ABSTRACT
Slavery imaginary plays an important role in early Christian thought. This chapter begins with a few NT texts in which the slave metaphor is employed according to the interpretative tradition. Within the field of NT studies massive attention has been given to the slavery metaphor and the title "slave of the Lord Jesus" in particular in the Pauline letters. Most studies can be located somewhere on the scale between seeing the slavery metaphor as merely a title based on Jewish conventional usage and connected to the Greco-Roman slavery institution at the time. The chapter looks at some texts that imagine Jesus as a slave. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book presents the potential meaning of the slavery metaphor in early Christian discourse using a variety of ancient texts submitted to a set of theoretical tools taken from metaphor theory and intersectional gender studies.
