andida Moss is a popularizer who is given to making wild claims that the stubborn text of the New Testament won’t support. Her Ph.D. is from Yale, in religious studies, and that should give her some heft on biblical questions; but you can easily refute her with Google, a lexicon, and some elementary knowledge of the biblical text and Greek language.
OH, CANDIDA.
In her latest performance, on January 1 at the Daily Beast, she promotes the revisionist work of Dr. Mitzi Smith in a scholarly collection entitled Bitter the Chastening Rod. I like the title more than the price. But I digress.
“Some readers,” Dr. Moss says, “will be shocked by Smith’s suggestion. How could we think that Mary was enslaved?”
“Well,” she says with supercilious confidence—as though she is about to present unanswerable evidence in front of our surprisèd eyes—“the answer is that [Mary] says as much.”
“When the Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary in Luke 1 and told her that she would conceive and give birth to a son, Mary responded by identifying herself as a doule [—] a Greek word that unambiguously means ‘enslaved girl’ (Luke 1:38). If we were reading any other ancient text written in Greek, we would assume that Mary was enslaved.
[That’s not at all true, as we will see below.
As [Dr.] Smith told me, “Any first-century reader, of any ethnicity, culture or religion, living under the Roman empire—a slave society where a significant segment of the population was enslaved and an empire that relied on enslaved labor—would have taken Mary’s self-designation as an enslaved woman seriously and as a declaration of her material or physical lived reality and not simply as a metaphor. And we should, too.”
Luke wrote his gospel, Dr. Smith says, “when Jewish people were enslaved in large numbers.”
As Professor Catherine Hezser has shown in her book Jewish Slavery in Antiquity [an even uglier price, dear reader; this is what libraries are for], ancient Jews also practiced slaveholding. Slavery would have been an easy and natural frame of reference for anyone who heard this story.
So? We can set aside this appeal to the presence of slavery in the Roman Empire; it doesn’t prove that Mary must have been enslaved too; not by itself. I can’t take that kind of thing seriously without additional, serious, historical evidence. That slavery existed, which no one denies, doesn’t prove the matter.
BOGEYMAN VS. THE LEXICONS.
So that leaves us with a single appeal to the word δούλη in Luke 1:38. Dr. Moss wants us to believe that translators have softened its rendering in English because of “culturally determined bias.” We’re all just classists and racists, she says.
“Translating doulos [f., doule] as servant,” writes [Clarice] Martin, “minimizes the full psychological weight of the institution of slavery itself. There’s nothing emancipatory about altering Mary’s social status: doing this obscures the realities of ancient people’s lives.”
Classism and racism are problems in Western culture. But are they to blame if we disagree with Candida Moss about Luke 1:38? Let’s check.
And what we find out, when we check, is that some translators of Luke 1:38 render doule as “servant.” And we also find that there is more variety than Dr. Moss would have us believe. Imagine that!
The King James, for example, says “handmaid.” The 1995 NASB reads “bond-servant” but the earlier 1977 version reads “bond-slave.” The Legacy Standard Bible and Holman Christian Standard Bible do translate doule as “slave.” Still other versions read “maid-servant.” All are variations of slavery.
Not only that, but every standard Greek lexicon—every one—tells us that “slave” is the primary meaning of doule.
- Strong’s [here]: “female slave.”
- Thayer’s [same link]: “substantively, a female slave.”
- Liddell-Scott [here]: “prop[erly a] born bondman.”
You won’t find any Greek lexicon that says anything different. No one is softening anything. The racists and classists must have forgotten to show up when scholars wrote the lexicons.
MAMA SAID SHE’S A SLAVE LIKE THIS.
That aside, there are two main exegetical reasons why Dr. Moss’s insistence that slavery was Mary’s “social status”— that she belonged to the “institution” of slavery—is nonsense.
- First, in Luke 1:38 Mary does not say that she is a doule, end stop. She says that she is ἡ δούλη Κυρίου, he doule Kyriou, “the slave of the Lord.”
Dr. Moss leaves that part out. Curiously, it’s the important part. If Mary had said “Behold, I am a slave of my master Brutus the Bold,” or Nathaniel the Nasty, I might believe that she was a slave by “social status.” If Dr. Moss puts so much stock in Mary’s own words, one would think she’d acknowledge that Mary calls herself not just a slave, but a slave of God. Who’s covering thing up here? the racists and classists, or Candida Moss?
- Second, the context of Luke 1:38 renders any discussion of Mary’s “social status” immaterial.
