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What factors point to the Turin Shroud being a fake?
The Shroud of Turin is probably the most famous supposed relic in existence. It is a 4.4-meter-long linen shroud bearing the image of a crucified man. Supporters of the shroud claim that it is the actual burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth and that the image on the shroud is the true image of Jesus, created at the moment of his resurrection.It is easy to see why this idea is so appealing. If the shroud were authentic, it would be a remarkable source of information about Jesus the human being. Unfortunately, we can be virtually certain that the Shroud of Turin is a hoax that was originally created in France in around the 1350s AD by an artist trained in the Gothic figurative style as part of a faith-healing scam.We know this primarily because there is no definitive record of the shroud prior to the fourteenth century and the earliest definitive record of the shroud is a letter recording that the forger who made it had confessed, but also because of a wide array of other factors. For instance, the shroud doesn’t match the kinds of funerary wrappings that were used in the Judaea in the first-century AD or the specific description of Jesus’s funerary wrappings given in the Gospel of John. The fabric of the shroud has also been conclusively radiocarbon dated to the Late Middle Ages.Additionally, the proportions of the figure on the shroud are anatomically incorrect, but they closely match the proportions of figures in Gothic art of the fourteenth-century. The bloodstains on the shroud are not consistent with how blood flows naturally, which suggests the stains have been painted on. Finally, the fabric of the shroud was made using a complex weave that was common in the Late Middle Ages for high-quality textiles but was not used for burial shrouds in the time of Jesus.Evidence #1: The Shroud of Turin has no reliable provenance prior to the fourteenth century.If the actual burial shroud of Jesus had survived and it really had a spectacular image of Jesus himself miraculously imprinted on it, we would expect to find mentions of it all over the place in early Christian writings. Instead, we have absolutely no mention of any object identifiable as being the Shroud of Turin in any surviving early Christian text and the earliest definitive mention of the Shroud of Turin comes from fourteenth-century France.Supporters of the shroud have tried very hard to invent a provenance for it. For instance, some supporters of the shroud have tried to give the Shroud of Turin a history by identifying it with the Mandylion, or Image of Edessa, a small, rectangular piece of cloth that was held in the city of Edessa in the Byzantine Empire that was said to bear the miraculous image of Jesus’s face.The earliest surviving source that mentions the Image of Edessa as having ever existed is the Doctrine of Addai, a Syriac Christian text written in around the late fourth century AD or early fifth century AD, which says that the Image of Edessa was painted by an artist sent to meet with Jesus while he was alive by King Abgar of Edessa. The text claims that the artist painted a portrait of Jesus’s face and brought it back to show to King Abgar. This text, however, says nothing about the Image of Edessa still existing in the author’s own time or about anyone alive in the author’s own time having seen it.The earliest surviving mention of the Mandylion as having existed in the author’s own time comes from the early Christian historian Evagrios Scholastikos (lived c. 539 – c. 594 AD). The fact that we have no record of the Mandylion having ever been created at all until the late fourth century AD at the earliest and we have no mention of anyone alive having seen the Mandylion until the late sixth century casts serious doubts on the Mandylion’s own authenticity.It doesn’t really matter for our purposes, though, whether the Mandylion was authentic or not because the Mandylion and the Shroud of Turin are certainly not the same object. According to virtually all accounts, the Mandylion was a much smaller piece of cloth than the Shroud of Turin and it only had Jesus’s face on it—not any other part of his body. Also, it did not depict Jesus as beaten and bloody, but rather alive and healthy.We know all of this because we have surviving descriptions of the Mandylion and even surviving depictions of it in art. For instance, there is a surviving tenth-century AD Byzantine encaustic painting, which clearly shows the Mandylion as a small piece of cloth bearing only Jesus’s face.ABOVE: Tenth-century AD Byzantine encaustic painting from Saint Catharine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai, depicting King Abgar bearing the Mandylion of Edessa with the face of Jesus on itSome supporters of the Shroud of Turin have tried to claim that the Mandylion must have been the Shroud of Turin folded in such a way so that only Jesus’s face was visible and the rest of his body was hidden. In support of this view, supporters of the shroud like to cite Codex Vossianus Latinus Q 69, a tenth-century codex currently held in the Vatican Library that contains an eighth-century Latin account claiming that the Mandylion of Edessa bore not only the image of Jesus’s face, but the image of Jesus’s entire body.This is, however, the only surviving account that describes the Mandylion of Edessa as bearing the image of Jesus’s whole body. It is far more likely that the author of this account never saw the Mandylion personally and simply imagined that it showed Jesus’s entire body than it is that the Mandylion was actually the Shroud of Turin folded so as to hide the rest of the body from view.Furthermore, this explanation fails to account for the fact that surviving depictions of the Mandylion all show it depicting a clear image of a living and healthy Jesus with his eyes open—not a ghostly image of a dead and bloody Jesus with his eyes closed. Also, surviving depictions of the Mandylion, such as the encaustic painting of King Abgar receiving it, show it with simply a blank space beneath Jesus’s neck and no continuation.Finally, the Mandylion is never described in any surviving source as having ever been viewed by anyone as having been Jesus’s burial shroud. There are several different stories about exactly how the Mandylion originated. The earliest version of the story, found in the Doctrine of Addai, holds that it was painted by an artist sent to meet with Jesus by King Abgar of Edessa.The most popular version of the story in later times, though, held that Jesus himself pressed his