Chance Bonar, “Enslaved to God: Slavery and Divine Despotics in the Shepherd of Hermas” (PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 2023).
Readers of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament are often confronted with both enslaved figures and language associated with slavery. One surprising element is that slavery is at times described as a positive thing – particularly in cases where deities themselves are characterized as enslavers. For example, God told Moses in Leviticus 25:39–42 that the Israelites are his enslaved people (ʿabādai) and so cannot be made into enslaved people (ʿābed) for fellow Israelites; rather, the Israelites are told to enslave from neighboring people. They are already enslaved by God and so cannot be enslaved by another. The apostle Paul called himself an “enslaved person” (doulos) of Jesus Christ in Romans 1:1, and goes on to describe how enslavement to God frees one from enslavement to sin (Romans 6:20–23). John of Patmos claimed in Revelation 1:1 to have received Jesus’s revelation through an angel, and in the process, characterized himself as an enslaved person (doulōi) who is meant to share these visions with God’s other enslaved people (doulois). In the synoptic gospels, Jesus used enslaved people regularly to explain how God will punish humans who fail to do what is expected of them and reward those who are obedient. Examples of this sort only proliferate when we examine early Christian literature beyond the New Testament. My dissertation, therefore, explores how enslavement, especially enslavement to deities, was a conceptual resource used by some early Christian writers to explain their relationship to God and to justify particular social and ethical expectations.
I wanted to make this intervention because the ubiquity of humans being described as enslaved to God or Christ is easy to miss. As Clarice Martin demonstrated in her 1990 article on womanist biblical interpretation and inclusive translation,[1] scholars and translators have often disguised or euphemized language of enslavement because of a discomfort with acknowledging the presence of enslaved people within the pages of the Bible. I argue that the process of undoing euphemistic translation and uncovering the presence and logics of enslavement in Jewish and Christian literature does not stop with those depicted as enslaved to humans, but extends to those depicted as enslaved to deities. The ubiquity of this discourse is not surprising – early Christians were both among the enslaved and enslavers in ancient Mediterranean, and the evidence suggests that enslavement shaped the understanding of self, ethics, and community of ancient Mediterranean religious practitioners as a result. It is no doubt as a result that some also used the ancient discourse of enslavement to conceptualize believers as enslaved to God and God as an enslaver.
My dissertation examines how some Christians crafted the ideal Christian subject through the discursive context of ancient Mediterranean enslavement. I focus my analysis primarily on the Shepherd of Hermas, a first- or second-century CE text. The Shepherd is attributed to a Roman man named Hermas who records the visions, mandates, and parables he is given through encounters with two main divine interlocutors: the Assembly (Ekklēsia) and the Shepherd, also known as the angel of repentance. The Shepherd is split into three sections (the Visions, Mandates, and Similitudes) in which Hermas walks around the Italian countryside receiving visions and copying books, as well as participating in an extensive dialogue with his pastoral counterpart about virtue ethics, wealth distribution, ecclesiology, and eschatology.
While an analysis of the Shepherd may seem like an odd choice at first—given that even scholars in the field often comment that they read it once in graduate school and promptly tossed it aside after—the text actually offers fresh insight into early Christian participation in ancient Mediterranean discourses of enslavement. The Shepherd is one of our most well-attested Christian texts of the first five centuries CE (beyond all New Testament texts except for the Gospels of Matthew and John). It was used as a catechetical text and read in churches in late antiquity (as Eusebius, Athanasius, Jerome, and Rufinus attest). In addition, it was purportedly written by an enslaved or formerly enslaved person.[2] Not only that, but the text of the Shepherd itself claims that it is meant to be distributed to God’s enslaved people. Written contemporaneously with some of our New Testament literature, the Shepherd offers a window into how enslavement to God functioned in some early Christian literature and thought. I argue that through participation in the language, practices, and logics of ancient Mediterranean enslavement discourse,[3] the Shepherd both exhorts believers to be obedient enslaved subjects and portrays God as an enslaver capable of possessing, surveilling, punishing, and rewarding God’s enslaved people.
