Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And do you remember when we used to have fun on this program? And we'd play goofy music at the end, and there would be fart jokes, and we would talk about movies and video games and laugh about things. But then do you remember when I after that I started talking about the horrifying practice of slavery in the ancient world? And it was hard to make fart jokes work with that. I remember. Look, this is bleak material that we're covering. And for those of you who maybe haven't been around for a couple of days, this is what we're doing. We're trying to make sense of what the New Testament says about slavery and what's going on with the situation in the book of Philemon. We're trying to make sense of what Paul's talking about here at the end of Colossians in Colossians chapter three when he talks about slaves and masters. I guess tacitly we're trying to tackle the question of a common modern criticism of Christianity in the Bible that, you know, Christianity in the Bible approve of slavery. I mean, we're working through very difficult things here. And I'm not trying to be unfunny, it's just bleak. It's hard stuff. And so yesterday I started reporting back to you what I found in doing this very consuming deep dive that I've quietly been doing behind the scenes for the last few weeks, where I've been reading hundreds of ancient sources on slavery, what it was like, and all these different capacities. And I'm reporting that back to you now. And yeah, and please don't mistake my at times clinical tone for approval or indifference to the plight of what these long-dead people went through. My heart is pretty soft about what they went through. Also, please don't mistake what people in the ancient world went through in slavery for being identical in every way to the slavery that we read about in the American South and history books in high school and in college. What I have found is I've read all this stuff is what we suspected, really. These are very different things. And I'm becoming more and more convinced that if Paul wrote the New Testament or the parts of it that he wrote in 1859 and he wrote to a town in the American South and a slave owner in the American South, I think it would sound different than what he wrote speaking into this kind of slavery that I think could be just as evil as slavery in the American South at its worst, right before the Civil War, but that I think had the capacity to be way more tame and at times also to look way more like just a job or an alternative to slaughtering everyone you defeated on the battlefield, or an alternative to basically uh just post-birth abortion, which was an evil but yet common poverty-induced practice among the pagans in the ancient world. My point is this is a complicated thing, and I'm trying to give it uh a complex and fair treatment so that instead of just, you know, spouting whatever opinions come to mind, we can think critically and from an informed position about what's going on here in the parts of the Bible that we're focused on. So yesterday I gave you my first two big observations after reading all of this stuff. Observation number one is that slavery in the ancient world wasn't racist, it was classist, and there was a flimsy rationale behind that, and it betrayed a certain insecurity that people involved in this all sort of seem to have felt across the centuries. Second observation, there were four, well, I guess five ways to become slaves that we looked at yesterday, and there's quite a spectrum of that experience and what horrors might go along with that. And observation number three that I want to share with you today is that all of this reading I've done gives me the impression that people in the ancient world felt like slaves were two things at once that are in conflict. A, they felt like slaves were morally incompetent, they were just less capable than you and me as free people of making moral decisions, of doing ethical things, of functioning with ethical patterns or in a principled manner. Like Aristotle from the quote I read you yesterday. If somebody is capable of being enslaved, then they are by nature less. They are by nature a slave, and that's different than free people. So the assumption in the ancient world was slaves are a morally incompetent, but b absolutely expected to behave morally. And if you didn't, oh, you're not getting the carrot, you're getting the stick, oftentimes, quite literally. We'll get to that one later on. So this is one of those really weird. I mean, you've encountered this, right? In situations that you thought were unfair at work or maybe in your upbringing or uh on a team with a coach that frustrated you, a boss you didn't like, a situation where you feel like you're getting mixed messages, you're getting conflicting signals from somebody. Heck, maybe this is happening, you know, in a dating relationship that you had. But, you know, it's the old uh give them the stick, don't give them the stick thing that I've referenced to you so many times over the years. Like, what do you want me to do? If I'm not capable, I'm pretending to be an ancient world slave now. If I'm not capable of making ethical decisions, why are you putting me on trial, finding me guilty, and then beating me for not making an ethical decision when no one was there to tell me what decision to make? You know, at times