Chains and Hope: Slavery in the Apostolic Age

A sweeping historical and theological exploration of slavery in the first-century Roman world and the birth of ChristianityIn the Roman Empire of the first century A.D., slaves were everywhere-and nowhere. They formed perhaps one-third of the population of Rome itself. They worked the mines, tilled the fields, managed the households, educated the children, and died in the arena. They were the "speaking tools" (instrumenta vocalia) on which the entire civilization rested. Yet their voices are almost entirely absent from the historical record.Chains and Hope brings that silent world to life. Mauro Tommaso De Candia guides the reader through the origins, markets, legal structures, punishments, and daily resistance of Roman slavery, before turning to the revolutionary encounter between slavery and the Christian message.The book moves from the Saturnalia and the mystery cults to Stoic philosophy, from the Jewish tradition of the Exodus and the jubilee to the parables of Jesus, the letters of Paul, and the case of Onesimus in the Letter to Philemon. It examines how the first Christian communities-where slaves and masters prayed together, shared the same bread, and called one another brothers-began to undermine the logic of ownership from within.The journey continues through the Church Fathers: Origen's vision of inner freedom, John Chrysostom's fiery preaching against the wealthy, Gregory of Nyssa's radical declaration that "God made no one a slave," and the concrete acts of liberation performed by Acacius of Amida and Saint Patrick.But the book does not hide the contradictions. It confronts the painful history of how texts about submission were used to justify oppression, how the Church sometimes collaborated with the slaveholding empire, and how Christian masters found ways to quiet their consciences while still holding human beings in bondage.The final part traces the paths to freedom: manumission, the peculium, legal strategies, collective liberations, and worship itself as a space where the enslaved could experience a dignity that no human law could grant. Each path is examined in its historical concreteness and its theological depth.Written with scholarly rigor and accessible prose, Chains and Hope is essential reading for historians, theologians, students, pastors, and anyone who seeks to understand how a faith born in the shadow of the cross gradually transformed-and was sometimes transformed by-one of the oldest and most persistent institutions of human domination.Today, as new forms of slavery-human trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage-continue to exist, this book is not only a history of the past but a call to recognize that the struggle between chains and hope is far from over.

Pages: 215, Paperback, Independently published