JESUS HIT SLAVEMEN, SLAVEWOMEN AND SLAVE CHILDREN

Jesus claimed that anybody saying any law in the Old Testament is wrong or even inferior will be punished for not a line will pass away from it for it is all meant to be fulfilled and honoured. Matthew 5. That was despite or because of it spending chapter after chapter spelling out how God wanted people to be enslaved and controlled. He attacked the Jewish leaders for many things including washing hands too much. He was very vicious towards them as you can see from Matthew 23 especially. There he oddly backed up their slave keeping by saying that nobody should doubt their teaching and the only problem was that they signed up to it and did live up to it right. He said they made up laws that God did not authorise and he condemned that. But surely they had rules that oppressed slaves even worse than they already were? Not a word from Jesus about that! Yet he said he came to make sure the law of God was understood correctly without people putting in their own interpretation and rules so that it could be fulfilled!

Jesus approved of slavery when he recommended us becoming slaves to one another. We are to be slaves to God for we are to serve him for his sake and not for any benefit even if there will be any benefit. And God could thrust you into Hell forever for a sin committed on your deathbed even if you lived a near-perfect life.

Christians approve of the New Testament God’s approbation of slavery but say that the reason for his approval was that the slave system was too deeply woven into the fabric of society for anybody to pick out. But this is untrue for God gave laws that the people hated far more than that. No hostels for runaway slaves were set up which proves the point. Thought God has the power to melt the frozen heart? His Christianity is full of unwholesome and shocking ideas like Jesus dying as a human sacrifice!

The Magnificat, the prayer recited by Mary at the Visitation and which is the most important prayer to Christians next the Lord’s Prayer, hints that slavery is right. Mary calls herself God’s slave-woman meaning she classed herself the lowest of the low in that Roman society she was part of and handmaiden is just a polite but inaccurate translation (page 99, Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine).  Jesus never calls her mother but woman and once disowned her by saying it is those who obey God who are his mother or whatever.  Her downgrading is consistent in the Bible.

The New Testament ratification of slavery was unavoidable because Jesus condoned all the evil of the Torah, the Law of Moses, because he understood this book as the word of God. Slavery was blessed under the Law of Moses which is the word of God according to Christians and Jews. My New American Catholic Bible of 1971 contains copious notes verifying that the Old and New Testaments permitted slavery. The New Testament went as far as to require that slaves be better slaves! As the Christadelphian booklet, Christ and Protest observes, slaves were never even told by the Bible prophets and authors and God to ask good masters for their freedom (page 3). Christadelphians argue from this that it is wrong to be assertive and that one must not defend oneself but that presupposes that slavery is wrong. The Bible commands assertiveness in the cause of Christ so they are wrong - the Bible thinks that slavery is lawful.

Jesus could have protested against abuses in the Temple outside but no he went in.  The gospels say he lost control there and rioted.  He targeted the sacrifice market where money was exchanged for animals for sacrifice. The Christians say Jesus just threw over a few tables in the Temple. That amount of violence would not have made any difference or any impact but it would have got Jesus into trouble. Jesus had to have done more than thrash up a few stalls. John 2 says he did a lot of damage and even got the animals out of their pens. These pens were strong. He didn’t do that with a whip. He must have had an axe with him as well. The John gospel is not telling us everything – but we will not be taken for fools by it.  The animals probably got hurt as well over him.  "He made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle".

The people he attacked were slaves who were forced to do the buying and selling and cheating for their masters who wanted to maintain their "good" image. 

"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's 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. He took the state of affairs for granted and shaped his parables accordingly. As Jesus presents things, the main problem for the slaves is not to get free, but to win their master's praise. There seem to have been slave revolts in Palestine and Jordan in Jesus's youth (Josephus, Bellum, 2:55-65); a miracle-working leader of such a revolt would have attracted a large following. If Jesus had denounced slavery or promised liberation, we should almost certainly have heard of his doing it. We hear nothing, so the most likely supposition is that he said nothing." MIchael Martin, Is Christianity Absurd? The Secular Web.

Jesus had to have met slaves who needed healing as their masters were allowed to over-work them and beat them. No record exists. Did he ignore them?

