Slavery is the hardest moral problem in the New Testament. The texts do not call for its abolition. They regulate it, and in one letter Paul sends a runaway slave back to his master. Both Christians and skeptics have struggled with these facts. This page engages the evidence honestly, at full strength, without softening it or dismissing it.
Slavery in the First-Century World
Slavery was universal in the ancient Mediterranean. Roughly one-third of the population of the Roman Empire were slaves. Slaves were the backbone of the economy: they worked the fields, staffed the households, and filled the ranks of craftsmen, teachers, and administrators.
Slavery in the ancient world was not the same as the race-based chattel slavery of the modern Atlantic world, but it was still slavery. A slave was property. A slave could be bought, sold, inherited, and punished at the owner’s discretion. Some slaves lived in conditions of relative comfort as teachers or administrators; most did not.
Jewish law regulated slavery but did not abolish it. A Jewish slave was to be released after six years (Exodus 21:2), and the treatment of slaves was governed by Torah. Non-Jewish slaves were not subject to the same release provision.
What the New Testament Says
The New Testament does not call for the abolition of slavery. It addresses slaves and masters directly, and it does so in ways that assume slavery will continue.
Ephesians 6:5–9
“Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; … And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.”
This is one of the so-called “household codes” that appear in Ephesians, Colossians, and 1 Peter. They address slaves and masters, wives and husbands, children and parents. They do not question the institution.
The key passage is Paul’s letter to Philemon. Onesimus was a slave who had run away from his master Philemon, met Paul in prison, and become a Christian. Paul sent him back to Philemon with a letter asking Philemon to receive him “as a beloved brother” (Philemon 16).
The letter does not demand manumission. Paul does not say, “Free him.” What he does instead is significant. He offers to repay any debt Onesimus owed. He asks Philemon to receive Onesimus as he would receive Paul himself. And he says, in a phrase that is easy to miss, that he knows Philemon will do “even more than I say” (Philemon 21). The implication is that Paul expected Philemon to free Onesimus. But he does not command it.
One passage is often cited as a step toward abolition: 1 Corinthians 7:21. The Greek is debated. Some translations read, “If you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity.” Others read, “Even if you can gain your freedom, make use of your present condition instead.” The Greek is ambiguous. The majority reading in modern critical editions favors seeking freedom.
The Honest Assessment
The New Testament does not condemn slavery as an institution. This is a real difficulty, and any account of the earliest Christian moral teaching has to acknowledge it.
Three honest responses are worth noting.
First, the earliest Christian writings belong to a period when slavery was so deeply embedded in the structure of the ancient world that any call for its abolition would have been practically absurd. There was no mechanism for abolishing slavery in the Roman Empire. The first successful abolition movements would not appear for over eighteen centuries.
Second, the New Testament does undermine the foundations of slavery, even if it does not attack the institution directly. Paul says that in Christ there is neither slave nor free (Galatians 3:28). He tells masters to treat their slaves as brothers (Philemon 16). He treats Onesimus, a fugitive slave, as a Christian brother and expects Philemon to do the same. These are not abstract claims. They are the seeds of an idea that eventually made slavery untenable.
Third, the history of the church is mixed. For most of its first eighteen centuries, the church did not call for the abolition of slavery. It was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Christian abolitionists — Wilberforce in England, the Clapham Sect, the American abolitionists — made the case for abolition on explicitly Christian grounds. Both sides of the American slavery debate quoted the Bible. Both sides were composed of Christians. This is a fact that demands honest engagement, not defensiveness.
The most common skeptical objection is this: if the New Testament were truly the word of a morally perfect God, it would have condemned slavery outright. The fact that it does not is evidence that the writers were shaped by their culture, not by divine revelation.
This objection deserves a serious response. It should not be dismissed with the observation that slavery was universal in the ancient world. Universal wrongs are still wrongs.
The response, for the reader who believes the New Testament is authoritative, is not that the difficulty is not real. It is that the moral trajectory of the New Testament moves toward the abolition of slavery, even though the New Testament itself does not arrive there. The New Testament’s own principles — the equal worth of every person, the brotherhood of all believers, the command to love the neighbor as oneself — are incompatible with treating a human being as property. The abolitionist argument was not an innovation that contradicted the New Testament. It was the working out of the New Testament’s own logic, over a period of centuries, by Christians who took its claims seriously.
Philemon, in Full
The letter to Philemon is short enough to read in one sitting. The reader is encouraged to do so. It is one of the most personal letters in the New Testament, and it shows how Paul attempted to navigate the moral complexity of slavery without either accepting it fully or calling for its immediate abolition.
The reader who reads Philemon carefully will notice that Paul says more than he commands. He appeals, he hints, he expects Philemon to understand. He does not issue an apostolic decree. He invites Philemon to see Onesimus differently — not as a slave, but as a brother.
Why the Topic Matters
Slavery is the clearest example of the New Testament’s embeddedness in its own world. It is where the reader sees, honestly, that the texts were written by human beings who lived in a particular time and place, and that some of the moral assumptions of that time and place were not challenged directly by the earliest Christians.
Engaging this honestly is more fruitful than either pretending the difficulty does not exist or using it as a reason to dismiss the entire tradition. The texts are what they are. The reader who examines them without flinching will understand them better than the reader who has already decided what he wants them to say.
