"Nice apologia of Greek slavery. The ancient Greeks were such enlightened people they must have been really kind masters."
The link you supplied made it apparent that they were certainly much better owners than the Christian Church. And lest you feel I am spending too much time exposing the "natural" attitude of ancient cultures (and other cultures up to and beyond the 19th century) toward the issue of slavery, let me give the Christian slave owners (the various churches and the various popes) their due.
The following is a rather long passage because 20 centuries is a lot of history and a lot of inhuman activity, but I have taken the time to bold some of the more pertinent facts for your thoughtful benefit.
Finally, I don't think you can blame the Greeks for Jesus supporting slavery nor for His followers doing so. After all, does God develop His moral ideas based on Greek Mores?
"For many centuries slavery was perfectly acceptable to Christians. Christians had no doubt that it was divinely sanctioned, and they used a number of Old and New Testament quotations to prove their case. Looking at the relevant passages it is clear that the Bible does indeed endorse slavery. In the Old Testament God approved the practice and laid down rules for buyers and sellers (Exodus 21:1-11, Leviticus 25:44). Men are at liberty to sell their own daughters (Exodus 21:7). Slaves can be inherited (Leviticus 25:45-6). It is acceptable to beat slaves, since they are property — a master who beats his slave to death is not to be punished as long as the slave stays alive for a day or two, as the loss of the master"s property is punishment enough:
And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money. Exodus 21:20-21
If a slave is gored by a bull, it is the master, not the slave, who is to be compensated (Exodus 21:32). Time and time again the Old Testament confirms that slaves are property and their lives are of little consequence. To prove the strength of Job"s faith, God sends Satan to test him by visiting disasters upon him. Amongst these disasters is the killing of Job"s numerous slaves (Job 1). Neither God, nor Satan, nor the story"s narrator finds it at all odd that people should be killed just to prove a point: they are only Job"s property and their destruction is naturally bracketed with the loss of his livestock and vineyards.
The New Testament also regards slavery as acceptable. It instructs slaves to accept their position with humility (Ephesians 6:5-8) and to please their masters in everything (Titus 2:9, cf. Colossians 3:22). They are commanded to serve Christian slave owners better than other masters (1 Timothy 6:1-2) "so that the name of God and the teaching may not be defamed". Even oppressive masters are to be obeyed according to 1 Peter 2:18. Jesus himself mentioned slavery more than once according to the New Testament, but never with the slightest hint of criticism of it. He even glorified the master-slave relationship as a model of the relationship between God and humankind (Matthew 18:23ff and 25:14ff). Christians naturally interpreted this as not merely acceptance, but approval. If Jesus had opposed slavery he would, they claimed, surely have said so. Church Fathers instructed the faithful not to let slaves get above themselves, and the Church endorsed St Augustine"s view that slavery was ordained by God as a punishment for sin*. Augustine called on the free to give thanks because Christ and his Church did not make slaves free but rather made bad slaves into good slaves.
In pre-Christian times and in non-Christian countries people expressed doubts about slavery and sought to improve the lot of slaves — the Stoic philosophers provide a notable example. In pagan times slaves who escaped and sought sanctuary at a holy temple would not be returned to their masters if they had a justifiable complaint. When the Empire became Christian, escaped slaves could seek refuge in a church, but they would always be returned to their masters, whether they had a justifiable complaint or not. When Christian slaves in the early Asian Church suggested that community funds might be used to purchase their freedom, they were soon disabused of their hopes, a line supported by one of the greatest Church Fathers (Ignatius of Antioch). He declared that their ambition should be to become better slaves, and they should not expect the Church to gain their liberty for them*. His orthodox approach followed the words of St Paul: "Each one should remain in the situation which he was in when God called him. Were you a slave when you were called? Don"t let it trouble you — although if you can gain your freedom, do so." (1 Corinthians 7:20-21 NIV).