face against the cloth and the image was miraculously created. This version of the story claims that Jesus sent the cloth to King Abgar of Edessa as a miraculous cure for illness.In other words, the only things that the Shroud of Turin and the Mandylion have in common is that they are both pieces of cloth said to bear some form of miraculous image of Jesus.ABOVE: Anonymous twelfth-century icon of the Mandylion of Edessa from NovgorodNow, supporters of the Shroud of Turin also like to cite a report from Robert de Clari, a knight from Picardy who participated in the Fourth Crusade, as well as the Crusaders’ brutal sack of the city of Constantinople in 1204. Robert de Clari wrote a detailed account in Old French of the sack of Constantinople titled The Conquest of Constantinople.In his account, Robert de Clari mentions that, before the city was sacked, the Church of Blachernai contained a piece of cloth that was claimed to be the very burial shroud of Jesus Christ himself. Robert further claims that this shroud miraculously elevated every Friday to reveal the image of Jesus. Robert says that no one knows what happened to the shroud after the city was sacked.Robert de Clari, however, is the only existing source that claims that there was a shroud in Constantinople with the image of Jesus on it, so we have no way of independently confirming his story. Furthermore, even if Robert de Clari really did see a shroud in Constantinople with the image of Jesus on it, there is no good reason to suppose that the shroud he saw was the Turin Shroud at all, since there have been many other shrouds that have been claimed to be the burial shroud of Jesus, many of which have borne images on them, and there is nothing about Robert’s account to indicate that the shroud he saw is the same one now held in Turin.Finally, even if the shroud allegedly seen by Robert de Clari in Constantinople was really the Shroud of Turin, that certainly wouldn’t make the Shroud of Turin authentic; Robert de Clari was writing nearly 1,100 years after Jesus’s death, but only around 150 years before the first definitive mention of the Shroud of Turin. In other words, he was writing far closer to the time when the Shroud of Turin first appears in the historical record than he was to the time of Jesus.If Robert de Clari really saw the Shroud of Turin in Constantinople in around 1203 AD, that would only make the shroud about 150 years older than it is otherwise known to have been; it certainly wouldn’t prove the shroud authentic by any stretch of the imagination.ABOVE: The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, painted in 1840 by the French Romantic painter Eugène DelacroixEvidence #2: We have the documented confession of the forger who created the Shroud of Turin.The earliest definitive mention of the Shroud of Turin in any written document is a letter written in 1389 by Pierre d’Arcis, the bishop of the city of Troyes to the Avignon Antipope Clement VII. In the letter, Pierre states that the shroud was being used as part of an elaborate faith-healing scam. He reports that the local experts on theology easily recognized the shroud as a hoax because none of the gospels made any mention of the image of Jesus being imprinted on his shroud.Pierre describes how his predecessor, Bishop Henri de Poitiers, set out on a mission to find out where the shroud had come from. After much inquiry, Henri managed to track down the original forger who had made the shroud, who confessed to him that he had created the shroud as a deliberate hoax and even showed Henri exactly how he had done it. Henri, having obtained this confession, ordered that the shroud be put away and that no one be permitted to venerate it.Here is the relevant portion of Pierre d’Arcis’s actual letter, as translated from Latin into English by Reverend Herbert Thurston:“The case, Holy Father, stands thus. Some time since in this diocese of Troyes the Dean of a certain collegiate church, to wit, that of Lirey, falsely and deceitfully, being consumed with the passion of avarice, and not from any motive of devotion but only of gain, procured for his church a certain cloth cunningly painted, upon which by a clever sleight of hand was depicted the twofold image of one man, that is to say, the back and front, he falsely declaring and pretending that this was the actual shroud in which our Saviour Jesus Christ was enfolded in the tomb, and upon which the whole likeness of the Saviour had remained thus impressed together with the wounds which He bore.”“This story was put about not only in the kingdom of France, but, so to speak, throughout the world, so that from all parts people came together to view it. And further to attract the multitude so that money might cunningly be wrung from them, pretended miracles were worked, certain men being hired to represent themselves as healed at the moment of the exhibition of the shroud, which all believed to the shroud of our Lord. The Lord Henry of Poitiers, of pious memory, then Bishop of Troyes, becoming aware of this, and urged by many prudent persons to take action, as indeed was his duty in the exercise of his ordinary jurisdiction, set himself earnestly to work to fathom the truth of this matter.”“For many theologians and other wise persons declared that this could not be the real shroud of our Lord having the Saviour's likeness thus imprinted upon it, since the holy Gospel made no mention of any such imprint, while, if it had been true, it was quite unlikely that the holy Evangelists would have omitted to record it, or that the fact should have remained hidden until the present time. Eventually, after diligent inquiry and examination, he discovered the fraud and how the said cloth had been cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed.”