What did Christianity do about slavery?

Colossians: "Servants, obey in all things those who are your masters according to the flesh, not just when they are looking." Ephesians: "Servants, be obedient to those who according to the flesh are your masters, with fear and trembling."

These sit inside household codes that also instruct wives, husbands, children and fathers, and that end by telling masters to be just and to give up threatening. They are addressed to an ordinary Roman household of the period, in which slaves were part of the household. Elsewhere 1 Timothy puts "slave-traders" in a list of sinners beside murderers and liars, which condemns a trade and not the owning of slaves.

The word rendered servant here is doulos, the ordinary Greek word for a slave. Translations that soften it are making a choice, and the choice is visible.

Philemon is a note about a man named Onesimus, a slave of Philemon’s who was with Paul. How he got there the letter does not say. Paul sends him back, which is the part usually noticed, and asks Philemon to receive him "no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother". He would have kept him, he says, but not without consent, so that Philemon’s goodness would be of free will rather than necessity.

It does not tell Philemon to free him and it does not say slavery is wrong. It asks one owner to treat one man as a brother, trusts him to "do even beyond what I say", and leaves the conclusion to him.

Both sides argued from the same book. Lincoln’s observation that North and South “read the same Bible” is the starting point of the chapter cited here, whose own point is that both read it in the same way. Those defending slavery pointed to Noah’s curse on the descendants of Ham, to Abraham’s slaves, to the law of Moses and to these letters.

Both were reading the same canon and both were Christians, often in the same denominations. Some of those denominations split over it rather than resolve it.

One reading has the first Christians expecting the world to end shortly and therefore seeing no point in reforming its institutions. Another has them declining to resist slavery for fear of persecution. A third has them simply not conceiving of a society without slaves, in a world where slavery was everywhere.

The first has something to work from. Paul tells the Corinthians to stay in the condition they were called in, and says a few lines later that the time is short. To a slave he says not to let it bother him, in a line some read as telling him to take freedom if it is offered and others as telling him to stay as he is.

These are not mutually exclusive and the evidence does not choose between them. What none of them does is turn the silence into a condemnation.

The British campaign against the slave trade was substantially organised by Christians, Quaker networks first among them. What it put before the public was less religious argument than evidence, Thomas Clarkson’s figures on what happened aboard the ships, and it persuaded. That is a fact about the eighteenth century and it is not a fact about the first.

Historians differ on how much of the movement is best explained by humanitarian and religious conviction and how much by economics, empire and the enslaved themselves, whose resistance and testimony were long left out of the version where abolition is something Europeans thought of.

Slaves were among the first Christians, alongside their owners. Pliny had two enslaved women tortured, women he reports were called ministrae, female attendants, which the standard Latin dictionary takes here to mean deaconesses. It is a rare glimpse, and it comes from the man doing the torturing.

The Shepherd of Hermas opens with its author recalling that he was sold as a slave in Rome, and most ancient writing puts the owners’ view before the slaves’. The tradition contains a great deal of instruction addressed to slaves.

The Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, to take two very different bodies, now condemn it. The Second Vatican Council listed slavery in 1965 among the "infamies" that insult human dignity. The Convention, founded in 1845 and by its own account shaped by slavery from the start, resolved in 1995 that it repudiated it, and apologised to African Americans for "condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime".

That is a real change and it is worth being precise about its shape: it is a case of a tradition concluding that its own earlier reading was wrong, and giving its reasons from scripture, Genesis, Acts and Galatians among them. Whether that counts as the texts finally being understood or as the texts being overruled is still argued, inside the churches and outside them.

Richard Burridge, then Dean of King’s College London, puts it to his own church. If a church "priding itself on being Biblical" could defend apartheid from scripture, as others had defended slavery, "how can we be so sure that we are right when we claim to be Biblical?" That point is available to a believer and to a critic, and they will draw opposite conclusions from it.

The thing not available to either is the version where the texts were always clear.