Soon the Church would become the largest slave owner in the Roman Empire. Bishops themselves owned slaves and accepted the usual conventions. So did other churchmen. Slave collars dating from around AD 400 have been found in Sardinia, stamped with the sign of the cross and the name "Felix the Archdeacon"*. Pagan slaves who wanted to become Christians required permission from their masters. For many centuries, indeed right up to recent times, servile birth was a bar to ordination , and the Church confirmed the acceptability of slavery in many other ways. For example, the Church Council of Châlons in 813 decreed that slaves belonging to different owners could not marry without their owners" consent. It had been common for pagan Greeks and Romans to emancipate their slaves, but the emancipation of the Church"s slaves was declared impossible, on the grounds that the slaves were owned not by the clergy but by God himself, and only the slave owner could legally dispose of his goods. Church slaves were thus inalienable property. (This principle would be enshrined in canon law in respect of monastic slaves under the Decretum gratiani c.1140.)
The Church found new reasons to take people into slavery. The Third Synod of Toledo in 589 decreed that women found in the houses of a clergyman in suspicious circumstances should be sold into slavery by the clergyman"s bishop*. Another synod of 655 declared that priests" children should be treated as slaves — an idea ratified in 1022 at Pavia and around 1140 by the Decretum gratiani. In attempting to enforce clerical celibacy popes revived the idea of taking the wives and concubines of churchmen into slavery*. Leo IX (Pope 1049-1054) had priests" wives taken into slavery for service at the Lateran Palace*. Urban II tried the idea against subdeacons" wives in 1089*. In 1095 wives of priests were sold into slavery — presumably the Lateran now had a full complement of female slaves. Saints, popes and Church officials approved the practice of slavery for centuries. The Church"s greatest scholastic authorities, such as Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus and Duns Scotus concurred. As Aquinas explained, a slave was merely an "inspired tool of his master" and a "non-member of society" , just like any other beast of burden. Slaves were classified in inventories under "Church property".
Popes sentenced countless thousands to slavery, although the sentences could not always be carried out. Anyone who opposed the papacy was condemned to slavery at the Third Lateran Council in 1179. The citizens of Venice were condemned to it in 1309, 1482, and again in 1506. The same thing happened to the whole of England in 1508. Papal galleys went on slave-hunting expeditions along the coast of Africa.
Slavery was a major trade in Christendom. Until the early tenth century the main Venetian export was slaves from central Europe. During the Crusades the whole Mediterranean slave trade was concentrated in Christian hands — the hands of the military monks and men like Pelius, the papal legate. Later the Genoese developed another major Mediterranean slave trade*. In Spain a single inquisitor, Torquemada, had 97,371 people condemned to slavery. In the New World Christians introduced the practice. Pope Nicholas V, in his bull Romanus pontifex of 1455, gave his blessing to the enslavement of conquered native peoples. Like other bishops, the popes themselves owned slaves — Pope Innocent VIII accepted the gift of numerous slaves from Malaga, given by the exceptionally devout Queen Isabella of Castile in 1487. To clear up any doubt about who was entitled to own slaves, Pope Paul III confirmed in 1548 that all Christian men and all members of the clergy had the right to own slaves.
Slave owning continued for centuries despite criticism from rationalists and freethinkers. The Jesuit College in the Congo owned some 12,000 slaves in 1666. Popes continued to own slaves until they lost control of the Papal States at the end of the eighteenth century. Benedictine monks still owned slaves in Brazil as late as 1864, the same date that clergymen in the southern states of the USA were obliged to give up their slaves.
The record of the Anglican Church was no better than that of the Roman Church. It was the universal opinion of churchmen that God had ordained slavery, and clergymen had no qualms about owning slaves themselves. Anglican slave traders were often extremely devout, and widely respected by their fellow Christians. It never occurred to them, or to their priests or ministers, that slave trading might be immoral. The most famous English slave trader, Sir John Hawkins, piously named his slave ships Angel, Jesus and Grace of God. The Reverend Richard Fuller summed up the Church"s position in 1845: “What God sanctioned in the Old Testament, and permitted in the New, cannot be a sin”*.
Since they were merely property, there could be no objection to branding slaves just like any other animal. Neither was there any obligation to treat them more humanely than animals in other ways. Their prices depended on supply and demand like any other commodity. Female breeders would be sold at premium prices after the importation of African slaves to North America and the Caribbean ceased. Sometimes slaves were hamstrung to stop them escaping. If they had escaped before, they could have a leg amputated to stop them doing so again. Once their working lives were over, they were put down*. Black slaves in the Caribbean and Americas received little education, but what they were allowed was mainly religious. Preachers tended to concentrate on biblical passages, such as those already quoted that endorsed slavery and counselled passive acceptance of it. Surviving texts show that among missionaries, the problem of preventing slaves from enjoying themselves on the Sabbath was more important than the question of slavery itself*.