The angel Gabriel had just told Mary that she would conceive a child by the Holy Spirit. When she replies “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord,” her meaning is that she is totally surrendered to God’s will. It makes no sense for her to reply, “I’m a slave,” meaning Brutus’s slave, or Nathaniel’s. That would be apropos of nothing. Dr. Moss insists upon superimposing a discussion of social status into a passage about something else.
She does not do that with other passages. When Paul says in Romans 1:1 that he is “doulos Christou,” a slave of Christ, no one writes books or articles at the Daily Beast to instruct us that Paul was really a slave of some Roman or Jewish master. Apparently it’s okay for Paul to have meant something different, something more metaphorical, by “doulos.” But not Mary, not even when she says precisely the same thing as Paul. Other than the fact that it’s two different persons of the Trinity (and two different genders), “doule Kyriou” and “doulos Christou” are the same thing.
DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE GREEK SHE TOOK.
A third point. Dr. Moss is simply wrong when she says that “if we were reading any other ancient text written in Greek,” we would not superimpose a metaphorical reading upon δοῦλος.
Really?
- In his play Persians, Aeschylus uses the word to refer to khrematon douloi, “slaves of money.” That’s a clearly metaphorical usage. Aeschylus is not talking about social status but avarice.
- In a fragment from a lost play, Euripides uses the word to refer to gnathou te doulos nedos th’ hessemenos, “a slave to his jaws and belly.” That too is a metaphorical usage. Euripides is not talking about social status but gluttony.
(Both these examples, along with other metaphorical uses of doulos, are cited in Liddell-Scott.)
And while we find ancient writers who portray Jesus as a bastard child, we find none who portray him as a slave child. Certainly Dr. Moss doesn’t cite them, though one would think that would be important primary evidence substantiating her argument—if it existed. Wouldn’t Josephus, or Tacitus, or Suetonius, have thought to mention Jesus being born into servitude?
WONT TO BE WOKE.
Dr. Moss, however, as is her wont, takes less than a thousand words to practice the popularizer’s alchemy and transform theory into fact. Then she waxes righteous on the reasons “horrified” European Christians have engaged in a 2000-year “erasure” of this supposed fact. “Spoiler,” she writes. “It’s racism and classism.”
European Christians have spent 1,500 years thinking of Mary as the (white) Queen of Heaven, and this revelation doesn’t really fit with that. Recognizing that Luke portrays Mary as enslaved does not jeopardize any of the lofty theological claims that are made about her in Christian churches. The foundations of Christianity aren’t shaking. So why are people worried about social status when we should be concerned about exploitation? Ultimately, maybe, this isn’t about theology or history: It’s about our values and ourselves.
It’s a large claim indeed to advance a theory, and then to insist that, if we find no one talking about it until our own day, it must be because of “racism and classism.” That’s a tic, not an argument. It trivializes real racism and real classism to use those words so reflexively, as a cudgel against any disagreement, any contrary point of view.
Dr. Moss might have a point if Luke really did “portray Mary as enslaved.” But since he does not, all this rhetoric is nothing more than moral posturing. It’s an attack on the bogeyman. I personally have no difficulty at all, per se, with the idea that Mary might have been a slave (as in “institution of slavery” and “social status”). The difficulty I have is that it’s not what the text says; the text says she is a slave of God. The text says she has surrendered her will to God. Mary is obedient to God’s will, not Brutus the Bold’s will.
THE LOWLINESS OF HIS HANDMAIDEN.
There’s plenty, however, that Luke’s gospel does say about casting down the mighty, if that’s what Dr. Moss is looking for. No one has to turn Mary into an enslaved girl; they just have to read the Magnificat—which Mary proclaims later in Luke 1, during her visit to Elizabeth.
(And how is it, by the way, that a slave can get up and travel on her own from Nazareth to Hebron, a journey of 80 miles, just to visit a pregnant cousin?)
“And Mary arose in those days,” Luke tells us, “and went into the hill country with haste.”
Just Mary, apparently. Luke doesn’t mention any traveling companion. Nathaniel the Nasty didn’t drag her there; Mary just rose one morning and went. And, when Elizabeth says that Mary is blessed among women, the mother of the Savior replies:
My soul doth magnify the Lord: and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden. [There’s doule again; and again, Mary is God’s doule.] For behold, from henceforth: all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath magnified me: and holy is his Name. And his mercy is on them that fear him: throughout all generations. He hath shewed strength with his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away. He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel: as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed for ever.
That’s some pretty radical stuff, if you’re looking for a Gospel that opposes exploitation. Why is it that these racist and classist European Christians haven’t covered up the part about scattering the proud and exhalting the humble?
Candida Moss doesn’t say.
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