fallsfromtrees wrote:
The apparent support for slavery in the New Testament primarily comes for the writings of Paul, who was actually had a fairly difficult tightrope to walk. He had to reconcile his understanding of the message of Christ with the existing Roman customs and laws. Advocating the abolition of slavery would have led to the short chop in very short order, as one of the major fears of the patrician class was a slave rebellion. Spartacus was only about one hundred years in the past, and was still remembered. Also the role of women in the society was very much as brood mares, and not much else, and Paul was clearly a misogynist, so it is not surprising that he denigrated the role of women in the church, despite that fact that women were significant supporters of the early church - again reflecting the mores of the times. The early Christian era was not the time for women's lib - the thought would have led to his immediate execution as a dangerous rebel.
We are getting into deep waters here. The passage I'm referring to is in Ephesians which probably was not written by Paul himself, but by one of his disciples after Paul was gone since much of the theology was Pauline. As for Paul's attitude toward women, he was the product of his times and it is not quite fair to judge him by the values of our own. And it ignores the reality that Paul saw himself with a very tightly focused mission of spreading the Christian faith, not introducing social change.
As for the rest of the Bible, Old Testament prophets and kings had slaves, apparently with divine approval. In the ancient world, slavery was a given. It was for a later time to seriously question it.
Don
