Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And in boring movies, you have a tension between a bad guy and somebody who's on Team Good Guy. And pretty early on you figure out, oh, this is why the bad guy hates the good guy. And in boring movies, you get to the end and you are like, I was right. That's why the bad guy hated the good guy. I'm glad the good guy won. But in more interesting movies, the motivations of the bad guy turn out to be a little bit of a surprise. And in such movies, there's usually a moment where the bad guy and the good guy, with whom the bad guy has a gripe, they have a confrontation, and the bad guy will clarify their motives. The formula of this little speech is something like, You think I hate you because of thing number one, but I actually hate you because of surprise thing number two. And then you're like, oh wow, this is more complicated. Our our characters, our good guys are more compromised, our bad guy is more relatable. I'm still rooting for the good guys, but dang it, bad guy has a gripe. Chief example of this would be Javier Bardem's character in Skyfall. He's an agent like James Bond. And in that line of work, from time to time, agents just get burned. It happens. It's you know, it's hazards of the job. And so you think throughout the movie that Silva's gripe is that M, Judy Dench's character, the one who runs MI6, yeah, thank Silva's gripe is you burned me in the field, and I said I knew the the risks, but when it actually happened, it made me mad, and now I'm back for revenge, and that doesn't make you feel very sympathetic to him. But then when he actually spells out what his gripe is, his complaint is that M acted as a mother to him, loved him and mentored him and made him really believe that she cared for him, but then she devised this very deliberate strategy to sacrifice him, using his trust against him. Silva says, It wasn't that she left me behind. I don't hate you because of thing A. Rather, she sacrificed me, she lied, she used me. That is why I hate her. I hate her because of actually thing B. Well, we get another one of those. Why does somebody hate somebody switcheroos? When we go and carefully look at the entirety of the surviving record of what people thought about slavery in the ancient world. I think because the kind of slavery we all learned about the most and that was most recently defeated was a racist slavery. It's just kind of automatic in our brains to imagine that all slavery ever is probably racist and is probably along racial lines. But when we go and we actually look at the ancient record, what we discover is that society did not have disdain for and hate slaves because of thing A, racism. Rather, society hated and had disdain towards slaves because of surprise thing B, classism. Now, of course, from time to time, those two things are gonna overlap. But I just got done over the last few weeks. Maybe you caught me stalling a little bit last week because I was trying to buy some extra time to work through all of these sources. Over the last few weeks, I've read maybe every single contribution that we have access to from the ancient world about slavery. It was interesting. Lots of these lists that I looked up included Philemon as a primary source on how the ancients thought about slavery. I think that's kind of fun. I'm using these other sources to figure out what to make of Colossians three and Philemon. And a lot of these authors I'm reading who gathered together all these ancient sources are using Colossians three and Philemon to help make sense of what all these other sources are doing. It's kind of fun. So I want to share with you my very big picture observations while this is still fresh in my mind. I think this has such relevance to what we're doing with Colossians and Philemon. Okay. Number one, people were very confused about what to think about slaves. Even brilliant people like Aristotle and Seneca and Justinian did not know exactly what to do with slaves. For the hundreds of years, you know, I mean, there's probably a thousand years range of primary sources that I'm reading here. Over that whole time, people are making up these weird rationales to make it work. There was an insecurity that existed in the ancient world about the slave thing. It bothered people. They knew it was kind of screwed up, they sensed that it was just a matter of misfortune to end up on one side or the other of the slavery equation. And so they had to invent philosophical justifications for why this practice existed that so clearly benefited the master and so clearly did not benefit the slave. And I found one really important line of thought from the great Aristotle. This is a sad departure from his usual level of logical soundness, but this is what he says about how slaves are, you know, different from free people. And you'll catch the circular reasoning here immediately. Aristotle writes in his politics for a man who is able to belong to another person is by nature a slave. Huh? Okay, so Aristotle's logic here is that if somebody is a slave, then they were someone who was capable of being enslaved. So just obviously, by nature, there's something deficient about them, and they are a slave. Apparently, Aristotle couldn't imagine any way other than something that is an overflow of the deficiency of the enslaved, that someone could become a slave. It really is pretty laughable, but it looks like this stuff that Aristotle wrote in the 300s BC is sort of the flimsy rationale that runs as a through line through the very conflicted moral thought of all these other people I read in the centuries that followed in the Greek and Alexandrian and Roman worlds. Does it make sense? No, but it was a narrative. It was a little story one could tell oneself to say, well, they're, you know, they're a different class of people. They're morally deficient. And that's why they're slaves. How do you know that they're morally deficient? Well, if they weren't, they couldn't be enslaved. And is that guy enslaved? Okay, well, then obviously he's morally deficient. Let's just get on with our lives here. So again, I point back to that example at the beginning from Skyfall. I don't hate you because you burned an agent. I know agents get burned in this line of work. I hate you because it was personal and you loved me and you made me feel loved, and then you used me up and you knew what you were doing all along. Oh, they didn't hate slaves in the ancient world because they spoke a different language or they were a different ethnicity. They hated slaves, they looked down on slaves in the ancient world because of this weird, philosophically informed classism. Okay, so observation number one after reading all of this stuff is that if you were hoping there was some really insightful rationale for slavery in the ancient world, there isn't. It was flimsy, it was written by the victors, and I sense tremendous latent insecurity about slavery and the moral grounds on which slave owners stood. Now, a second big observation after reading all of these sources is that I've got way more clarity and certainty on the four main ways people became