Charitable me would say this is simply laughable ignorance, but I know better

Was Paul a Slave? The surprising argument that Saul of Tarsus was born into bondage. By Mark R. Fairchild and Jordan K. Monson, Christianity Today, April 22, 2024:

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.

LOL, Christianity Today features female contributor who simply ignores the slave language of the New Testament, saying she's no servant

 Human Beings Are Stewards, Not Slaves to God

I’m not merely an inglorious servant to the divine . . .. 

 

She also ignores The Fall in the Christian origin story, which is her topic, and Eve's role in it.

 

What a shock, right?

None is able to serve two lords, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will hold to the one, and despise the other; ye are not able to serve God and Mammon.

 

-- Matthew 6:24

So you too, when you do all the things which were commanded you, say, 'We are unworthy slaves; we have done only that which we ought to have done.'

 

-- Luke 17:10

 

Truly, truly I say to you, a slave is not greater than his master, nor is one who is sent greater than the one who sent him.

 

-- John 13:16

 

No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, because all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.

 

-- John 15:15

 

For am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a slave of Christ.

-- Galatians 1:10

Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, having been set apart for the gospel of God.

-- Romans 1:1

For the one who was called in the Lord as a slave, is the Lord's freed person; likewise the one who was called as free, is Christ's slave.

-- I Corinthians 7:22

For though I am free from all people, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I may gain more. 

 

-- I Corinthians 9:19

 

. . . just as you learned it from Epaphras, our beloved fellow slave, who is a faithful servant of Christ on our behalf.

 

-- Colossians 1:7

Tychicus, our beloved brother and faithful servant and fellow slave in the Lord, will make known to you all my affairs.

-- Colossians 4:7

Paul, a slave of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ . . ..

-- Titus 1:1

James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes who are in the Dispersion: Greetings.

 -- James 1:1

Jude, a slave of Jesus Christ, and brother of James, To those who are the called, beloved in God the Father, and kept for Jesus Christ:

-- Jude 1:1

And a white robe was given to each of them; and it was told to them that they should rest for a little while longer, until the number of their fellow slaves and their brothers who were to be killed even as they had been, would be completed also.

-- Revelation 6:11

And they sang the song of Moses, the slave of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying . . ..

-- Revelation 15:3

And a voice came from the throne, saying, 'Give praise to our God, all you His slaves, you who fear Him, the small and the great.'

-- Revelation 19:5

Then I fell at his feet to worship him. But he said to me, 'Do not do that! I am a fellow slave with you and your brothers who have the witness of Jesus. Worship God! For the witness of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.'

-- Revelation 19:10

I, John, am the one who was hearing and seeing these things. And when I heard and saw, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed me these things. But he said to me, 'Do not do that! I am a fellow slave with you and your brothers the prophets and with those who keep the words of this book. Worship God!'

-- Revelation 22:8f.

You'd think an historian searching for very early Christian evidence of gender equality would know about Galatians 3 and I Corinthians 7, but you'd be wrong

Am I missing anything by way of obvious sources? Put another way, without Romans 16 above all, and a couple of other comparable lists of “Say hello to” greetings in other letters, would any later scholar dared have portrayed very early Christianity in the gender-equal way that modern scholars suggest? Think how easily something like Romans 16 might have dropped out of the transmission history of that document, if an early scribe had decided it was just personal stuff, and not worth preserving. If that had occurred, just what would we know or think about gender roles in early Christianity then? 


 

 

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

 

-- Galatians 3:28

For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does.

 

-- I Corinthians 7:4

Pope Francis decrees universal feast for Mary, "Mother of the Church", about which St. Paul knew NOTHING

You will search in vain in the New Testament for the sure basis for this Roman Catholic obsession with Mary the mother of Jesus.

Had St. Paul, for example, the slightest knowledge of this notion of contemporary Marianism, one might have expected him to have alluded to it in the straightforward way the Mary mystics do, especially whenever he discussed the related topics of virginity, fatherhood and motherhood, and the church.

It never happens.

