Katherine Shaner, Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)

Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity is the first monograph written by Katherine Shaner, Associate Professor of New Testament at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity. The book, a refined version of Shaner’s doctoral thesis at the Harvard University Divinity School, was published in 2018 by Oxford University Press. The book aims at studying the presence and role of people of unfree status in religious institutions at the time of the Early Church, with a particular but not exclusive focus on Christian society. With a dual study of the architectonical, archaeological and epigraphical record from the ancient city of Ephesus (in modern day İzmir Province, Turkey) during the Roman period, as well as with a corpus of Roman and early Christian texts, Shaner constructs the theory that actors of unfree status could hold positions of power and authority in ancient religious communities.

The author aims at surpassing the current dominant scholarly view on ancient slavery, which presupposes the fundamental submission of slaves in most aspects of private and communal life – among other scholars holding this opinion the book mentions Jennifer Glancy and Dale Martin (p. 51-52). Such a position is viewed in the study as following too closely the narratives of the extant source material, which almost never portrays the point of view of actual people of unfree status. Instead, the author proposes a study more indebted to feministic hermeneutics, and working in particular with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s concept of kyriarchy, defined in the book as “intersectional systems of power relationships that benefit those already in power” (p. xv). By considering the power imbalance in ancient life, Shaner builds a discourse analysis to study the potential agency of slaves between the lines of her sources.

The monograph’s theory is built through its five chapters. In the first chapter, Shaner studies the presence of people of unfree status in the city of Ephesus through a selection of the city’s archaeological evidence. She focuses on three sites in particular – the harbour, the marketplace and the Terrace Houses, a set of elite-owned “multistory urban condos” (p. 13) – demonstrating how the architectonical logic of the city made its large presence of unfree people disappear in a conscious way. Chapter two is focussed on an Ephesian inscription, the so-called Persicus Decree (44-45), which mandates a limitation of the role of slaves in the city’s Artemis cult. Shaner interprets these limitations as actively combating the positions and roles – from servile to honorific – that slaves may have already had in the cult.

Chapter three then shifts to a study of a Biblical text, the letter to Philemon, specifically focussing on the individuation of the role of the slave Onesimus in the internal narrative of the text. By studying the rhetoric and language which defines the slave in the letter, most importantly the use of the concept of diakonia (p. 59-60), the chapter theorises the possibility of unfree leadership in the Christian community as understood by the writer of the letter. Chapter four returns to the archaeological evidence with an analysis of the supposedly non-elite characters in the Ephesian Parthian Reliefs (2nd century). It is Shaner’s view that, from the ambiguity of the portrayal of sacrificial practices on the Reliefs, viewed in combination with what the book has thus far shown on the role of unfree actors in religious cults, a tension can be recognised around unfree labour in pagan cultic practice – a tension which may further demonstrate the place unfree actors may have held in the institutions. Finally, chapter five considers a few early Christian texts – especially 1 Timothy, as well as Ignatius of Antioch’s Letter to the Ephesians and Letter to Polycarp – to study their portrayals of power-struggle between free and unfree actors. The chapter builds on a comparison between the elision of female and unfree agency in early Christian communities, and makes a further case for considering the existence of unfree actors on every level of ecclesiastical institutions, from fully enslaved workers to community leaders.

Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity is a book of many strengths. Most importantly, it refuses to be held back by dominant views in the field, and for that achieves a rare and precious view “between the lines” of the extant sources on ancient slavery, which chiefly portray the worldview of elites and slaveholders. Shaner’s argumentation is stringent and flows elegantly throughout her five chapters. In particular chapters three and five showcase her deep understanding of Biblical and early Christian texts through her analysis of the specific language of unfreedom and leadership in them. Still, in light of the large surge of studies on early Christian unfreedom of the past decade, the book presents a view of unfreedom that may appear to be too static and simplistic. I would have wished the author to delve deeper into the meaning of unfreedom in the period, while the book mostly treats slavery as a monolith term to be opposed to the free element of society.

All in all, the book provides a successful view past the rhetoric of ancient texts, getting to a fundamentally human truth behind the strictness of their language: slaves are people, and, at some level, even the slave societies of the Graeco-Roman world recognised this fact. I would recommend the book for an audience of graduate students and scholars, as the complex language and the wide reach of Shaner’s arguments makes the book a difficult read at times. For readers interested in the macro-topic of war, this book represents an interesting view into the lives that could befall those enslaved during conflicts in the period in which Christianity established itself in the Roman Empire.