Tag Archives: doulos

A Reply to a Slave

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I’ve discovered this new gizmo that lets me look stuff up on the Interweb. Goober or somesuch. I used it to find the meaning of ‘doulos’ that the absence of dictionary prevented you from doing. All of the results Goober brought up described doulos thusly:

Doulos (Ancient Greek: δοῦλος, Greek: δούλος, Linear B: do-e-ro) is a Greek masculine noun meaning “slave”. Wikipedia

Doulos (a masculine noun of uncertain derivation) – properly, someone who belongs to another; a bond-slave, without any ownership rights of their own. Biblehub (Christian site)

…anyone could become a slave, in a sense. However, once someone was sold into slavery, they remained a slave for life, and all of their offspring automatically became slaves as well. The only standard way of obtaining freedom was to earn enough money to pay your owner back as much as he had paid for you in the first place. This was a nearly impossible task to accomplish because slave owners did not often facilitate their slaves ability to earn money on the side. As such, most slaves, and their offspring remained slaves for the totality of their lives. Slavesandsons (Christian site)

Doulos is a Greek word in the Bible that has only one true historical option for accurate translation into English, which is slave. It literally means to be owned by someone for a lifetime. This word is found at least 127 times in 119 verses in the New Testament scriptures. It is used in the context of human slavery, which, sadly, was very common throughout the ancient Roman Empire for hundreds of years. Recorder.com (Christian site)

You’ll see none of them say what you say, Don. None think slavery was a nice amicable arrangement. Christian sites especially emphasise how slavery was a downright awful thing so’s they can sermonise about how Jesus saves us from slavery to sin.

If you’re going to reduce real world, God-approved slavery to something akin to a nice comfortable arrangement, you diminish the metaphor of Christ’s redemptive work to… not much at all. (Which of course it isn’t.) I noticed you didn’t comment on this point when I mentioned it in an earlier post and here you are digging yourself in deeper with your ‘slavery wasn’t really all that bad’. Good work, Don!

You’re certainly enslaved to all this Christian mumbo-jumbo. To Christ though, not really. There’s no such being and you certainly don’t give the impression of being a slave in any real world sense. Perhaps that’s because you have no understanding of what slavery was and is.

Jesus Shows How To Treat Slaves

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Jesus’ parable of the talents

Three slaves are given money by their owner, two invest it while the third buries his share. He is castigated by his master (yes, it’s Jesus as his favourite metaphor: slave master) who says to him on his return:

I tell you that to everyone who has, more will be given, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me. (Luke 19:26-27)

I know, that last sentence doesn’t fit the rest of the story, but it tells us what a despicable s**t Jesus was, quite happy to see those who didn’t want a peasant with delusions of grandeur lording it over them exterminated. Thank God the Romans got to him first (if indeed he existed.) No-one likes a dictator, specially not another dictator.

How about the conclusion to the actual parable, the one about the slaves and the money? The talents are evidently a metaphor for something or other. According to Christianity.com, it’s that the third slave, ‘didn’t take joy in the promise of the master’s return but instead wasted his time, his opportunities, and the master’s money.’

In other words, it’s fanatic talk aimed at those with a lack of commitment to the cult and its beliefs, including the ‘master’s’ imminent return, when wastrels will be in big trouble. As Christianity.com puts it:

Those who are not (faithful) may face the harsh reality of being called a wicked and lazy servant. Worst of all, they may not share in the joy of their master’s presence when he returns.

And there we have it, the softening of Jesus’ dictatorial original: ‘will’, as in ‘will lose everything’ becomes the hedging-your-bets ‘may’ while ‘slave’ (doulos again) becomes the watered-down ‘servant’. After all, we wouldn’t want to draw attention to how much of a cruel bastard Jesus was originally conceived as being. (Because, yes, these stories were invented by the early Jesus cult.)

The cult took no prisoners; in terms of commitment. It was all or nothing. Waiver in that commitment and you risked expulsion when the slave-master returned. So much for being redeemed unto salvation, so much for salvation by grace alone. If you weren’t utterly committed you stood to lose it all. What the original cultists weren’t to know, of course, was that the master would never return. The whole sorry parable was as irrelevant then as it is now.