Did Paul Blame Victims of Sexual Assault? 1 Corinthians 7 (Part 4)

Consent, culpability, and coercion in a Pauline context

So far in this series, we’ve looked at first-century views of consent in both Roman and Jewish contexts. Then, last week, we turned to 1 Corinthians 6, zeroing in on a unique metaphor (a slave market metaphor!) that’s used only twice in the whole Bible: the Corinthians were “bought with a price.”

(If you’re joining us in this series for the first time, I strongly recommend that you read Part 3 before diving into today’s post.)

We left Prima (our reconstruction of an enslaved Christian woman in Corinth) facing a dilemma at the end of 1 Corinthians 6.

If her body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, that means that the men who sexually abuse her violate sacred space and invite the wrath of an avenging God.

But it also means that, because she belongs to the Lord, she should glorify God in her body. And yet, this truth leaves her in a difficult position:

But even as we trace the liberating possibilities of Paul’s argument, it’s plain that this final statement produces a dilemma for Prima. What does it mean to glorify God in her body when she is, in real and tangible ways, vulnerable to the choices of others? I want us to pause there, to sit with the layers of that fear.

How can a legally vulnerable woman live up to that standard?

Photo by JJ Ying on Unsplash

Today, we turn to Paul’s second use of the “bought with a price” metaphor, which comes in the very next chapter.

“Do Not Let It Concern You”

In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul addresses the enslaved directly. He interrupts a longer discussion about marriage and sex to articulate the general principle he’s working from—that it’s generally best for each of the Corinthians to remain in the situation they were in when God called them.

Having just addressed the men and women in his discussion on marriage, he directs a word to the circumcised and the uncircumcised and then to the enslaved and the free. Do these three categories seem familiar? To me (and most scholars), it sounds a bit like Galatians 3:28: that in Christ there is no Jew/Gentile, slave/free, or male/female.¹

All three of these categories deal with a Christian’s embodied life within their social contexts. So, what does Paul say here about slavery and freedom?

²¹ Were you called as a slave? Do not let it concern you. But if you are also able to become free, take advantage of that. ²² For the one who was called in the Lord as a slave, is the Lord’s freed person; likewise the one who was called as free, is Christ’s slave. ²³ You were bought for a price; do not become slaves of people.

(1 Corinthians 7:21-24, NASB)

(Quick note on translation—the NASB uses italics when it’s adding words that aren’t in the original text but that are important to capture the meaning of the Greek.)

So, Paul’s first piece of advice for the enslaved is that they needn’t be concerned about their enslaved status. Given the violent realities of slavery, this is … easier said than done.

Some might suggest that Paul, from his position of freeborn privilege, is merely out of touch with the physical and psychological realities of slavery. Here, I’d counter that Paul was no stranger to enduring physical abuse for the sake of his mission. (As a Roman citizen, he should’ve, by law, been exempt from beatings. But since he didn’t always invoke his citizenship, he suffered abuse that was reserved for noncitizens and the enslaved.) There’s even a possibility that Paul was a freedperson, that he himself had been born into slavery.²

But the central question for Prima—if she believes that Paul is truly an apostle—is this: Does Paul mean what he says?

Is it true that Christians must glorify God with their bodies, yet the enslaved needn’t be concerned about the social reality that makes their bodies vulnerable? If both of these statements can be true in any meaningful sense, it suggests that Paul believes that nothing that is done to a slave can separate them from Christ. Their place in the body of Christ, in the church itself, is secure, regardless of the actions of others.

We might want Paul to be more focused on the here-and-now in this verse, but I don’t think he’s actually downplaying the importance of what’s done to the body. Hang with me while we trace his theological logic and its implications.

“If You Are Also Able To Become Free”

Paul’s second piece of advice (7:21b) is so grammatically opaque in Greek that I can only assume he was trying to do scholars a favor by giving them a puzzle to argue about. In the NASB, it’s translated as: “But if you are also able to become free, take advantage of that.” But your translation might suggest the opposite—that Paul is telling enslaved to turn down freedom if it’s offered!

To oversimplify, the problem is that the sentence is missing a word. Paul says, literally: “but if you also are able to become free, rather make use of.” (MAKE USE OF WHAT, PAUL? HELP A GIRL OUT HERE.) So we have to fill in the blank and take our best guess as to what he’s saying: make use of the offer of freedom or make use of the present condition of enslavement?

I’m going to skip the arguments about the grammar because they’re very technical and don’t actually end up solving the problem of the missing word one way or the other. Our best guidance comes from this verse’s historical and literary context.

Historical context: The evidence doesn’t suggest that the enslaved could refuse manumission in Paul’s day. Perhaps a slave could try to persuade the slaveholder to change his mind, but a slaveholder could manumit (free) someone with or without their consent. It makes little sense for Paul to urge an enslaved person to turn down an offer they couldn’t, in fact, refuse.

Literary context: Throughout this chapter, Paul gives rules … and exceptions to the rule. And this clause is structured as if it’s an exception to his general “remain as you are” rule. It’d be weird for Paul to give an exception that turned out to be a doubling-down rather than a real exception.³

For both of these reasons, a slim but growing majority of interpreters take this clause to mean that Paul is encouraging the enslaved to pursue opportunities for freedom.⁴ Paul thinks that freedom is to be preferred over slavery in the here-and-now.

