Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And one of the things that has been perhaps most interesting to me on Twitter during the Twitter era of my life, yes, I still call it Twitter, is the capacity for large groups of people to listen to the same individual, a public figure, say something, and then people hear completely different things based on their presuppositions, based on their read about the world. I'm not above this at all. I completely participate in this, though quietly I don't usually type what I think into the computer and then hit enter about most political things on the interwebs. But the same phenomenon that you and I have observed in the age of social media occurs when people go and look at the letter of Philemon. It's kind of a Rorschach test, right? It's a little tiny 25-verse inkblot on just one page of the New Testament in most Bibles. People look at it, and it is fascinating to me how very scholarly, very intelligent people can look at this and come to two very different conclusions about what Paul is actually saying. Here's what I mean. In the one camp are people who say, Philemon is a request for manumission. That's the fancy term for freeing a slave. Other people look at the letter and are honestly a little bit, you know, kind of grouchy or turned off, or they feel like they need to defend Paul for not demanding or requesting manumission for Onesimus. Which one actually is it? Well, I'm not going to solve it today, but I'll just read it to you. I mean, it certainly feels like it leaves the door open for Onesimus to be freed, but let me just read it to you. Cold read. What do you make of this? Is this a request for Onesimus to be liberated? Or is Paul suggesting that Onesimus be received back still as a slave, but treated well also as a brother, but still within the boundaries of that institution? Here we go, starting in verse 8. Therefore, although in Christ I could be bold and order you to do what you ought to do, yet I appeal to you on the basis of love. I then, as Paul, an old man, and now also a prisoner of Christ Jesus, I appeal to you for my son Onesimus, who became my son while I was in chains. Formerly he was useless to you, but now he's become useful to both you and me. I'm sending him, who is my very heart, back to you. I would have liked to have kept him with me so that he could take your place and helping me while I'm in chains for the gospel, but I didn't want to do anything without your consent, so that any favor you do will be spontaneous and not forced. Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back for good, no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He's very dear to me, but even dearer to you, both as a man and as a brother in the Lord. So if you consider me a partner, welcome him as you would welcome me. What does the inkblot look like for you? We'll have more time to sort that out down the road, but I can say this with certainty, after having read all of these primary sources on slavery from the ancient world, I can say with certainty that it is very possible that what Paul was doing there and how Paul knew his letter would be understood was as a request for formal legal manumission for Onesimus. I think you and I are going to have an easier time unpacking that if we know a little bit more about what the deal was with manumission in the ancient world, according to these sources. So, right now we're in the middle of a little arc here where I am walking us through big picture observations about slavery in the ancient world drawn from primary sources from the ancient world that I've been spending a lot of time reading lately. So far, we have four observations. One, that ancient slavery was not primarily racist, but it was classist. Two, that there were multiple ways to become a slave. Three, that slaves were regarded as morally incompetent, but still expected legally to act with moral competence. If that seems inconsistent, I'm right with you. Before, there was an attitude when things were at their best, that slaves weren't evil, they were just weaker, they were lesser, and that slavery could be a mercy. And yesterday, when we were talking about slaves and acting morally or failing to act morally, I referenced something that slave-owning civilizations across time have had in common, and that is the use of the stick, punishment, torture, even horrible things to get slaves to act morally competent, to behave in ethical ways. But before we get into the physical punishment, the intimidation, and the stick side of the motivation, I want to talk about the carrot side. And the greatest carrot of all that was held out in the ancient world as a way to keep slaves motivated and moving forward and behaving well was the promise of manumission. Such a complicated word. The promise of freizing, freedomizing, freedomegidiating. Honestly, I think manumission might be easier now that I've tried that out. So to just put it bluntly, my fifth observation here from reading all of this stuff is that manumission was very real. It was very obtainable. It is not just some made-up thing to that Christians came up with that they we kind of read into Roman history to be like, there, see, we don't have to feel so bad about the fact that there were Christians and slavery at the same time back then, because manumission might have been a thing. Oh no, it was a thing, it was a well-known thing, it was part of the deal, the contract on the front end, whenever anybody voluntarily signed up for slavery. And overwhelmingly, throughout the history of the various Greek civilizations in Rome, it was the end game, the end goal for the ideal master slave relationship when someone came to be a slave by being defeated in war or descended from somebody who got defeated in war. Manumission looks like it was a little bit harder to earn if some of your fellow tribesmen or a neighboring non-Roman tribe raided you, captured you, and sold you out to the Romans or the Greeks. Looks like that route to freedom was a little bit trickier. And as we discussed yesterday, the day before, whenever it was, if someone came into slavery by being given as an obelet, I don't know if that's the right term, but that's what you call it when somebody donates a kid to be a part of a monastery in the Middle Ages instead of setting them out to be exposed in the evil forest. If someone got given as a slave as an infant