Jesus could at least have condemned the Temple for having slaves. He said nothing despite violently and publically objecting to it making money.

The subject had to have come up. Jesus then must have said slavery was right. Saying nothing would add fuel to the fire for him for people would wonder why he was not addressing it. He was already thought to be about upheaval. Saying nothing was about him trying to gain peace for himself without even trying to help those people and children who were trapped in a degrading system.

He must have had slave-owners following him and he accepted what they were doing.

He must have accepted donations of money from them, the profits they got from trafficking in human flesh.

Jesus could have got more followers by backing slave liberation or at least improving their conditions.

Jesus was never reported to have given away his dinner to the poor or to hand a slave some money.

It was all about the master. Slave culture was extreme patriarchy. The slave craved praise for there was nothing else and the alternative was being beaten or sold to a monster.

Normalising slavery in his parables sent the message that it was meant to last and not pass away. He could not even encourage others to rethink slavery.

His warning that society should worry about faith and nothing else for the world was about to end was guaranteed to keep slaves where they were. He knew he was being irresponsible for many like him had predicted an impending apocalyse that never happened.

There is no information at all on Jesus as a worker or as an example for workers. An itinerant celibate over-devout shouting preacher cannot be an example for the rest of us.

Human nature has always liked horrible twisted news stories and the gospels and the Bible provide plenty of them. Jesus' example is not good enough. People like to make themselves feel good by glorifying a poor role model. The role model is no real challenge to them but they pretend it is.

Jesus was guaranteed fame by siding with the slaves. He didn’t but sought fame other ways by doing his magic tricks.  To attack slaves to get fame shows exactly how little he valued slaves.  It has never occurred to people that the woman he racially abused for being from another nation and who he called a dog may have been a slave.  Slaves were called dogs and dogs were seen not as pets but as mere instruments for dealing with vermin.   He could at least have stood up for child slaves.  Many slave masters in the past did not tolerate enslaving children.  How nasty and low was he?

Jesus in Matthew 23 told Jewish leaders in public that they were murderers and would kill the prophets if the prophets were alive and told them to go and finish him off.  These men had wives and children and slaves.  By trying to inflame the violent against them meant that the ones who really mattered, the wives and children and slaves were going to suffer.  He could have told them, "As religious leaders even if others should have slaves you should not.  Depend on God and be the slave of the people and nourish their faith."  The silence is deafening.

Jesus told a mob that a woman he and they made a show of in public by exposing her adultery in John 8 that if they had no sin to go ahead and stone her.  He wrote on the ground.  Nobody is mentioned as seeing what he wrote.  It was not meant to interest anybody.  Was he calculating her price?  Was she a slave?  Was his problem not that she deserved to live but that the poor master would lose his property if she were slain?

BOOKS CONSULTED
 
ALLEGED DISCREPANCIES OF THE BIBLE, John W Haley, Whitaker House, Pennsylvania, undated
BIBLICAL EXEGESIS AND CHURCH DOCTRINE, Raymond E Brown, Paulist Press, New York, 1985
CHRIST AND PROTEST, Harry Tennant, Christadelphian Publishing Office, Birmingham, undated
CHRISTIANITY FOR THE TOUGH-MINDED, Editor John Warwick Montgomery, Bethany Fellowship, Minnesota, 1973
IN DEFENCE OF THE FAITH, Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1996
JESUS AND THE FOUR GOSPELS, John Drane, Lion Books, Herts, 1984
JESUS HYPOTHESES, V Messori, St Paul Publications, Slough, 1977
NEW AGE BIBLE VERSIONS, GA Riplinger, Bible & Literature Foundation, Tennessee, 1993
THE HOLY BIBLE NEW AMERICAN VERSION, Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington DC, 1970
THE JESUS EVENT, Martin R Tripole SJ, Alba House, New York, 1980
THEOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. Kittel Gerhard and Friedrich Gerhard, Eerdman’s Publishing Co, Grand Rapids, MI, 1976
THE UNAUTHORISED VERSION. Robin Lane Fox, Penguin, Middlesex, 1992
WHEN CRITICS ASK, Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe, Victor Books, Illinois,1992

No Copyright