“Accordingly, after taking mature counsel with wise theologians and men of the law, seeing that he neither ought nor could allow the matter to pass, he began to institute formal proceedings against the said Dean and his accomplices in order to root out this false persuasion. They, seeing their wickedness discovered, hid away the said cloth so that the Ordinary could not find it, and they kept it hidden afterwards for thirty-four years or thereabouts down to the present year.”The forger himself literally confessed. You can’t get any better proof than that.ABOVE: Manuscript illustration dating to 1379, depicting Antipope Clement VII, the addressee of Pierre d’Arcis’s letter describing how his predecessor Henri de Pontiers had obtained the confession of the original forger who made the Shroud of TurinEvidence #3: The Shroud of Turin doesn’t match the kinds of shrouds that were actually used in Judaea during Jesus’s time or the description of Jesus’s shroud given in the Gospel of John.Maybe, even though we have a confession, you’re still not convinced that the Shroud of Turin is a hoax. Well, that’s fine, because we have even more evidence that it is a hoax aside from just the confession. Even if we ignore the confession altogether and just look at the shroud itself, it is evident that it is a fourteenth-century forgery. The evidence is written all over the shroud itself.Quite simply, the shroud doesn’t match the kinds of funerary wrappings that were used in Judaea in Jesus’s time. In Judaea during the first century AD, people did not normally wrap whole bodies in a single rectangular piece of linen; instead, people wrapped the body in strips of linen and wrapped the head separately from the body using its own piece of linen. The Gospel of John 20:6–7 actually explicitly describes Jesus’s head and body having been wrapped separately in precisely this manner. The Greek text of the gospel reads:“ἔρχεται οὗν καὶ σίμων πέτρος ἀκολουθῶν αὐτῶ, καὶ εἰσῆλθεν εἰς τὸ μνημεῖον· καὶ θεωρεῖ τὰ ὀθόνια κείμενα, καὶ τὸ σουδάριον, ὃ ἦν ἐπὶ τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτοῦ, οὐ μετὰ τῶν ὀθονίων κείμενον ἀλλὰ χωρὶς ἐντετυλιγμένον εἰς ἕνα τόπον.”Here is the same passage, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):“Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself.”The Greek word that is used to describe the wrappings that covered Jesus’s body in this passage is ὀθόνια (othónia), which means “bandages made of fine linen.” The word used to describe the cloth that covered Jesus’s face is σουδάριον (soudárion), which means “a headcloth for the deceased.” No matter how you interpret this passage, it is definitely not describing a single-piece, full-body shroud like the Shroud of Turin.There are other passages in the gospels that reference Jesus’s body having been wrapped in linen, but none of them give anywhere near as much detail as that passage I just quoted from the Gospel of John. For instance, the Greek text of the Gospel of Mark 15:46 reads as follows:“καὶ ἀγοράσας σινδόνα καθελὼν αὐτὸν ἐνείλησεν τῇ σινδόνι καὶ ἔθηκεν αὐτὸν ἐν μνημείῳ ὃ ἦν λελατομημένον ἐκ πέτρας, καὶ προσεκύλισεν λίθον ἐπὶ τὴν θύραν τοῦ μνημείου.”Here is the same passage, as translated in the NRSV:“So Joseph [of Arimathea] bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb.”The Greek word in this passage that the NRSV translates as “linen cloth” is σινδών (sindṓn). Some supporters of the Shroud of Turin claim that this word actually refers to a single, full-body shroud. The NRSV’s translation, however, is completely correct in this case; σινδών just means “fine linen cloth,” without any implication of this cloth being in the specific form of a full-body shroud.At the very least, the Gospel of John’s description of Jesus’s funerary wrappings is an accurate description of how bodies in Judaea in the first century AD were normally wrapped. Nonetheless, because single shrouds for both the head and the body became common in western Europe during the Middle Ages, most western depictions of Jesus’s shroud depict it as a single piece of cloth covering both the head and the body.ABOVE: Eastern Orthodox mosaic from near the Stone of the Unction in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem depicting Jesus being borne into his tomb, correctly showing his head not wrapped in the same cloth as his bodyEvidence #4: The Turin Shroud was radiocarbon dated and the material definitively dates to sometime between c. 1260 and c. 1390.In 1988, three teams of scientists working independently in three different laboratories located in Oxford, Tucson, and Zürich conducted radiocarbon dating tests on three different samples of the linen from the Shroud of Turin. All three teams of researchers found that the cloth dated to sometime between c. 1260 and c. 1390 AD. These estimates correspond exactly to the time when the Turin Shroud first enters the historical record.Defenders of the Turin Shroud have tried to insist that, maybe, the corner of the shroud that the samples that the experts conducted radiocarbon dating tests on came from had been “invisibly” repaired in the Middle Ages and that the rest of the Turin Shroud might be much older.There is, however, currently absolutely no evidence to suggest that the corner of the shroud that the samples were taken from had been repaired at a later date. If the samples had been repaired, the researchers would have been able to detect signs of the repairs when they examined the fabric under a microscope, but they didn’t detect any such signs of repairs.Furthermore, before the researchers in the Oxford team conducted the radiocarbon dating tests, they consulted textile experts from a laboratory in Derbyshire, England, who did their own examinations of the cloth to make sure they weren’t testing using material that had been added to the shroud later.The textile experts identified a few stray bits of cotton fiber mixed in with the linen. They concluded that either the loom used to make the linen had been previously used for cotton and the fibers had been introduced when the shroud was woven or that the cotton fibers had been introduced to the shroud at a later date. The cotton fibers of unknown origin were sorted out and only the linen fibers making up the bulk of the shroud were used for testing.In other words, not only is there no evidence that the parts of the shroud being tested had been introduced due to later repairs, but the researchers were consciously making efforts to ensure that the material they were testing was original to the shroud itself. For a more thorough debunking of the claim that the Shroud of Turin might have been repaired, you can read this article, written by Dr. Steven D. Schafersman, which debunks claims made on the subject.ABOVE: Newspaper photograph taken on 13 October 1988 of Edward T. Hall, Michael Tite, and R. E. M. Hedges at a press conference at the British Museum announcing that the Turin Shroud had been radiocarbon dated to between c. 1260 and c. 1390 ADEvidence #5: The image on the Turin Shroud has unrealistic anatomical features that are consistent with Gothic artwork, but not with real human anatomy.The figure depicted in the Turin Shroud doesn’t have realistic human anatomical features. Let’s start by looking at the face. The forehead is too small and the lower part of the face too large. On a living human human, the forehead (i.e. the space from the top of the head to the eyes) normally takes up about half the face; on the Turin