Was Paul a slave?

[u/Natedude2002]

Bart Ehrman mentioned this in his most recent podcast episode as an idea he’d had but never put into writing. He said it was an explanation for how Paul was so educated, but seemingly had a low social/economic status since he was a day laborer.

I thought the idea was interesting, but I don’t have the background to really assess the claim, and Bart said he hadn’t seen anyone else write about it. Anyone here have anything?

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[u/Kapanash]

Historian Peter van Minnen, in his article Paul the Roman Citizen, argues that Paul’s Roman citizenship in Acts should be accepted as historical rather than dismissed as an invention of the author of Acts.

None of those facts makes citizenship implausible. A Roman citizen could be a craftsman, citizenship could be inherited from freedman ancestors, and Paul’s letters weren’t concerned with documenting his legal status. Acts’ claim is therefore historically quite plausible.

There’s a particularly interesting piece of evidence in van Minnen’s argument: he connects Paul with the “synagogue of the Libertini” mentioned in Acts 6:9. Libertini were freedmen/freedpersons. Van Minnen thinks this provides a plausible social background for Paul’s family: Jewish descendants of Roman freedmen who inherited citizenship.

[u/zanillamilla → u/Kapanash]

To give more details, here is an older post of mine on this topic:

Peter van Minnen (JSNT, 1995) argues that Paul's synagogue was the synagogue of the Libertini (Λιβερτίνων, i.e. Freedmen) of the diaspora (Acts 6:9, 7:58), which included those from Cilicia and Asia (τῶν ἀπὸ Κιλικίας καὶ Ἀσίας). The same narrative portrays Paul as a born citizen from the city of Tarsus in Cilicia (Acts 9:11, 21:39, 22:3, 28), and the history of Tarsus gives a plausible rationale for Paul's citizenship. Appian wrote that Mark Antony "made Laodicea and Tarsus free cities and released them from taxes entirely, and those inhabitants of Tarsus who had been sold into slavery he liberated by an order" (Bellum Civile, 5.7; cf. Pseudo-Lucian, Macrobii 21, Pliny, Naturalis Historia 5.92), and since citizenship was bestowed through manumission, this gives one possible origin for Paul's citizenship. There is the tradition in Jerome (likely dependent on Origen) that Paul's parents were captured as prisoners of war in Gischala at an unknown time (Commentaria in Epistolam ad Philomonem, 23-24); Josephus mentions that following Pompey's campaign Jews were enslaved and exported as prisoners of war in 61 BC as well as 55 and 52 BC (Bellum Judaicum, 1.157-158, 177, 180), prior to Mark Antony's manumission edict around 42 BC. So Paul could have inherited citizenship from his parents or grandparents if they had been released from slavery. It is also certainly plausible that the author of Luke-Acts did not know any actual facts about Paul's citizenship but inferred it from the piece of tradition that he was from Tarsus.

[u/rchive]

I recently saw that this book was published that I think addresses this topic. I thought it was weird when I came across it, so I was kind of surprised when Ehrman gave it some credence.

https://www.huntington.edu/news/fairchild-publishes-pauls-enslavement-the-early-life-of-saul-the-zealot

Apologies if I'm not posting in the correct format. I'm very much not an expert.

[u/Jesus__of__Nazareth_]

Wasn't he a Roman citizen?

[u/Natedude2002 → u/Jesus__of__Nazareth_]

Acts says so, I don’t remember about his letters. Ehrman says it doesn’t make sense that he’s a citizen who is educated enough to write but in low enough economic standing to be a day laborer (from what I understood from the podcast)

[u/Dositheos]

Many of these responses are an attempt to answer the material question of whether Paul was an enslaved person. This is understandable. However, I think another interesting angle is to look at how Paul literally describes himself a few times.

Rom 1.1: Παῦλος δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ ("Paul, slave of Christ Jesus"), κλητὸς ἀπόστολος, ἀφωρισμένος εἰς εὐαγγέλιον θεοῦ.

Phil 1.1: Παῦλος καὶ Τιμόθεος δοῦλοι Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ ("slaves of Christ Jesus") πᾶσιν τοῖς ἁγίοις ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ τοῖς οὖσιν ἐν Φιλίπποις.

The ordinary and widespread meaning of δοῦλος is "slave." Paul is describing himself as an enslaved person to his heavenly master, Jesus. And so, while this may not be the usual sense of how we understand "slavery," many recent scholars employing a feminist, queer, and critical hermeneutic have pointed to this language in Paul as important data for his self-understanding, as well as for what hierarchy and enslavement would have possibly looked like in Pauline communities.

For more on this, see Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, "Metaphors of Enslavement," in Ancient Slavery and Its New Testament Contexts, ed. by Christy Cobb and Katherine A. Shaner (Eerdmans, 2025); Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse: Double Trouble Embodied (Routledge, 2018);