Jennifer Glancy—not one to let Paul off the hook when she thinks he’s being problematic—suggests that Paul offers this exception because the enslaved were sexually available to the slaveholder, that Paul shows awareness of the difficulties that enslavement posed to a chaste sexual ethic.⁵

Is Paul advising the enslaved to take opportunities for freedom because of the specter of abuse? If so, his reassurance that they need not be concerned about their enslaved status only makes sense if such abuse does not jeopardize their membership in the body of Christ.

“The Lord’s Freedperson”

Then, in 7:22, Paul writes that the enslaved is the Lord’s freedperson, and the free believer is the Lord’s slave. Here, Paul overturns the status binaries that the Corinthians took for granted. Status is not merely irrelevant to identity in Christ—in some mysterious way it is reversed.

This statement is especially striking in conversation with Roman law and custom, which gave freedwomen equal access to sexual honor and respectability as a matron, despite the presumption of sexual history within the slaveholder’s household.⁶ A respectable freedwoman was not a licit target of sexual violence in Roman society. Only her husband and, in limited circumstances, her patron (former enslaver) had the “right” to sexual activity with her. Any attack on her was an offense against her patron, who could bring her attacker to judgment in court.

But here, she is not the freedwoman of a slaveholder but the Lord’s freedwoman. An attack on her is an offense against the Lord.

We can hope that a Christian Corinthian slaveholder might hear in this line a warning against sexually abusing his slaves. And though this would be of little practical help to enslaved members of non-Christian households, it might afford a victim some measure of dignity and a promise that the Lord himself takes offense at her mistreatment and will render judgment against her abusers.

“Bought With a Price”

Finally, we reach the second usage of “bought with a price,” in 7:23: “You were bought for a price; do not become slaves of people.”

Paul says that free Christians ought not sell themselves into slavery. The Christian has already been purchased at a slave market, bought at the cost of the Lord’s own life. Here, again, Paul may demonstrate a sensitivity toward the difficulties the enslaved face in living out the chaste sexual ethic that Paul teaches. Though he offers no word of condemnation to slaves in difficult situations, he does forbid free Christians from voluntarily entering into a social context that makes chaste living impossible.

Free Christians, for whom the slave market metaphor could remain safely spiritualized, may have brushed over the metaphor’s callback to Paul’s argument about sexual immorality in 6:12-20. But the enslaved, who felt the full force of the slave-market metaphor, knew in an intimate, embodied, visceral way that sexual coercion and slave status were intertwined realities. To them, this verbal echo probably didn’t seem like a coincidence.

I don’t mean to suggest that every enslaved woman in Corinth would’ve heard Paul’s teaching in exactly this way. But by reading these passages with the social realities of slavery in mind, we can ask questions that we haven’t thought to ask before. And these questions open up possibilities in the text—implications of Paul’s theological logic—that we might not have seen otherwise.

We may surmise that, to Prima, each of these two passages might comment on the other, contextualizing both Paul’s sexual morality teachings and his advice to people in her situation.

Paul says that the body matters. That the Christian’s body is sacred space—a temple of the Holy Spirit. That slaves need not be concerned about their status. That an enslaved woman is the Lord’s freedwoman. Again, the all-important question for Prima is, “Does Paul mean what he says?”

I believe Paul’s message to the enslaved is: “Do the best you can. But when you are coerced, know that the guilt belongs not to you but to the perpetrator—and God will judge.”

The impact of sexual violence cannot be brushed away with spiritualized language—if the body matters, then what happens to the body matters. Perhaps Prima, unaware that this letter will come to be accepted by the church as inspired Scripture, brushes off Paul’s words as offering an out-of-touch perspective, the inconsistent ramblings of a privileged freeborn man who cannot understand the plight of an enslaved woman or the implications of his own theology.

Or perhaps in his moral logic, she recognizes the words of God.

Perhaps the two passages interpret one another, exposing how Paul’s theology of the body intersects with the painful realities of her life.

Perhaps, in his words, she hears a message of hope: that God does not condemn her, that the God of the Exodus sees the suffering inflicted on her and will judge the men who abuse her, that like Hagar in the desert, she has cause to name God as El Roi—the God who sees her.

Thank you for joining me on this journey! Next week, we’ll wrap up this series with a discussion of what this reading of 1 Corinthians 6-7 means for the church today.

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ICYMI

1. These three categories may have been part of an early Christian baptismal formula that pre-dated Paul. See Richard Hays, First Corinthians, 123.

2. The assumption that Paul was freeborn has been recently challenged by Mark Fairchild in his new book Paul’s Enslavement: The Early Life of Saul the Zealot. You can read a summarized version of Fairchild’s arguments in this Christianity Today article.

3. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, 318.

4. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, 316. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 68. For more detail on the grammar of this clause, see the discussion in J. Albert Harrill, The Manumission of Slaves in Early Christianity. (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), 68-128.

5. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 68.

6. Matthew J. Perry, Gender, Manumission, and the Roman Freedwoman. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 130-132.