The dissertation consists of four chapters. In order to demonstrate that the Shepherd participates in a broader Mediterranean discourse of enslavement, chapter 1 argues that God’s enslaved people are characterized like other enslaved people in ancient literature. I especially focus on how the Shepherd encourages God’s enslaved people to be useful, loyal, and commodifiable for their enslaver. Utility, loyalty, and commodification are all relational concepts by which the enslaved are represented as being in an unequal yet symbiotic relationship with God: they benefit from being in right relationship with God by being offered life and happiness, and God benefits from them through their obedience and usefulness for God’s ecclesiastical building project. This building is depicted in the form of a tower that represents the Christian assembly, which is depicted as under construction at two points in the text and is central to the Shepherd’s portrayal of what God’s community ought to do and look like (Vision 3 and Similitude 9). Chapter 2 turns to the figure of Hermas himself, whom I argue is portrayed in the Shepherd as an enslaved literary worker. The textual composition, dissemination, and reading of the Shepherd itself is framed by enslavement insofar as Hermas is depicted as composing and copying revelatory material with the express purpose of circulating the Shepherd among God’s enslaved people. Hermas’s role as enslaved literary worker not only fits into broader ancient Mediterranean (and especially Roman) practices and discourses about whose bodies ought to do the physical labor of writing, but also allows us to see how an early Christian text makes visible its enslaved literary worker and the processes surrounding book production and circulation.
While chapters 1 and 2 focus on how believers are portrayed as enslaved in the Shepherd, chapters 3 and 4 turn to how God is depicted as an enslaver. The effects of enslavement to God manifest through early Christian conceptions of the body, agency, and ecclesiology. Chapter 3 aims to demonstrate that spirit possession is central to the Shepherd’s presentation of God as an enslaver. In other words, the anthropology and pneumatology of the Shepherd depict the holy spirit as the physical presence of the indwelling enslaver, who is capable of entering the bodies of God’s enslaved people in order to surveil them and affect their cognition, behaviors, and actions. Here, I build especially upon Giovanni Bazzana’s recent work on spirit possession to suggest that some early Christians (especially those influenced by Paul’s letters) understood the presence of the spirit to be God’s physical presence within the body.[4] Such a presence could be intertwined with discourses and logics of enslavement. Finally, chapter 4 takes up the issue of agency and argues that God’s enslaved people are treated as God’s instrumental agents in the Shepherd. This analysis not only emerges from placing the Shepherd within a broader Mediterranean context in which the enslaved are used by enslavers as limbs, prostheses, or proxies, but also in conversation with scholarship on enslaved agency in the Atlantic World.[5] I argue that God’s enslaved people in the Shepherd who fail to be used as effective instrumental agents and conform to God’s will are encouraged to repent—or else risk death through separation from God. Additionally, I explore how the Shepherd’s two visions of the tower, whose stones represent individual members of the ekklēsia, depict the process of uniformity and conformity that believers must undergo in order to become part of God’s assembly. Enslaved obedience is central to the Shepherd’s vision for both Christian individuals and communities, and is expressed in two ways: through opening one’s body to God’s presence and through reshaping one’s self according to God the enslaver’s will.
My hope is that this dissertation will be meaningful to future readers because of how it demonstrates that discourses of slavery shaped (and may still shape) how some believers constructed themselves as ethical, loyal, and pious subjects of God. My reading of how the Shepherd crafts such subjectivities and relations of believers to God in light of enslavement exposes how deeply entrenched some early Christian literature and practices were in ancient Mediterranean discourses of enslavement.
[1] Clarice J. Martin, “Womanist Interpretations of the New Testament: The Question for Holistic and Inclusive Translation and Interpretation,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 6.2 (1990): 41–61.
[2] I challenge the consensus that Hermas was obviously a freedperson, rather than an enslaved person, in “Hermas the (Formerly?) Enslaved: Rethinking Manumission and Hermas’s Biography in the Shepherd of Hermas,” Early Christianity 13.2 (2022): 205–226.
[3] I build especially on the concept of doulology coined and developed by Chris L. de Wet to describe the relationship between human and divine enslavement, particularly in late ancient Christian literature. See de Wet, Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015); idem, The Unbound God: Slavery and the Formation of Early Christian Thought, Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World (London: Routledge, 2018).
[4] Giovanni Battista Bazzana, Having the Spirit of Christ: Spirit Possession and Exorcism in the Early Christ Groups, Synkrisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020).
[5] See especially Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, rev. 25th anniversary edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022 [1997]); Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).