 500 drachmae was fixed for admission to the roll of citizens, perhaps by Athenodorus sometime after 30 B.C. (Dio Chrysostom, Oration 34.23).
-- F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans: 1988), p. 432.