Paul esteems virginity, for example, at considerable length in 1 Corinthians 7 (while acquiescing to marriage), however not on the grounds of Mary's supposed perpetual virginity, which he does not know. To Paul virginity was preferable not because of the example of Mary but only because of the pressures of the eschatological moment.

What's more, in Paul's theological imagination the father of us all is Abraham, and for two reasons: because of circumcision to which Abraham submitted as the first Jew; but also because of Abraham's faith in respect of Isaac, the child of the promise, through which same faith the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ now incorporates the Gentiles who similarly believe into the people of God, of whom the Jews were the first. Paul makes these arguments about the "father" at considerable length in Galatians and Romans, but there is hardly a word about the "mother". 

The only time it occurs to Paul to speak of spiritual motherhood at all, it is not to Mary to whom he refers, but to the source of faith, the heavenly Jerusalem:

 

But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.

 

-- Galatians 4:26

Paul's countless opportunities in his works to introduce the mundane conceptions of Marianism characteristically are passed by, doubtlessly because they never occurred to him and he probably did not know them, even from others in the church. Whatever proto-Marianism one might think to find in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke is for this reason self-evidently quite late compared with the date of the Pauline corpus.    

The basis for contemporary Marianism is sheer casuistry, which notably raises its ugly head in the story here:

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has decreed that Latin-rite Catholics around the world will mark the feast of "the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church" on the Monday after Pentecost each year.

The Gospel reading for the feast, which technically is called a "memorial," is John 19:25-31, which recounts how from the cross Jesus entrusted Mary to his disciples as their mother and entrusted his disciples to Mary as her children. ...

Francis approved the decree after "having attentively considered how greatly the promotion of this devotion might encourage the growth of the maternal sense of the church in the pastors, religious and faithful, as well as a growth of genuine Marian piety," the decree said. /end

Of course John 19 says no such thing about "his disciples", only about the disciple whom Jesus loved,  "who from that hour took her into his own home" because Jesus in his final words on the cross had said to Mary "behold thy son" and to the disciple "behold thy mother", and promptly died.

Jesus had abandoned his mother and sisters and brothers to fend for themselves when he had embarked upon his itinerant career of preaching a similar repentance. Presumably as the carpenter's son and the carpenter, which are both attested in the evidence, Jesus had been apprentice to his father and took over as the breadwinner when Joseph was no longer in the picture. When this ne'er-do-well of a first born son left it all behind it had to hurt, for all sorts of reasons, but not the least of which was pecuniary.

In this light John's account of the final arrangements for Mary from the cross are pathetic in the extreme, Jesus' concession to his mother and friend that it hadn't turned out quite as he had expected.

If anyone had lacked the maternal sense, it had been Mary's own infamous son . . . by design. 

Sorry Kevin Shrum, But St. Paul, Like Jesus, Demoted Marriage By Exalting The Single State

St. Paul exalted the single state above the married state because he believed, like Jesus and in keeping with Jesus' teaching about marriage (Matthew 19:10ff., Luke 20:34ff.), that the world was coming to a sudden end:

Now concerning the matters about which you wrote. It is well for a man not to touch a woman. ... I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. ... I mean, brethren, the appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none . . . But whoever is firmly established in his heart, being under no necessity but having his desire under control, and has determined this in his heart, to keep her as his betrothed, he will do well. So that he who marries his betrothed does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better.

-- 1 Corinthians 7, passim

And Jesus answering said unto them, The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage: Neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.

-- Luke 20:34ff.

Paul would not have agreed in his own time with this from ours, by one Kevin Shrum, here:

'If marriage implodes then so, too, does a civil, productive society. Any culture that demotes, demeans, demoralizes, diminishes, denigrates, or re-defines marriage does so at its own peril. Cultures that eviscerate marriage will survive, but those same cultures will be, as Plato would argue, mere shadows of the "real thing," of the "real idea." How can we help our neighbors see and hear the truth in this matter of marriage?'

The irony of such statements is that despite the radical teachings of Jesus and Paul about marriage, Christianity went on to conquer the West and recreate its culture in its own image . . . and flourish.