Tomorrow I’m teaching the Gospel of John to one of my classes and I was struck by some of the translating decisions in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible in regards to slave imagery. I’ll go into the specific examples shortly and then connect that to the work of Joseph Miller, a historian of African slavery.
In John’s account of the Last Supper, at one point Jesus addresses his disciples with the following:
“You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” (15.14-5)
What is interesting is that NRSV notes that the word servant here, doulos, can mean slave. But the fact that they relegate this meaning of doulos to the footnotes means that they are giving the meaning of servant a higher priority. The problem is that doulos’ primary meaning is slave. The NRSV uses this meaning when they translate another passage:
“Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear. The slave’s name was Malchus.”(18.10)
The NRSV knows that slaves could be armed and could even partake in keeping the peace of city (cf. 18.26), but as the passage in 1.514 makes clear, they’re a bit uncertain about Jesus addressing his own disciples as slaves. (On an unrelated note, I love how John gives us the name of this slave. None of the other Gospels provide this detail and it’s something that I want to investigate further at some point).
However, as the work of Dale Martin shows, early Christians were quite comfortable with using the metaphor of slavery to describe their relationship with Jesus (Slavery as Salvation: the Metaphor of Salvation in Pauline Christianity). One of the main points of Martin’s argument is that the Greeks and Romans associated powerful people as having powerful slaves. As such, if Jesus is powerful, as the early Christians thought he was, then it was appropriate for him to have slaves, and in turn those slaves would powerful. Hence Paul was willing to call himself a “slave to Christ” in numerous places within his epistles.
Alright, how does all of this relate to the work of the African historian Joseph Miller? Well, Miller wrote a book, The Problem of History as Slavery, in which he argues that historians need to stop falling for the seductive promise of sociology when writing their histories of slavery. More specifically, what Miller is concerned about is that historians are using their conception of slavery as an institution (one that can exist in many cultures, but nonetheless has a coherent identity that transcends time and place) to explain historical changes rather than using historical changes to explain the how and why of specific examples of slavery. In other words, Miller would point out that we need to be willing to accept descriptions of ancient slavery like Martin’s and jettison our assumptions that ancient slavery was similar to modern slavery.
In John’s account of the Last Supper, at one point Jesus addresses his disciples with the following:
“You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” (15.14-5)
What is interesting is that NRSV notes that the word servant here, doulos, can mean slave. But the fact that they relegate this meaning of doulos to the footnotes means that they are giving the meaning of servant a higher priority. The problem is that doulos’ primary meaning is slave. The NRSV uses this meaning when they translate another passage:
“Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear. The slave’s name was Malchus.”(18.10)
The NRSV knows that slaves could be armed and could even partake in keeping the peace of city (cf. 18.26), but as the passage in 1.514 makes clear, they’re a bit uncertain about Jesus addressing his own disciples as slaves. (On an unrelated note, I love how John gives us the name of this slave. None of the other Gospels provide this detail and it’s something that I want to investigate further at some point).
However, as the work of Dale Martin shows, early Christians were quite comfortable with using the metaphor of slavery to describe their relationship with Jesus (Slavery as Salvation: the Metaphor of Salvation in Pauline Christianity). One of the main points of Martin’s argument is that the Greeks and Romans associated powerful people as having powerful slaves. As such, if Jesus is powerful, as the early Christians thought he was, then it was appropriate for him to have slaves, and in turn those slaves would powerful. Hence Paul was willing to call himself a “slave to Christ” in numerous places within his epistles.
Alright, how does all of this relate to the work of the African historian Joseph Miller? Well, Miller wrote a book, The Problem of History as Slavery, in which he argues that historians need to stop falling for the seductive promise of sociology when writing their histories of slavery. More specifically, what Miller is concerned about is that historians are using their conception of slavery as an institution (one that can exist in many cultures, but nonetheless has a coherent identity that transcends time and place) to explain historical changes rather than using historical changes to explain the how and why of specific examples of slavery. In other words, Miller would point out that we need to be willing to accept descriptions of ancient slavery like Martin’s and jettison our assumptions that ancient slavery was similar to modern slavery.