Jennifer A. Glancy

The Accused: Susanna and Her Readers

The tale of Susanna, typically referred to as a story of failed seduction, is better described as a story of attempted rape. The article explores why scholars have read the tale as an attempted seduction. Readers share the elders’ voyeurism, and are thus seduced into categorizing the event as seduction by their complicity in terms of ’tobe-looked-at-ness’ and masculinity in terms of the agency of gazing. The article finally considers whether the pleasure of reading such a text is the same for all readers, and in particular whether women readers may react differently from men to the code of voyeurism. 27. Readers may also be interested in the treatment of Susanna in M. Bal, Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 138-76, which appeared after I completed work on this article.

Slaves and Slavery in the Matthean Parables

An inscription from Puteoli details the job description of a manceps, a public official whose duties included torturing and even executing slaves on demand. Private citizens could hire the manceps to conduct the desired torture of their slaves; the manceps would supply the necessary equipment, sparing slave owners the burden of accruing hardware of that kind themselves.1 Would a first-century Galilean have been aware that such an apparatus of terror supported the slave system? In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells the parable of the unmerciful slave to emphasize to his hearers the harsh treatment they may expect from their heavenly father if they fail to extend forgiveness to others (Matt 18:23-35). In the parables denouement the master turns the unmerciful slave over to the torturers (toiS jpaoavitoai;) until he repays the funds he owes his master (Matt 18:34). Jesus does not specify whether these torturers are public officials or part of the masters retinue;2 since the master is himself a king, perhaps they are both. In either case, Jesus assumes that those who hear him are familiar with the idea that slave owners who want to punish their slaves can call on the services of torturers, like the manceps of Puteoli. Slaves and slavery are ubiquitous in writings from the ancient Mediterranean world; the image of the slave awaiting or lamenting punishment is a convention, even a cliche. Not surprisingly, then, allusions to slaves and masters are

The Sexual Use of Slaves: A Response to Kyle Harper on Jewish and Christian Porneia

Kyle Harper has argued that by the first century CE, porneia “was the chief vice in a [Jewish] system of sexual morality rooted in conjugal sexuality. For Hellenistic Jews, in a culture where sex with dishonored women, especially prostitutes and slaves, was legal and expected, the term condensed the cultural differences between the observers of the Torah and Gentile depravity” (“Porneia: The Making of a Christian Sexual Norm,” JBL 131 [2012]: 374). Harper argues that for Paul, as for other first-century Jews, porneia encompassed “that wide subset of extramarital sexual activity that was tolerated in Greek culture, the sexual use of dishonored women” (p. 378). I demonstrate, however, that Hellenistic Jewish writers did not use the word porneia to refer to a man’s exploitation of slaves he owned. Moreover, while Jewish writers promoted conjugal sexuality, they were tolerant of extramarital sexual relationships between slaveholders and enslaved women. We have no evidence that Paul challenged that sexual norm. This article thus (1) clarifies the parameters of the contested term porneia; (2) contributes to an understanding of the logic of Jewish sexual ethics during the Second Temple period; and (3) locates Paul’s silence on the sexual exploitation in the context of first-century Jewish teaching.

Slavery in Acts of Thomas

ABSTRACT The central figure of Acts of Thomas is the doubly enslaved apostle Thomas, metaphorically enslaved to his kyrios Christ, literally sold into slavery in a foreign land. As a result, the work returns frequently and explicitly to the theme of slavery, sustaining attention to the uneasy relationship between theological trope of slavery and lived realities and power relations of slavery. Caught between metaphor and critique, the narrative of Acts of Thomas assumes the inevitability of slavery, a tension epitomizing the representation of slavery in Christian writings of the era—slavery figured as metaphor to characterize relationship between believer and kyrios, slavery recognized as incongruent with the gospel of freedom, but nonetheless conceded as natural structure of the world.

Book Review: Death and Desire: The Rhetoric of Gender in the Apocalypse of John

THE INTENT of this study is to set Pauls interpretation of Abraham within the context of the biblical and Jewish writings that speak of the patriarch in order to establish the literary antecedents of the apostles portrayal. An evaluation of nearly fifty extrabiblical Jewish sources that deal with Abraham leads Harrisville to the conclusion that none of them served as the literary source for Paul. Any similarities that exist are owing to independent reflections on the Genesis narrative. At the substantive level, however, Paul arrived at fundamentally different views from those of his Jewish counterparts on such theological themes as promise, faith, covenant, seed of Abraham, the gentiles, righteousness, circumcision, and the law.