Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hi, I'm John Dixon with a brief Undeception single. In the early 400s AD, as the Roman Empire was beginning to crumble, slave traders were using the chaos to snatch people off the streets and out of the villages and sending them away to the slave markets dotted all around the Mediterranean.
It seemed like everyone was in on it. People were selling their family members to the traders just to make some quick cash. It reached fever pitch in about the 420s in the North African port town of Hippo Regius, modern Anabar in Algeria. From correspondence at the time, we learned that large numbers of men, women and children were being kidnapped and onsold through this port.
We hear of a woman in Hippo who created a lucrative trafficking business by luring women from the wooded hill country of Gadaba, south of Hippo, on the pretext of purchasing timber from them and then she would imprison them, beat them and sell them on. One monk we know of from the Hippo monastery was abducted and sold as a slave.
Another man, one of the church's own tenant farmers, whose job was to grow produce for the poor, sold his own wife into slavery. Bands of thugs roamed the countryside abducting people and selling them to the traders. A letter from the time laments, "They seem to be draining Africa of much of its human population and transferring their merchandise to the provinces across the sea."
The Christians of Hippo decided to do something about it, in what has to be one of the gutsiest church outings in recorded history. Our evidence for all of this comes directly from the Bishop of Hippo, who ended up being the most influential Christian thinker in the West for nearly a thousand years.
His name is Augustine, and he deserves an episode all of his own, but I want to focus just on one of his letters, a letter only discovered in the 1980s, by the way, which opens a remarkable window on some of the things Christians were trying to do in ancient times to undermine slavery.
It is a sad fact, as I've said before, that Christians generally just tolerated slavery as an unhappy permanent feature of a fallen world. They did their best to assist slaves as they could. When churches had sufficient funds, they would use these to purchase and then free slaves. And some of those slaves, in fact, became leaders of the movement, like Callistus in the early 200s, who ended up the Bishop of Rome.
Mostly though, churches resigned themselves to working legally within the system to buy people's freedom. Augustine's letter makes clear that sometimes they went much further.
Augustine faced a special problem in Hippo. Slave traders, especially from Galatia in Asia Minor, what we call Turkey, were using his city as the main port to ship slaves out of North Africa to various destinations around the empire and beyond.
Augustine had been deploying church funds in the normal way for years, but by the 420s things were getting out of hand and Augustine's churches were stretched to the limit. They just couldn't purchase any more slaves. The local believers took matters into their own hands.
A large ship was in port about to set sail with its human cargo. A member of the church, a faithful Christian, says Augustine, knowing our custom of missions of mercy of this kind, made this known to the church. Immediately, members of the church raided both the ship and a nearby holding cell.
"About 120 were freed by our people," Augustine reports. Sadly, he tells us nothing about how they pulled this off, what the operation actually involved. But once in a safe place, the slaves started to tell their stories to the church and "Hardly a person could keep himself from tears on hearing all the various ways by which they were brought to the Galatians by trickery or kidnapping."
Some were able to be returned to their families. The churches tended to have a great network where they could make that happen. Others were being housed and fed at the church itself. Still others had to be sheltered in the homes of local Christians around Hippo. For the church could not feed all those whom it freed, Augustine says.
Augustine's fear at the time of writing was that things were getting tense in the city. These slave traders had friends in high places in Hippo and they were beginning to agitate to get all their merchandise back. The rescue operation wasn't exactly legal and Augustine worried that things were about to get pretty bad for the local Christians.
Part of Augustine's motivation in writing to his friend Olypius, another bishop, was to ask him if he could do something while he was in Italy to get some influential people to help over in Hippo.
He ends the letter with a warning. If these things can happen in Hippo, he says, where in God's mercy the great vigilance of the church is on the watch so that people can be freed from captivity of this sort, imagine, he says, how much similar trafficking in unfortunate souls goes on in other coastal areas. Augustine wasn't an abolitionist, I'm afraid to say.
But he did use church funds, as I say, to free slaves and resettle them. And he oversaw the occasional church raid on the slave ships. I have a question as I read about what ancient Christians did to undermine slavery. But it's a question about modern slavery. Our friends at International Justice Mission tell us that right now there are about 40 million people in the world in slavery.
So my question isn't so much, why weren't all the ancient Christians fervent abolitionists? My question is, am I doing as much now to end slavery as they did then? I doubt it.