Shroud, though, the forehead takes up just a little over a third of the face.To illustrate just how weird the proportions are on the face from the Turin Shroud, below is a comparison of the face from the Turin Shroud with the face of Diogo Morgado, the real, human actor who played Jesus in the 2013 History Channel television series The Bible as well the 2014 film Son of God.The comparison is obviously imperfect because the top of Diogo’s head is cropped in the image that I found on the internet, but you can still see very clearly that Diogo’s forehead occupies a vastly greater proportion of his face than the forehead of the face on the Turin Shroud.ABOVE: A comparison of the proportions of the negative of the face from the Turin Shroud (left) with the proportions of the face of Diogo Morgado, a real, human actor who portrayed Jesus in the 2014 film Son of GodIf we assume that the image on the Turin Shroud is an accurate representation of how Jesus really looked, we are at a loss to explain why his forehead was so tiny. Instead of coming up excuses, like that maybe Jesus had a deformity, I think we should look at works of Gothic art that were made around the time the Shroud of Turin first appears in the historical record.It was common for Gothic artists in France in the fourteenth century to portray humans with unrealistically small foreheads and unrealistically long lower faces. The proportions of the face on the Turin Shroud, then, are more consistent with the proportions of faces in Gothic art than the proportions of a real human being. This strongly suggests that the Turin Shroud was created by a Gothic artist.Now let’s look at the body of the figure. We immediately notice that the body itself is disproportionately elongated. The legs and torso are all unnaturally long and thin. This tall, thin quality is highly characteristic of how figures were normally represented in the Gothic art style. Gothic artists intentionally made their figures look this way in effort to make them seem more imposing.If we look at the figure’s arms, we find that, just like the legs and torso, the arms of the figure on the Turin Shroud are too long to be realistic. Once again, though, we find that figures in Gothic art often have disproportionately long arms—just like the figure on the Turin Shroud.The exact same thing is true for the fingers of the figure; they’re too long and thin to be natural, but they align exactly with the way figures were portrayed in Gothic art. Indeed, everything about the proportions of the figure on the Shroud of Turin points to the conclusion that it was created by a Gothic artist.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Gothic figures from the western portal of Chartres Cathedral, dating to c. 1145. Notice the small foreheads, long lower faces, long arms, and long bodies—all features of Gothic art that are found in the Turin Shroud.What’s even more interesting is that the arms of the figure on the Turin Shroud are also different lengths. The right forearm is noticeably longer than the left forearm. The fact that the arms aren’t the same length is almost a dead giveaway that we’re looking at an image created by an artist and not the exact likeness of a real human being. Real human beings virtually always have arms of the same length, but it is really easy for an artist to mess up and make arms that aren’t the same length.Finally, we have a smoking gun: the front side of the figure on the shroud doesn’t match the back side of the figure. In fact, the two figures aren’t even the same length; the front side of the figure on the shroud is 1.95 meters long, but the figure on the back of the shroud is 2.02 meters long!This is absolutely a dead giveaway that we’re looking at the work of an artist. It’s easy to see how an artist could have painted the figures separately and accidentally made the back side of the figure longer than the front side, but it is hard to see how, if the shroud were authentic, Jesus’s back could have been longer than his front. That in itself would take some kind of miracle.ABOVE: The full-length negatives of the front and back of the Turin Shroud. Pay attention to the arms, which are of differing lengths and too long to be anatomical. Also notice that the image on the back is longer than the one on the front.Evidence #6: The blood stains on the Turin Shroud are not consistent with how blood naturally flows and the stains instead appear to have been painted on.Researchers have repeatedly conducted experiments and found that the bloodstains on the Turin Shroud are not consistent with how blood naturally flows. In 2018, a group of researchers conducted experiments in which they applied blood to a live volunteer and to a mannequin to mimic the wounds sustained by Jesus on the cross in order to see how the blood would run on human bodies in various positions. They then compared the actual blood patterns with the bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin.Two short trails of blood on the back of the left hand of the figure on the Shroud of Turin were found to be only plausible if the man was holding his arms at a forty-five degree angle, but bloodstains on the forearm were only plausible if the man was holding his arms vertically or nearly vertically. Since a man can’t hold his arms in both positions at once, clearly the bloodstains weren’t natural.The bloodstains on the front chest of the figure were consistent with the pattern one would expect from a spear wound in the side, but the bloodstains on the back, which supposedly came from the same spear wound, weren’t consistent with the supposed injury. In other words, this is another case of the back side of the figure on the shroud not matching the front.Matteo Borrini, the leader of the research team and a forensic anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University, stated in an interview with LiveScience, “…these cannot be real bloodstains from a person who was crucified and then put into a grave, but actually handmade by the artist that created the shroud.” In other words, the bloodstains were painted on.ABOVE: Christ Crucified, painted c. 1632 by the Spanish painter Diego VelázquezEvidence #7: The fabric of the Shroud of Turin uses a herringbone twill weave, which is a kind of complex weave that was used in the Late Middle Ages for high-quality textiles, but is not known to have been used for burial shrouds in the first century AD.The Shroud of Turin is made of linen fibers woven using a three-to-one herringbone twill weave, which is a kind of highly complex weave that was used in the Late Middle Ages for high-quality textiles. Although