@Frank Apisa,
Frank Apisa wrote:My take on that is: Jesus never condemned slavery because the god he worshiped said there was nothing wrong with slavery.
Your comments, if you would.
Simplest comment would be: see my recent posts avove.
Let me reiterate. There is absolutely no evidence, Biblical or otherwise, that Jesus ever made a comment about slavery, apart from using slave/master stories as allegories for man/God relationships. Thus, we do not know whether or not he had any position in the matter. To say that he was in favor of it because he never actively opposed it is logical nonsense (as youwell know, Frank).
So let's get right to the nub of the matter, the fact that slavery was not only acceptable to the Jews of Jesus' time but fully sanctioned by their religious teachings, e.g. the passage from Leviticus that you quoted. Interestingly enough, by the time of Jesus, that passage was already being honored more in its breech than its observance. Most slaves were owned by the Roman overlords, not by the Jews themselves. Except for a handful of very wealthy families like King Herod's kin (and Herod, btw, himself was not ethnically Jewish although raised in the Hebrew religious mold so he's be acceptable as king of the Jews) most Jews themselves no better off than slaves under the Roman rule. It is inaccurate to say that the practice of slavery was universally -- or, I suspect, even widely -- acceted by the Jewish community in Palestine, in spite of Leviticus and a few other passages in the Torah. I have already alluded to the fact that the Essenes eschewed slavery and spoke against it. This has been attested to by no lesser authorities than Pliny the Elder (who was in Judea at about the time of the big Jewish rebelllion), Josephus, on whose memoirs abbout
The Jewish Wars historians rely on for most of their information and Philo of Alexandria, a contemparary Jewish scholar living in Egypt at the time of Jesus. They all say the Essenes kept no slaves.
Interestingly, the Essenes didn't particularly preach against slavery either. They were not 'abolitioniists' in the sense of certain 19th Century Amercans who opposed slavery here. It was assumed that if a convert became an Essene he would see the rightness of hard work without indentured help and there was no point in trying to foist this way of life on others. I strongly suspect that this was Jesus' position as well. If he thought that slavery was wrong, he still saw no need to preach against it. Anyone who came to see things his (Jesus') way would soon discern for himself that slavery was untenable. We're talking about 1st Century Judea here, not 19th Century America. The entire cultural millieu was quite different.
In the final analysis, does it matter?
We set up questions such as the headline on this thread with one thing primarily somewhere near the top of our thoughts: let's tweak the noses of those pain-in-the-ass dudes who call themselves Christians. Frank, if you're as honest a man as I think you are, you will acknowledge that some such thought crossed your mind. The point is that here we're not even talking about what Jesus might have or might not have done or said (because, in the finally analysis, we
don't know!) but, rather, let's get those Christians whose idiotic leaders, following the Pauline heresy of early Christianity, have totally perverted whatever might have been positive in the teachings of that dude from Nazareth.
And I totally agree with that: the churches (all of them of whatever denomination) have done far, far more harm than good in the long run. They call on Jesus at every turn, usually knowing absolutely nothing whatever about him as a histprical figure. Let's take the burden off the memory of Jesus of Nazareth and lay it where it belongs -- at the doo of the so-called Christian churches.