who couldn't be provided for by a family, I mean, just from what we read about how they did things in Thebes the other day, I mean, the end game, the end goal was manumission of some sort. Here's an excerpt from something in the 100s AD, written by somebody named Gaius. It's called The Institutes. This deals with a whole bunch of legal minutiae. And here we're dealing with questions of citizenship, not so much slavery, but it gets us into this part of the slavery and manumission conversation. It says, But if a slave has suffered no such disgrace, he outlines what kinds of disgraces earlier, he sometimes becomes not just free, but a Roman citizen when he is manumitted. And sometimes a Latin, which at that time was an even higher status. Gaius goes on, a slave becomes a Roman citizen if he fulfills the following three conditions. He must be over 30 years of age, his master must own him by a certain right, and he must be set free by a just and legitimate manumission. For example, that being by the rod or by census or by will. If any of these conditions is not met, he will not become a Latin. And then he goes on to describe provincial councils and Roman councils in Rome that could be assembled from time to time to do hearings about manumission, because apparently it was fairly easy to manumit a slave if there was no possibility of citizenship or Latin citizenship, but a little more complicated if somebody was maybe going to move from a state of slavery to a state of Roman citizen or elite Roman citizen. So Gaius goes on, he says, in the city of Rome, the council comprises five Roman senators and five equestrians. These are just different levels of legislators for the sake of time. In the provinces, it consists of 20 local justices who must be Roman citizens, and it meets on a some calendar stuff, certain day. At Rome, there are certain fixed days for manumissions before a council slaves. Over 30 can in fact be manumitted at any time, so that manumissions can even take place when the praetor or proconsul is passing by on his way to the baths or theater, for instance. Like literally, you know, if it was a will or the handing of the rod of freedom, it could be the kind of thing where uh somebody who was manumitting their slave could be like, hey, hey, hey, praetor. I know you're on your way to uh, you know, pickadouce, but uh just real quick, can you just like initial this or give this a stamp or just give me the thumbs up? I'm gonna free my slave. Yeah, it's cool, Bruce, whatever. And then that would be it. So it's really interesting to get this glimpse into what things look like just a little after the New Testament, in terms of the actual practice of manumission and what the prospects were for the carrot side of the incentive system that existed for slaves who had ambitions toward freedom and even citizenship. Here is another detail I think is very interesting. This is a story from somebody named Achilles Tatius, and it's a story about a landowner who'd been abroad for a really long time, and then she goes out to look to tour the grounds of all of the field slaves who were working. And somebody who was not supposed to be enslaved, she was from Melita or well, Malta, we call it. And apparently she ran up and was like, Oh, you master, mistress, I've been wrongly enslaved from woman to woman, show me mercy, hear my case. And so the lady listens for a minute, and I think I'm getting the details right here. And she's like, Okay, no, we're gonna resolve this right now. This is wrong. And then the master goes and corrects the administrator who got all of this stuff wrong. And it was kind of a cautionary tale for hey, let's make sure we get the boundaries between slave and free right. And this woman was manumitted on the spot. Here's one. This is from hang on, I'm gonna tell you. Oh, this is Aristotle. Okay, so this is from Aristotle's The Householder document. And you remember, Aristotle said some, you know, pretty dank things about slaves and their incapacity to function, that they are uh an animate tool. But then later on, he says this it is essential that each slave should have a clearly defined goal, telos. I know what that one means. It is both just and advantageous to offer freedom as a prize when the prize and the period of time in which it can be attained are clearly defined. This will make the slave work willingly. And let me give you one more example of this. This is from a few years before the birth of Jesus, about a hundred years before the writing of the letter of Philemon. This is by Cicero, a Roman statesman and orator, and listen to him argue vehemently for manumitting people in a timely fashion. He writes, After six years, members of the Senate, we can now hope for our freedom. We have suffered slavery for a longer period than careful and hardworking captives taken in war normally have to. Should we refuse to be wakeful, to be anxious, to make every effort in order to give the Roman people back its freedom? Now, clearly, you're smart, you're picking up the context here. Cicero is talking about Julius Caesar's dictatorship in this context, but he's using as an example, a counterexample to what's happening politically in Rome. He's using it as a counterexample the decency with which slaves are treated and freed after they lose in war, in contrast to how Rome is being held hostage for longer than that period of time in this era of weird political strangeness and unprecedentedness that was happening in the time of Caesar. I thought that was a pretty cool example. Here's the deal: obviously, we've got more conversation about manumission, and I've got some stuff from Christian sources after the time of the New Testament from the ancient world as well, that we'll get to as we dive back into the question of is Paul asking Philemon to manumit Onesimus or not. But after today, I feel like we're better equipped. I mean, before today, when's the last time you read anything about manumission in the ancient world from a primary source? For me, it had been a while. So after today, I feel like we are better positioned to understand the intricacies of what Paul was intoning and saying explicitly to Philemon and how Philemon and the rest of the Colossian church would have heard that. We've got more big picture observations about ancient slavery still to go. We'll do more of that tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.