the herringbone twill weave did exist in the ancient Roman world, we have no evidence that it was ever used for burial shrouds.Fragments of a number of burial shrouds have been recovered from tombs near Jerusalem dating to the same time period as Jesus and all of them use a plain two-way weave; none of them use a herringbone twill weave.Even if we imagine that the herringbone twill weave was used for burial shrouds in Roman Judaea and we just don’t have any evidence for this, it almost certainly would not have been used for the burial shroud of a crucified Jewish criminal, since it is a very complex weave that takes much greater skill and effort to produce than a plain weave. As such, any fabric made using this weave in Jesus’s time would have certainly been very expensive.The burial shroud fragments that have been recovered from the tombs near Jerusalem, however, include fragments from shrouds that certainly belonged to extremely elite individuals and all of them use the much simpler two-way weave. It is hard to imagine that a high priest or wealthy aristocrat would have been buried with a relatively cheap shroud made with a simple weave, but a crucified criminal would have been buried with a more expensive herringbone twill shroud.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons depicting a modern example of herringbone twill weave. This kind of weave was used for expensive fabrics in the Late Middle Ages, but not for burial shrouds in Judaea in the first century AD.ConclusionSo, here’s the evidence I have presented for why the Shroud of Turin is clearly a hoax:We have no reliable documentation of the Shroud of Turin’s existence until the fourteenth century.The forger who made the Shroud of Turin confessed and the earliest definitive mention of the shroud in any historical source is a record of his confession.The Shroud of Turin doesn’t match the kinds of funerary wrappings used in Judaea in the time of Jesus or the description of Jesus’s own funerary wrappings given in the Gospel of John.The linen of the Shroud of Turin has been securely dated using radiocarbon dating to between c. 1260 and c. 1390 AD—well over a millennium after Jesus’s death.The figure on the Shroud of Turin does not have anatomically correct proportions and much more closely resembles figures in fourteenth-century Gothic art than a real human being.The bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin are not consistent with how blood actually flows naturally and they instead appear to have been painted on.The fabric of the Shroud of Turin is made with a kind of weave that is known to have been commonly used during the Late Middle Ages, but does not seem to have been used for burial shrouds in Judaea in the first century AD.All the evidence points to the inexorable conclusion that the Shroud of Turin is a late medieval hoax.The fact that the Shroud of Turin is a hoax doesn’t make it any less interesting as a historical artifact; it may be a hoax, but it is still an extremely famous hoax that is probably around seven hundred years old and that can reveal a lot about the nature of religious hoaxes in late medieval France. The Shroud of Turin is worth studying, then, not as an authentic ancient relic, but rather as an authentic medieval religious artifact. It has historical value, just not the particular kind of historical value that some people think it has.Since I’m debunking misconceptions about Jesus, I should probably also note that Jesus almost certainly wasn’t married to Mary Magdalene, he definitely wasn’t copied off the Egyptian god Horus or the Greek god Dionysos, and he almost certainly wasn’t really born on December 25th either.(NOTE: I have also published a version of this article on my website titled “Sorry, the Shroud of Turin Is Definitely a Hoax.” Here is a link to the version of the article on my website.)
Do historians believe the Ark of the Covenant exists?
It is impossible for anyone alive today to know for certain if there was ever really an Ark of the Covenant because, if there was one, it was probably destroyed thousands of years ago. Personally, though, I strongly suspect that there probably really was some form of Ark of the Covenant that really was kept in the Holy of Holies of the First Temple in Jerusalem.Nonetheless, if the Ark really existed, we cannot be sure that it really looked how it is described in the Book of Exodus. Furthermore, the Ark, if it existed, almost certainly never possessed any of the amazing supernatural powers that are attributed to it in the Hebrew Bible.The Book of Deuteronomy—a contemporary source for the Ark?The first reason why I suspect that there probably really was an Ark of the Covenant is because the Ark of the Covenant is described in the Book of Deuteronomy, which is usually thought to have been written during the reign of King Josiah of Judah (ruled c. 649–609 BC).During Josiah’s reign, the Ark of the Covenant would have probably still been held in the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem. If this was indeed the case, this would make the Book of Deuteronomy a contemporary source in this regard.ABOVE: Joshua Passing the River Jordan with the Ark of the Covenant, painted in 1800 by the painter Benjamin WestSimilar Arks in the Near EastThe second reason why I suspect that there probably really was an Ark of the Covenant is because the description of the Ark of the Covenant given in the Hebrew Bible closely resembles known arks that existed throughout the ancient Near East. Here is the description that is given of the Ark of the Covenant in the Book of Exodus 25:10–22, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):“They shall make an ark of acacia wood; it shall be two and a half cubits long, a cubit and a half wide, and a cubit and a half high. You shall overlay it with pure gold, inside and outside you shall overlay it, and you shall make a molding of gold upon it all around. You shall cast four rings of gold for it and put them on its four feet, two rings on the one side of it, and two rings on the other side. You shall make poles of acacia wood, and overlay them with gold. And you shall put the poles into the rings on the sides of the ark, by which to carry the ark. The poles shall remain in the rings of the ark; they shall not be taken from it. You shall put into the ark the covenant that I shall give you.