Slavery was widespread throughout the Mediterranean lands where Christianity was born and developed. Though Christians were both slaves and slaveholders, there has been surprisingly little study of what early Christians thought about the realities of slavery. How did they reconcile slavery with the Gospel teachings of brotherhood and charity? Slaves were considered the sexual property of their owners: what was the status within the Church of enslaved women and young male slaves who were th...

The author of 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus argues in favor of a “traditional” Greco-Roman gender ideology: that because men and women are biologically different, they ought to behave differently in the family and society. His gender-specific beliefs carry over into his teachings for the house churches, where only free married men are eligible to serve as leaders, teachers, and preachers, while women are expected to take up the subordinate female domestic roles of wife, mother, and house...

Investigates how discourse spills from language to action, generating, obfuscating, and perpetuating violence while also offering the words, principles, and practices that may interrupt itWe are continually catching up with and being caught by words, especially words that hurt. These collected essays probe the interaction of violence and words across time, place, and circumstance. Often cited as the core source of violence, religion’s capacity for coordinating idea...