Dissertation Spotlight | Enslavement to God among Early Christians

by Chance E. Bonar in


I wanted to make this intervention because the ubiquity of humans being described as enslaved to God or Christ is easy to miss. As Clarice Martin demonstrated in her 1990 article on womanist biblical interpretation and inclusive translation, scholars and translators have often disguised or euphemized language of enslavement because of a discomfort with acknowledging the presence of enslaved people within the pages of the Bible. I argue that the process of undoing euphemistic translation and uncovering the presence and logics of enslavement in Jewish and Christian literature does not stop with those depicted as enslaved to humans, but extends to those depicted as enslaved to deities.

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