“Then you shall make a mercy seat of pure gold; two cubits and a half shall be its length, and a cubit and a half its width. You shall make two cherubim of gold; you shall make them of hammered work, at the two ends of the mercy seat. Make one cherub at the one end, and one cherub at the other; of one piece with the mercy seat you shall make the cherubim at its two ends. The cherubim shall spread out their wings above, overshadowing the mercy seat with their wings. They shall face one to another; the faces of the cherubim shall be turned toward the mercy seat. You shall put the mercy seat on the top of the ark; and in the ark you shall put the covenant that I shall give you. There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the covenant, I will deliver to you all my commands for the Israelites.”This basic structure of a chest with two poles on either side for it to be carried aligns well with other known artifacts from the ancient Near East, including a surviving ark that was discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamen. (And, no, the ark from the tomb of Tutankhamen is definitely not the Ark of the Covenant. It is merely a different, Egyptian ark with a similar structure.)ABOVE: Photograph of the Anubis Shrine, a different ark with the same basic structure as the Ark of the Covenant that was found in the Tomb of Tutankhamen, from when the tomb was first openedABOVE: Modern color photograph of the Anubis Shrine from the Tomb of TutankhamenDoes the Ark still exist?Unfortunately for the thousands of treasure seekers who are currently out looking for the Ark of the Covenant, the real Ark, if it did indeed exist, as I suspect it probably did, was probably destroyed when the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar II (ruled c. 605 – c. 562 BC) sacked the city of Jerusalem in 587 or 586 BC.We know that, during this sack of the city, the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple in which the Ark of the Covenant is said to have normally been kept. Furthermore, although no surviving account of the destruction of Jerusalem mentions the Ark, we also know that references to the Ark cease after the destruction of the First Temple. This indicates that this was when the Ark was either destroyed or lost.My view is that the Ark of the Covenant, if it existed, was almost certainly destroyed. The Babylonians had no motivation to preserve the Ark and they had strong motivation to destroy it. Because the Ark was so religiously important to the Judahites, destroying the Ark would have helped the Babylonians in breaking the Judahites’ spirit.Furthermore, the Ark is said to have had gold components. Gold was extremely valuable in the ancient world and the Babylonians would have known that, if they harvested the gold from the Ark and melted it down, they could use that gold to make other things.ABOVE: The Burning of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar’s Army, painted between 1630 and 1660 by a member of the circle of the Spanish painter Juan de la CorteThe Second Book of Kings 25:8–21 describes how the Babylonians utterly destroyed the First Temple. Here is the passage, as translated in the NRSV:“On the seventh day of the fifth month, in the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard, an official of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. He set fire to the temple of the Lord, the royal palace and all the houses of Jerusalem. Every important building he burned down. The whole Babylonian army under the commander of the imperial guard broke down the walls around Jerusalem. Nebuzaradan the commander of the guard carried into exile the people who remained in the city, along with the rest of the populace and those who had deserted to the king of Babylon. But the commander left behind some of the poorest people of the land to work the vineyards and fields.“The Babylonians broke up the bronze pillars, the movable stands and the bronze Sea that were at the temple of the Lord and they carried the bronze to Babylon. They also took away the pots, shovels, wick trimmers, dishes and all the bronze articles used in the temple service. The commander of the imperial guard took away the censers and sprinkling bowls—all that were made of pure gold or silver.”“The bronze from the two pillars, the Sea and the movable stands, which Solomon had made for the temple of the Lord, was more than could be weighed. Each pillar was eighteen cubits high. The bronze capital on top of one pillar was three cubits high and was decorated with a network and pomegranates of bronze all around. The other pillar, with its network, was similar.”“The commander of the guard took as prisoners Seraiah the chief priest, Zephaniah the priest next in rank and the three doorkeepers. Of those still in the city, he took the officer in charge of the fighting men, and five royal advisers. He also took the secretary who was chief officer in charge of conscripting the people of the land and sixty of the conscripts who were found in the city. Nebuzaradan the commander took them all and brought them to the king of Babylon at Riblah. There at Riblah, in the land of Hamath, the king had them executed.”“So Judah went into captivity, away from her land.”The archaeological record supports this account of absolute destruction. Although no one has excavated the remains of the First Temple because archaeological excavation on the Temple Mount is forbidden, archaeologists have found signs of devastation throughout the ancient parts of the city of Jerusalem that date to the time when the city is recorded to have been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar’s armies.The archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman describe the level of destruction in Jerusalem on page 295 of their book The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts:“Signs of a great conflagration have been trace almost everywhere within the city walls. Arrowheads found in the houses near the northern fortifications attest to the intensity of the last battle for Jerusalem. The private houses, which were set alightand collapsed, burying all that was in them, created the charred heaps of rubble that stood as a testament to the thoroughness of Jerusalem’s destruction by the Babylonians for the next century and a half (Nehemiah 2:13).”Given this level destruction, it is almost inconceivable that the Babylonians would have spared the Ark of the Covenant.ABOVE: Illustration on gouche board by the French painter James Tissot (lived 1836 – 1902) depicting the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians“Maybe they smuggled it out!” Probably not…The only way the Ark of the Covenant could have possibly survived the destruction of the First Temple would be if a group of extremely devoted and extremely stealthy Judahites somehow managed to smuggle it out of the city of Jerusalem before its