slaves in the Greek and Roman world. Onesimus must have become a slave almost surely in one of these four ways. Now, three of these ways that people became slaves are covered in this excerpt from a legal digest from later on in the time of Rome. Let me read you this excerpt. Slaves come into our ownership either by civil law or the common law of people. So two different ways. By the civil law, number one, if anyone over twenty allows himself to be sold in order to benefit by retaining a share of the purchase price. Okay. So one way you could become a slave is to sign up for it because it was a better deal than what you had otherwise. A second way, and by the common law of peoples, that is, those who've been captured in war, and third, those who are the children of our slave woman are our slaves. So there you go. Three ways. One, voluntarily sell yourself into slavery, two, lose in war. And I love the way this Roman digest is like, obviously, that's just like the common law of humanity. If you lose, well, I mean, we could put you to death. That would be a jerk thing to do. Or the nice thing to do would be to just enslave you. I mean, who knows? You might even end up in a good situation. Maybe a generation or two from now, you could uh somebody in your family could win their freedom back and climb the ladder again. And then the third way is if you're born into slavery, you're a slave. So what is the fourth way? Well, for that, I turn to Strabo. We get this excerpt about the slave trade here. He says, where the river Don flows into the Sea of Azov, there's a city called Tanias, I don't know if I'm saying that right, after the name of the river. It was founded by the Greeks who controlled the Bosporus, but it was recently destroyed by King Polemon for refusing to recognize him. It was the central place of exchange between the nomadic tribes of Asia and Europe and the people who sailed across the Sea of Azov from the Bosporus. The former brought slaves and hides and whatever else nomads might have to offer, and in exchange, the latter traded them fabrics and wines and all the other things pertaining to civilized living. The fourth way people became slaves is they got caught by slavers who were ethnically or culturally nearly identical to them in the far reaches of the world, and they got dragged to slave markets on the fringes of the Greek world or the Roman world, there they were sold. It looks to me like that was the worst way to come into it as I read more of that context. So there's your big four ways. Actually, hold on a second. I made a note here. Oh, yeah, there's a fifth. I caught this one little detail. You might find this interesting. This is uh right here. There's a fifth way that I had not heard of that someone might become a slave. And it's kind of like um the old cliche of like the leaving a baby at the fire department or something, like knocking on the door and running away for somebody who's in a terribly desperate situation and doesn't want to, you know, leave their baby out for exposure, but also can't take care of the baby, like that kind of tragic thing. It looks like there's an allowance for that described by somebody named Ayelian, who was writing, I don't know, maybe around 200 AD or just a little bit after, but he's writing about a much older practice. Here is the citation There is a particularly just and humane law at Thebes that no Theban may expose his child or condemn it to death by abandoning it in a deserted place, which is I mean, this is kind of uh it's pretty dark, but this is kind of how ancient abortion worked for most people. If they didn't feel they could keep a child, they there was sort of a designated place, like it was often called the evil forest, and they would just abandon their children there. That was called exposing a child. That's a whole other ancient uh social civil justice issue that maybe we can talk about more someday. But this uh excerpt goes on here. It says, if the child's father really is in dire poverty, then whether the child is male or female, he must bring it in its swaddling bands to the magistrates as soon as the mother's labor has ended, and they must take the baby and give it to whoever will pay them the least amount of money for it. An agreement must be made with this person stipulating that he should look after the baby and is to have it as his male or female slave when it has grown up and use its labor in return for having looked after it. So there is one more particularly tragic, but also, I mean, come on, merciful example of a way that somebody might become a slave. And as you think about those five ways, there is certainly a spectrum there of just absolute horror nightmare kind of scenario, all the way over to you never really knew anything different, and the alternative was to just be left for dead out in the evil forest. I don't know, what would you want? To be left for dead or to be given a shot. I I don't know, I've never been in that situation. I'm not a coward, I've just never been tested, I don't know what to do with that. But you are sensible people, and when we step aside from a lot of the modern assumptions and sensitivities, and we just try to think about another time and another place and what the options were in front of people, we can see there is a spectrum of how slavery was initiated there. They all feel a little bit like a little different moral equation to me, a little bit of a different place on the horror scale. So I have more observations, and I think these are very, very important to understanding Colossians and Philemon and the objection that people have to Christianity, like the Bible approves of slavery. This is really crucial stuff, kind of the heart of the season right here. So I'm not gonna rush it. We'll chip away at this stuff more tomorrow. But I think a good thing to leave in our heads as we walk away from this or as we pause today is just to go back to that initial example from Skyfall, the James Bond movie. In the same way that as a viewer, you would figure that the bad guy, Silva, is mad at the good guy, M, Judy Dench's character, because she just burned an agent and he was an agent who got burned, and he's bitter about it. In the same way you would figure that's the case, but then you're surprised to find out that he has a very different reason for hating her. So you and I are most likely going to look at ancient slavery and assume that racism is what fueled it because that is what fueled slavery in recent times. But when we actually go and look at it, what we discover is that racism actually seems to have had next to nothing to do with it. That concept doesn't seem to have existed in the same way as it has in modern times. Rather, there is a complex philosophical, convoluted moral classism that is at the heart of this ancient world slavery. And the beginning of understanding slavery and the Bible and Philemon and all of this starts with comprehending that difference. All right, more of this stuff about slavery in the ancient world next time around. What could be more fun, right? Matt, this is the 10 minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.