Black Slavery and the New Testament.

Black Slavery and the New Testament: A case study from the Parables

In the parable of the talents, the faithful slaves may be proud to advance their owner's interests, but they should certainly be fearful of the punishment that awaits them should they fail.

I was listening to this reading last week, and I was struck by how it was probably used as a stick in sermons to the black slaves when the European and American slave trade was taking off.

It is the perfect material for a sermon by a slave owner: slaves, obey their master, and be obedient, and use your skills to make him more money. So I wondered what the black community made of this.

In “Black Theology, Slavery and Contemporary Christianity” by Anthony G. Reddie there is presented an inverted interpretation based on the understanding of black slaves in America, and that heritage in the black community.

Reddie comments that:

"Matthew clearly uses the language of slavery. Moreover, in no way does he indicate that these slaves are atypical. Rather, his parabolic slaves personify first-century stereotypes of managerial slaves.”

“Do these parables tell slave success stories, offering evidence that slavery could serve as a positive route to advancement in the ancient world? In one sense we may respond affirmatively. The Matthean parables depict slaves who enhance their own positions by diligently pursuing their owners' interests.”

“At the same time, however, every Matthean parable that features a managerial slave also highlights the vulnerability of such slaves to physical abuse. An elite slave may have sufficient access to his owner's estate to accrue an enormous debt of ten thousand talents, but this slave still knows that his master has absolute rights over his body, rights that include the prerogatives of torturing him or selling him and his family into a harsher slavery, which could include the sale of family members to geographically scattered households.”

Some of those enslaved in the Slave Trade, if they had bibles, would tear out those pages which told a slave to be dutiful to their master.

Reddie looks at how the parable of the talents can be seen, from the viewpoint of the subjugated slave, as a story told from the point of view of the master, rather than that of the slave, and how we can read between the lines a story in which the third slave is the only one who stands up to his oppressor:

“We have the situation presented of a slave master giving differential amounts of money to his slaves. Two of the slaves double the money, while a third slave, who was only given one talent/pound returns the one talent, stating the master was an oppressor and he feared losing the funds and decided not to play the game. The master confirms that the assessment of him as a harsh task master was true. It is the third slave who had the courage to stand and name the system as oppressive and consequently told the master the unsparing truth about himself. Unsurprisingly, he is the one who is thrown out. The other two slaves are called good and trusted slaves and are rewarded”

“As we are accustomed to interpret this parable, we are encouraged to dislike the slave with the one talent who in Mt 25:26. is called wicked and lazy. and in Lk 13:22 is called wicked. We preach this passage with the message. ‘Stop worrying about what other people have and do the best with what you have! ‘”

“By this reading, we are encouraged to stop thinking that this parable, as do so many others, speaks essentially of slavocracy. We miss this aspect. and continue to proceed with the one talent being taken from one slave and given to the other slave, who started out with the most and who has the most....We also miss that the slaves who double the money are still slaves. While the one who was thrown out is now free‘“

This is also taken up in a thesis by Gerald West on “Thabo Mbeki’s Bible: the role of the religion in the South African public realm after liberation”

He explains how South African Black theologian Takatso Mofokeng emphasised the contested nature of the Bible, and that Mofokeng insisted that there are numerous “texts, stories and traditions in the Bible which lend themselves to only oppressive interpretations and oppressive uses because of their inherent oppressive nature.”

And he notes how in a speech to the International Labour Conference in 2003, the current South African President Thabo Mbeki engaged with the Parable of the Talents as seeing it as ““a money merchant, angry that one of his servants did not discharge his duties as a fund manager, by using the Talent given to him to trade in the money markets”

And Mbeki concluded:

“Among the hundreds of millions of the African world from which we came, as we travelled to Europe, the outer darkness into which the money merchant cast his unprofitable servant, there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth. Those who do not hear and do not see the agony, have neither ears to hear nor eyes to see”

This interpretation, as West notes, is not a typical one that we find in commentaries on Matthew, but it is apparently fairly common in marginalised communities, “reading against... a dominant tradition of interpretation”.

Jennifer Glancy writing on “Slaves and Slavery in the Matthean Parables”

“the slaves in the parable of the talents (25:14-36) serve as their master's financial agents” and that this and other parables “contrast the exemplary work of the faithful slave with the flawed work of the wicked slave”.

She also notes that “The representation of the slave's body as the locus of abuse is thus pervasive in the Matthean parables, constituting the most prominent aspect of Matthew's ideology of slavery. Consciousness of disciplinary realities produces the faithful slave, of a divine master as of a human master.”

There is something very deeply disturbing about these texts, which are complicit in practices in a society where slavery was rife. As Glancy notes:

“ a faithful slave is one who occupies a managerial position and has moreover internalized the master's interests to the extent that he will work unsupervised when his master is away. Slave morality is inextricably identified with the master's interests. In return for their labors, these faithful slaves receive additional responsibility

“The faithful overseer will have oversight of his master's entire estate (24:47); the first two slaves in the parable of the talents will have care of many of their master's affairs (25:21, 23). Even their rewards forward their master's concerns.”

In the parable of the talents, “there is no consideration of the possibility that the slave's moral options are separable from the master's interest.”

And she concludes that:

“The Matthean parables focus on managerial slaves, a visible and influen tial minority among the enslaved population. They promote the view that a slave's moral purpose is to advance the interests of his or her owner”.

And notes that:

“Modern sensibilities are likely to shrink from an endorsement of the master's grasping and punitive nature.”

Commentaries invariably, as Reddie observes, see the parable in terms other than those seen within a slave-owning society. The typical interpretation of Jesus' "Parable of the Talents" is that the talents symbolize gifts and abilities that God has given us.

But there is a brutality and harshness in some of these parables of Matthew which appear to endorse an image of God akin to a slave-owner.

Why does Matthew present the slave owner as so brutal in his treatment of his slaves? In some parables, there is a degree of cause: the slave who is not merciful as his master is, receives a just reward. But the parable of the talents is far more ambiguous.

Nils Chittenden, speaking at the Episcopal Center at Duke University, cautions against readings which downplay the harshness of the text:

“If the rich man represents God, and the slaves represent us, what does that say about God’s view of us, and ours of him? Does God view us as slaves? Do we think of God as an oppressive and harsh master that we live in fear of, and who’s bidding we have no choice but to do?”

“We are told that the rich man is harsh, and reaps where he does not sow. What on earth are we to make of this, if we stick with the view that the rich man represents God in this story? Even with the most charitable reading, ‘reaping what you do not sow’ sounds awfully like exploitation.”

Slavery and the New Testament, because of the use of texts as an instrument of oppression, will always be problematic. What is important is that do not gloss away this problem. Clearly there are different interpretations of the parable, as seen above, but it is important not to ignore or down play the very real impact of this text on a slave owning society, and how it would appear to the slave.