Churchmen owned slaves and were not particularly notable as good masters. Indeed some of the worst masters were clergymen. In the court of St Ann's in Jamaica in 1829, the Rev. G. W. Bridges was charged with maltreating a female slave. For a trivial mistake he had stripped her, tied her by the hands to the ceiling so that her toes hardly touched the ground, then flogged her with a bamboo rod until she was a "mass of lacerated flesh and gore" from her shoulders to her calves. As usual in such cases he was acquitted. Important questions for the Church were the extent of slave owners" rights to flog or burn their human property, to split up their families, and to demand sexual gratification from them*. This last must have been a particular problem, since owners could point to several biblical passages that take it for granted that a slave girl is available for her master"s sexual desires. This was clearly difficult to square with the knowledge that sex was sinful. The harm that was done to the slaves themselves was not considered, although its effects were so severe that they live on today. In the Americas it has left a legacy of bitterness, hatred and social disruption* that is likely to endure well into the third millennium.
Slavery was not confined to selected races or to members of other religions: Christians routinely condemned their fellow believers to slavery. John Knox for example spent 18 months as a galley-slave under French Catholics. Cotton Mather, a Puritan clergyman best known for his part in the infamous Salem Witch Trials, plotted the enslavement of William Penn and his fellow Quakers in 1682*. In the late eighteenth century popes still held slaves, as did Anglican clergymen. It was still beyond question that slavery was ordained by God and therefore unimpeachable. In the second part of The Age of Reason, published in 1795, Thomas Paine noted that in the book of Numbers Moses had given instructions as to how to treat Midianite captives. Essentially, everyone was to be executed except virgins, whom the victors were allowed to keep alive for themselves. God then gave instructions as to how the booty, including 32,000 virgins, should be divided up between the victors. Paine summarised the relevant passage: "Here is an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters"*. In response to this, Bishop Watson of Llandaff pointed out that the virgins had not been spared for any immoral purpose, as Paine had wickedly suggested. Rather, he said, they were spared so that they could be taken into slavery. Obviously, there could be no ethical objection to this, since slavery was divinely sanctioned. The bishop"s rebuttal was perfectly acceptable to mainstream Christians, who found sex objectionable but slavery not at all objectionable. According to the Churches, slavery was not merely permitted, it was obligatory. Slavery was a God-given institution. To oppose what God had sanctioned was positively sinful.
In America opposition to slavery was first voiced by freethinkers such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. Initially a Quaker, later a deist, Paine was widely condemned as an unbeliever. He wrote an influential article against slavery in 1775 , and when he drafted the American Declaration of Independence the following year, he included a clause against slavery that was later struck out*. Under Quaker influence, slavery was made illegal in the state of Pennsylvania in 1780. Other campaigners included the rationalist James Russell Lowell, the sceptical ex-preacher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the freethinker Wendell Phillips. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown had shifted away from traditional Christianity after reading Thomas Paine.
While Thomas Paine opposed slavery in America, his fellow freethinkers opposed it in his native country. Granville Sharp, a British humanitarian lawyer, sought to bring cases before the courts, arguing that throwing slaves overboard to drown was murder. (The prevailing Christian view was that a ship"s captain was free to jettison them, just like any other property*.) Within a few years, by 1787, a campaign to abolish the Atlantic slave trade was started by a group of Quakers*. It was supported by non-believers. As the movement grew, various nonconformist groups and some evangelical Christians joined it, but all traditional Churches and mainstream Christian sects consistently opposed it. Tellingly, the pro-slavery Confederacy adopted the motto “Deo Vindice”, (“God On Our Side”).
