Dr Paul Allen

Slavery in the Ancient World Slavery existed in most cultures in the ancient world and in all the cultures surrounding the land of Israel during biblical times. A slave could be owned by the state—such as the publicly owned slaves in Athens who served as a police force—or by individuals. The majority of slaves were prisoners of war who were sold into slavery. Slavery could take the form of debt slavery , in which people sold themselves or their children to clear their debts, punishment for crime, the birth of children to slaves, and the enslavement of victims of piracy or war. Slaves in state-owned mines worked under inhumane conditions and had a short life expectancy. Many household slaves, on the other hand, fared better. In addition to denoting a person’s legal status or identity, the term “slave” also denotes a power relationship between persons. Patterson defines slavery as “social death,” arguing that an enslaved person was “alienated from all ‘rights’ or claims of bi

Lee Strobel,  The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus   (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 166–69: Jesus and Slavery There was one other issue I wanted to raise with Carson. I glanced at my watch. “Do you have a few more minutes?” I asked. When he indicated he did, I began to address one more controversial topic. To be God, Jesus must be ethically perfect. But some critics of Christianity have charged that he fell short because, they say, he tacitly approved of the morally abhorrent practice of slavery. As Morton Smith wrote, There were innumerable slaves of the emperor and of the Roman state; the Jerusalem Temple owned slaves; the High Priest owned slaves (one of them lost an ear in Jesus’ arrest); all of the rich and almost all of the middle class owned slaves. So far as we are told, Jesus never attacked this practice. . . . There seem to have been slave revolts in Palestine and Jordan in Jesus’ youth; a miracle-working leader of