destruction and hide it somewhere safe.This is highly implausible, though. First of all, the Babylonians had the city completely surrounded. King Zedekiah tried to escape the city, but he was captured by the Babylonians, who butchered both his sons while he watched and then gouged out both his eyes and took him as a prisoner, along with all the men he had with him. There is no reason to think that men carrying the Ark would have fared any better.Furthermore, Ark is described as quite a large object. It would have taken a whole team of men to carry it. It is hard to imagine that a group of at least four Judahite men carrying a massive gold chest could have escaped during the Siege of Jerusalem and successfully hidden that gold chest somewhere where it would be safe from destruction.Even if they could have escaped, we have no reliable documentation that they did. The surviving accounts of the destruction of Jerusalem make no mention of the Ark whatsoever. You would think that, if the Judahites had managed to save the Ark, they would have written a whole detailed account of the Ark’s salvation into their account of the destruction of Jerusalem—but they did not.ABOVE: The Ark Passes over the River Jordan, illustration on gouche board by the French illustrator James Tissot depicting men carrying the Ark of the CovanentWhile some have claimed that the fact that the Hebrew Bible does not mention the Ark’s destruction means it must have survived, it seems more plausible to me that the reason why the surviving accounts of the destruction of Jerusalem make no mention of the Ark is precisely because the Ark was destroyed and the Judahites were so embarrassed that they could not bear to mention it. After all, if your most precious religious artifact was destroyed, that is the sort of thing you might want to put in the past and forget about.Even if the Ark was somehow not destroyed during the destruction of the First Temple, it was probably destroyed at a later date. The Ark is said to have been gilded in gold and to have had gold components. If it was hidden somewhere and someone found it, they probably would have taken the gold and sold it to be melted down.The chest itself is said to have been made of acacia wood. Wood—even gilded wood—rots rather quickly. We have very few surviving examples of wood artifacts from ancient times. Even if the Ark was somehow saved from Jerusalem before the city was razed and hidden somewhere, then, unless the place where it was hidden was someplace extremely dry, the wood would have probably rotted away within a few generations.ABOVE: Gilded bas-relief from Auch Cathedral in France depicting men carrying the Ark of the Covenant“But wait, what about 2 Maccabees 2:4-8!”Some will object to what I have written here by pointing to a passage found in the Second Book of the Maccabees 2:4-8 claiming that the prophet Jeremiah rescued the Ark of the Covenant and hid it in a secret cave under Mount Nebo in modern-day Jordan. The full passage reads as follows, as translated in the NRSV:“It was also in the same document that the prophet, having received an oracle, ordered that the tent and the ark should follow with him, and that he went out to the mountain where Moses had gone up and had seen the inheritance of God [i.e. Mount Nebo in modern-day Jordan]. Jeremiah came and found a cave-dwelling, and he brought there the tent and the ark and the altar of incense; then he sealed up the entrance. Some of those who followed him came up intending to mark the way, but could not find it. When Jeremiah learned of it, he rebuked them and declared: ‘The place shall remain unknown until God gathers his people together again and shows his mercy. Then the Lord will disclose these things, and the glory of the Lord and the cloud will appear, as they were shown in the case of Moses, and as Solomon asked that the place should be specially consecrated.'”There are multiple serious issues with taking this as a factual account, however. First of all, the Second Book of the Maccabees was written in Koine Greek sometime around 124 BC or thereabouts, probably in Alexandria. In other words, this text was written nearly five hundred years after the events it describes supposedly took place.Although the book purports to cite certain unnamed “records” to support its claim, it is unclear which “records” the text is citing and no one can guess how old these supposed “records” are. Furthermore, we do not even know if these unnamed “records” really existed or if the author of 2 Maccabees simply made them up to make his account sound more credible.Additionally, the specific claims made here give us good reason to doubt the historical accuracy of the author’s sources (whatever those sources really were). The idea that Jeremiah would have been permitted by the Judahite king to simply carry off the Ark to an unknown location is highly implausible. It is even less plausible that he could have simply stolen the Ark out of the Temple and run off with it, since it was kept in the Holy of Holies and would have certainly been under constant protection.We know Jeremiah definitely could not have rescued the Ark during the Siege of Jerusalem after the king’s capture by the Babylonians because, according to the Book of Jeremiah, which is usually thought to have been mostly written by Jeremiah himself, he was imprisoned the whole time. According to chapter 40 of the Book of Jeremiah, Jeremiah was finally released by the Babylonians after they had captured the city, by which point, they would have certainly already destroyed the Ark if it was there for them to destroy.This whole account of Jeremiah hiding the Ark is clearly motivated by a later Jewish interest to explain what happened to the Ark of the Covenant. In any case, even if this account were true and the Ark was really hidden in a cave under Mount Nebo, there is next to no chance that it could have survived to the present day.It is worth noting that, although the Second Book of the Maccabees is considered canonical by Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, it is not considered canonical by Jews or Protestants, largely on account of its late date and a number of obvious historical errors contained within it.ABOVE: Jeremiah on the Ruins of Jerusalem, painted in 1844 by the French Orientalist painter Horace Vernet. According to the apocryphal Second Book of the Maccabees, Jeremiah rescued the Ark of the Covenant and hid it in a secret cave under Mount Nebo.