William Wilberforce is usually accredited with abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, although he came many years after the first abolitionist campaigners. He too was an unbeliever when he espoused abolition. Later as an evangelical he was able to sit in Parliament (which unbelievers were not). There he stood out amongst his fellow Christians as an exception. He noted that those who opposed slavery were nonconformists and godless reformers, and that Church people were indifferent to the cause of abolition, or else actively obstructed it. His support came from Quakers, Utilitarians and assorted freethinkers. Like the freethinkers who had started the movement, he was condemned by the mainstream Churches as presuming to know better than the Bible. His successor, Sir Thomas Buxton, was another maverick, an evangelical with Quaker sympathies.
The Church had enjoyed 1,500 years during which it had had the power to ban slavery but had failed to do so, or even to have expressed any desire to do so. ( the Anglican Church's missionary organisation , the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts , was still branding its slaves on the chest with the word SOCIETY to show who owned them. Now that reform was in the air, the mainstream churches opposed it with all their power. They vilified reformers (including Wilberforce) and attacked them for daring to question the plain word of God. Anglican clergymen still owned slaves and continued to oppose abolition well into the nineteenth century. One of their number was the most effective supporter of slavery during the 1820s abolitionist campaign in Jamaica*. All mainstream Churches agreed with the traditional view that slavery was ordained by God. To practice slavery was therefore meritorious, and to try to stop the practice was sinful. With the exception of Quakers, all denominations agreed. When the British parliament abolished slavery in the colonies in 1833, the Bench of Bishops voted against — as they did on almost all reform bills. To get the bill through Parliament voted to compensate slave owners (There was no compensation for the slaves themselves). The Anglican Church received £8,823 8s 9d, for the loss of slave labour on its Codrington plantation in Barbados. Individual Churchmen had to be compensated separately. Henry Phillpotts , Bishop of Exeter, and three business associates received nearly £13,000*. Elsewhere Churches held out longer. In 1843 some 1,200 Methodist ministers owned slaves in the USA.
Under popular pressure generated by secular thinkers, all of the mainstream Churches (except the Baptists) performed a volte-face during the nineteenth century. When enough of their members had moved over to the abolitionist cause, the Churches followed. God had always condoned, sanctioned and even demanded the practice of slavery, but slavery was no longer acceptable. God must have changed his mind. Priests, bishops and popes felt obliged to cease owning slaves. Slavery was criticised for the first time by a pope (Gregory XVI) in 1839, but it was not until the Berlin Conference of 1884 that Roman Catholic countries fell into line with Protestant ones on the question of slavery, agreeing that it should be suppressed. The official U-turn came in 1888 when Pope Leo XIII declared in In plurimis that the Church was now opposed to it.
In the USA the pattern was similar: nineteenth century churchmen advocated slavery, though secular forces opposed it. It was a commonplace that "Slavery is of God". Christian ministers wrote almost half of all defences of slavery published in America. The Churches routinely produced such defences. Along with these defences, Christian Churches circulated biblical texts on the subject of Negro inferiority, and the need for total unquestioning obedience. A civil war was fought before the Christian South was forced to abandon slavery in 1863. Yet the Southern Presbyterian Church could still resolve in 1864 that it was their peculiar mission to conserve the institution of slavery, and to make it a blessing to both master and slave.
Black slaves were not permitted to learn to read or write, since education was seen as a threat to God"s natural order. An American slave who adopted the name Frederick Douglas was exceptional in that he learned to read and write in secret. After he was granted his freedom he wrote this:
Were I to be again reduced to chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me.... [I] hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-stripping, cradle plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land*.
The Christianity he had in mind was not particularly American. Nor is it yet dead. There are still Christians prepared to uphold the traditional Christian line. In 1996 Charles Davidson, a devout Christian Senator from Alabama, said that slavery had been good for blacks, and pointed out that the practice had biblical approval, citing the traditional prooftexts such as Leviticus 25:44 and 1 Timothy 6:1*.
The story now propagated by some Churches — that they were responsible for abolition — is simply false. The first country to abolish slavery, was France, under an anticlerical revolutionary government in the 1790s*. Abolition came in Britain in the early nineteenth century, in the teeth of fierce opposition from the Anglican Church, and it was achieved through the efforts of an alliance of unbelievers, freethinkers, utilitarians, Quakers and fringe Christians who galvanised public opinion. In the USA it came in the second half of the century, again in the face of intense opposition from the Churches.