it was the slaves who would raise these objections, but more so, this is just one of those kinds of contradictions that at times is latent underneath the bedrock of a society where everybody knows the contradiction is there. No one is going to do anything about the contradiction, and it has a corrosive effect on the soul of civil society because everybody knows we have this really key thing about how we do law or culture or relationships or whatever that is a complete fraud and makes no sense, but we're not gonna challenge it and we're not gonna do anything about it. We're just gonna move forward with it, I guess. Here's an excerpt that I think illustrates this. Uh, there's a guy who was a contemporary or close to contemporary of Aristotle. I don't remember the timeline perfectly, but we're talking, you know, late 400s, early 300s BC here. The guy's name is Xenophon. You've probably heard of him. Sounds like it starts with a Z, but it starts with an X. And he wrote a book called The Householder. Aristotle, I think, also has a work called The Householder. But here in this work, you hear the otherwise brilliant Xenophon wrestling with that same corrosive tension that I just mentioned a minute ago. He's trying to figure out what the relationship is between the moral incompetence of slaves, but also how slaves seem to do better when they have good masters. But then also sometimes it doesn't work out like that. It almost sounds like he's scratching his head here. Here is what he has to say. It is hard to learn to do something well if the teacher's demonstration is bad. And when a master sets an example of carelessness, it is difficult for the slave to learn to be careful. In the larger context, he's not just talking about doing the work well, he's talking about ethics. To put it briefly, I don't think I can remember a case of good slaves belonging to a bad master. I do, however, know of bad slaves who belonged to a good master, and they're punished for it. If you want to make people capable of being managers, then you have to supervise their work and examine it, and you'll have to be willing to reward those responsible for what has been done well, and you must not be frightened to punish as he deserves someone who is careless. So clearly, Xenophon's solution to this is the solution that the ancient world seemed to embrace, and that all slave-holding civilizations embrace, which is yeah, slaves probably generally are less morally capable than everybody else, but through beatings and threats, and maybe occasionally even rewards, you can get them to behave as though they were ethically competent in an imitation of actually ethically competent people, those being free people. We can't see each other when I do the podcast because there's no video component to this. So you can't see all of my body language and my eyebrows and my mocking faces. But like just to check in and be clear, you can tell I don't agree with Xenophon, right? You can tell when I'm doing shtick and doing the voice of the people who owned slaves and we're trying to reason it through because that's what I was just doing there. All right, here's a fourth big observation after reading all of these primary sources. It's just sort of a tempering of the last one. Sure, slaves aren't morally competent, the slave owners in the ancient world would say, but slaves aren't evil inherently either. They're just less, and slavery is a mercy that we can show these lesser beings. To illustrate this attitude, here is a quote from right around the time of the birth of Jesus by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, which, if you recall, that's where Herodotus, the great historian of the Persians, was from. All right, here's what Dionysius has to say. Since I have reached this part of my account, I think it's essential to describe the attitudes which the Romans had at that time toward their slaves, in case anyone should criticize either the king who first decided to give citizenship to people who had been enslaved, or those who accepted such a law for abandoning sensible and fine traditions. The Romans obtained possessions of slaves through extremely legitimate procedures. Either they bought from the state those who were sold under the spear, so people, you know, captured more, as part of the booty, or a general would allow those who took prisoners of war to keep them together with the rest of the plunder, or else they obtained possession of slaves by buying them from others who were their owners as a result of one of these methods. But by allowing those who had lost their own country and their freedom in war and had been useful to those who had enslaved them or had bought them from their captors, to have both these things restored to them by their owners, neither Tulius, doesn't matter who that is, don't worry about it, who established the rule, nor those who accepted and continued it, considered that what they were doing could be criticized as shameful or harmful to the community. Most of them were given their freedom as a reward for good conduct. And this was the best way of becoming independent of your owner. A small number bought their freedom with money they'd earned by working dutifully and honestly today. And even though we're getting a little bit on in time here, I want to read you just a bit more because this next paragraph from Dionysius demonstrates that the