The abolitionists won largely because slavery was no longer financially viable. The alliance of Church and slave owners lost the battle in one country after another because of monetary considerations. Following traditional teachings, and unrestrained by Western economics or political correctness, Christians in Ethiopia are still making captured prisoners into slaves well into the twenty First century. The simple, if embarrassing, truth is that no Christian society has ever abolished slavery while the practice continued to be profitable."
Notes
§ The Authorised Version invariably uses the word servant where the natural translation is slave. Most modern translations use the word slave (a more accurate rendering of the Hebrew "ebhedh, Greek doulos) — masters buy and sells slaves not servants.
§. St Augustine, City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 15.
§. Ignatius"s letter to Polycarp 4. See Andrew Louth (ed.), Maxwell Staniforth (trans.) Early Christian Writings, p 110.
§. Fox, Pagans and Christians, p 298, citing G Sotgiu, Arch. Class. 25/6 (1973-4) 688.
§. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, p 104.
§. A number of cases of women being taken into slavery on the orders of Church authorities are cited by Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, pp 89-93.
§. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, p 91.
§. Decretum Gratiani, pars. 2, dist. 32, c10 (Hefele, C. J. Konziliengeschichte, vol. V (1863) p 175 ).
§. Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 3, p 357.
§. F G Wood, The Arrogance of Faith, A A Knoopf (New York, 1990), p 59
§. For these and other examples of torture and mistreatment of slaves, see Scott, A History of Torture, ch XIV, especially pp 126-7.
§. James Walvin, Black Ivory A History of British Slavery, p 184.
§. James Walvin, Black Ivory A History of British Slavery, p 187.
§. Psychological studies have found evidence of religion still being responsible for "psychological bondage" amongst African Americans well into the twentieth century. See Argyle and Beit-Hallahmi, The Social Psychology of Religion, p 108, citing W. H. Grier and P. M. Cobbs, The Jesus Bag, McGraw Hill (New York, 1971).
§. Letter dated September 15, 1682, from Cotton Mather [1663-1728] to John Higginson [1616-1708]:, quoted (in a footnote) by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces. cited by Professor Robert Phillips, American Government and Its Problems, Houghton Mifflin, 1941, and by Dr. Karl Menninger, Love Against Hate, Harcourt , Brace and Company, 1942, p. 211":
To ye aged and beloved, Mr. John Higginson [1616-1708]:
There be now at sea a ship called Welcome, which has on board 100 or more of the heretics and malignants called Quakers, with W. Penn, who is the chief scamp, at the head of them. The General Court has accordingly given sacred orders to Master Malachi Huscott, of the brig Porpoise, to waylay the said Welcome slyly as near the Cape of Cop as may be, and make captive the said Penn and his ungodly crew, so that the Lord may be glorified and not mocked on the soil of this new country with the heathen worship of these people. Much spoil can be made of selling the whole lot to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar and we shall not only do the Lord great good by punishing the wicked, but we shall make great good for His Minister and people.
Yours in the bowels of Christ,
Cotton Mather
§. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, p 92. The biblical reference is to Numbers 31:13-18.
§. Tribe, 100 Years of Freethought, p 21.
§. The issue generally came to court only because of insurance claims, slaves being property like any other. A key case (concerning a ship called the "Zong" from which slaves had been jettisoned) was heard in 1783. See Walvin, Black Ivory A History of British Slavery, pp 16-22.
§. James Walvin, Black Ivory A History of British Slavery, p 304.
§. James Walvin, Black Ivory A History of British Slavery, p 190.
§. To his credit Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, marshalled a public apology in 2006 for the Anglican Church"s role in promoting slavery guardian.co.uk
§. Frederick Douglas, Autobiographies: Narrative of a Life, My Bondage and My Freedom, Life and Times, Henry L. Gates, Jr., ed. (New York, Library of America, 1994), cited by Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, p 343.
§. "Gospel Truth", The Independent on Sunday, 15 th May 1996.
§. Slavery within England itself had been confirmed to be contrary to the common law in 1772. The slave trade was made illegal in 1807 and ranked with piracy from 1824. Slavery was made illegal in all British territories in 1833.
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