ancient world isn't one thing. These attitudes are moving, these laws are moving, different assumptions are happening at different times. So Dionysius here just described when times, in his opinion, were good. That was a pretty good set of attitudes towards slavery there. The slaves aren't evil. They lost at war, they were born into it. Good masters took care of them, and eventually a whole bunch of people got freed anyway. Those were the good old days. But now he's going to contrast it with the bad old days, which he considers to be the times at which the New Testament starts, the time at which Jesus was born. He goes on, but this is not the situation today. Things are in a state of such confusion that the fine traditions of the Roman state are ignored and disgraced to such an extent that people now buy their freedom and immediately become Romans with money they've acquired through brigandage and robbery and prostitution and similar disreputable activities. Slaves who have advised and supported their owners in poisonings and murders and crimes against the gods of the community receive their freedom from them as a reward for the awful things they did. I personally know people who conceded freedom to all their slaves only after their own deaths, so that as corpses they would be acclaimed as good men, and so that there would be lots of people wearing the felt liberty caps on their heads to follow their beers in the funeral procession. Remember the liberty caps from the Phrygians, little floppy smurf hats that the French also wore later on? Thought that was fun that he gave us that reference. Oh, Dionysius gives us a really dynamic account here of what he thinks is the glory days' attitude towards slaves. Slaves aren't evil, they were on the wrong side of a fight, yet maybe some of them are a bit simple. Freedom should be the end goal, if not this generation, next generation. Look, do I personally, Matt Whitman, think that's good enough? No, but it's a lot better than a whole lot of other things I've heard about slavery over the years. But I think it's really interesting that Dionysius then goes on to be like, but now it's getting dumb with slavery. You have all of these abusive, scandalous things that have become normalized, where slaves are being used as assassins and hitmen, and then that's the only way they can be freed. Is that really the example we want to give to slaves for like this is your pathway to freedom? Just murder somebody on behalf of your master and then lie to cover for them. What? And you got this weird, performative manumission freeing of slaves after they are dead, so they look good. That's an awful look as well. In the opinion of Dionysius, the whole attitude towards slavery that used to have a bit more purity to it, again, his words not mine, those good old days are gone. And now the slavery thing, it stinks, it's weird, it's worse than it used to be, and no good Roman should feel good about how this is functioning now. Interesting. Okay, so we got four big observations so far that we've done about slavery in the ancient world. One, it was not racist, it was classist. Two, there were a lot of different ways that somebody could become a slave. Three, the assumption in the ancient world was that slaves are morally incompetent, but yet they were still expected to act morally. And that was a weird cultural contradiction. Four, at least when attitudes were at their best, apparently the common assumption was that slaves aren't evil, they're just unlucky, or maybe simple, and that slavery is a mercy to spare someone's life and give them a shot to scrape their way back in. But that also there were some corrupting habits lurking on the horizon that might make the whole attitude towards slavery thing much bleaker and worse. Final thing here, just pulling back the curtain a little bit on the conversation between a few of you and me. I know there are some of you who are displeased with the amount of history in this season and uh particularly uh with the amount of time that we're spending on the slavery stuff. I have heard you on that. I like you. I really like that you're here. I really appreciate that you feel like you can reach out to me and share your thoughts, your opinion, your read on things. Thank you. You make good points. Also, I gotta feel good about how I do this, and it has to follow my curiosity. And I know that won't always align with all of yours, and I hate that. I wish that we could just all pull on exactly the same thread of our curiosity in the exact same way at the exact same time. But the truth of the matter is, this part of the season is really, really important to me personally. I wanted to know this stuff better. I've thrown a lot of work at trying to understand it better, and so uh please do not feel slighted or disregarded or unappreciated, as it probably feels like I'm ignoring you and continuing to invest in this extra-biblical history stuff that I think frames up Colossians and Philemon in a really important way. We do have a few more episodes of this to go. And if this sounded like an apology for that, you've misunderstood me. It isn't that. It's just my best attempt to say, hey, uh I heard from a few of you. I appreciate you. And I'm just gonna ask for your patience with me as I work through this stuff that I think is really important. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.