“But wait, what about the Ethiopian Orthodox Church?”Others will doubtlessly point out that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims to possess the true Ark of the Covenant. According to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the original Ark of the Covenant with the original Ten Commandments inside is held in the Chapel of the Tablet at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, Ethiopia.The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has a whole elaborate legend about how the Ark supposedly came to Ethiopia. Supposedly, King Menelik I of Ethiopia was the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Upon reaching manhood, Menelik travelled to Jerusalem to meet his father. While he was in Jerusalem, King Solomon gave him the true Ark of the Covenant and replaced the Ark in the Temple with a forgery. Then, Menelik I brought the Ark back home with him to Ethiopia and founded a dynasty that would rule Ethiopia for nearly 3,000 years.This whole story is full of holes. For one thing, the earliest reliable record of the supposed “Solomonic dynasty” of Ethiopia dates to the thirteenth century AD and the main source for the whole story about the Ark of the Covenant being taken to Ethiopia by King Menelik I is the Kebra Nagast, the national epic of Ethiopia, which was composed in around the fourteenth century AD, roughly 2,200 years after the events it describes purportedly took place. Furthermore, this epic was composed primarily for the purpose of justifying the reigning dynasty of Ethiopia, not for the purpose of chronicling accurate history.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Chapel of the Tablet at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, Ethiopian, where the Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims the real Ark of the Covenant is heldEven if we set aside the fact that this is a story from over two millennia later, the whole account of Solomon giving the Ark to his son to take back to Ethiopia is also wildly implausible. It is almost unfathomable that Solomon, if he even existed, would have given the most sacred religious artifact in the entire Judahite religion over to a young man from a distant land claiming to be his son for him to carry off to his homeland half a world away. The story is clearly a medieval fantasy driven by nationalistic fervor.The Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims that the Ark of the Covenant is held in the Chapel of the Tablet at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, but only one monk, known as “the guardian,” is ever allowed to see it. No scholars, journalists, or non-clerics of any kind are permitted to view the supposed Ark. Needless to say, this is highly suspicious. If no one is permitted to examine the Ark and all we have is the Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s word that it is the real Ark, then there is no way for anyone to know if it is really the Ark at all. Quite simply, their claims are unverifiable.There have, however, been some scholars who have claimed that they were granted access to the supposed “Ark.” The British scholar Edward Ullendorff (lived 1920 – 2011), who was a professor of Ethiopian studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, claimed in an interview from 1992 with Michael A. Hiltzik, a journalist for The Los Angeles Times, that he had gained access to the artifact that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims to be the Ark of the Covenant in 1941 during World War II, before the Church started its policy of never letting scholars examine at it.Ullendorff stated in the interview, “They have a wooden box, but it’s empty.” He described the box as a “middle-to-late-medieval construction, when these were fabricated ad hoc.” In other words, no one today outside of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is permitted to examine the artifact that the Church has in its possession and the only scholar who has credibly claimed to have seen the Ark says it is a medieval fake.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the crowns of various Ethiopian kings held in the Chapel of the Tablet, the same chapel where the Ark of the Covenant is supposedly heldConclusionThere probably was some kind of historical “Ark of the Covenant.” It may or may not have looked as it is described in the Book of Exodus. It almost certainly did not have any supernatural powers. Finally, the original Ark was almost certainly destroyed millennia ago, most likely during the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar II in 587 or 576 BC.There is almost no chance whatsoever that the Ark could have survived to the present day. Even if, through some inexplicable miraculous act of God, the Ark has somehow survived, we have no sources that would lead us to its current location. The Ark of the Covenant is gone forever.(NOTE: This answer is excerpted from an article I published on my website on 2 September 2019 titled “What Happened to the Ark of the Covenant?” Here is a link to the full article.)
Who were the earliest opponents to slavery? Were there any classical (Greek/Roman) abolitionists?
The prevailing attitude towards slavery throughout the ancient Mediterranean world was essentially that being a slave was horrible and unpleasant, but that that was just the way things were and the way things always would be. As far as we can tell from the surviving sources, the idea that slavery even could be abolished does not seem to have occurred to most people.There were apparently a few people in ancient Greece and Rome who thought that slavery was immoral, but these people seem to have been extremely rare, since they only appear briefly in the sources. Furthermore, we have absolutely no documentation of the existence of any large-scale, organized movement to abolish slavery in ancient Greece or Rome. Some people did criticize slavery extensively and there were probably people who wished slavery didn’t exist, but no one seems to have ever developed any realistic plans to abolish it.The Achaemenid PersiansThe Achaemenid Empire is often cited as being anti-slavery. This is partially true. The ruling government of the Achaemenid Empire seems to have been, in general, largely opposed to most forms of chattel slavery. This should not, however, be taken to mean that slavery did not exist in the Achaemenid Empire. For one thing, we know that in many cases the Achaemenid Persians left regional governing bodies intact and it is highly probable that any regulations against chattel slavery that might have existed were not evenly enforced.Furthermore, other forms of slavery persisted under Achaemenid rule. For instance, we have evidence to believe that defeated rebels were sometimes taken as prisoners of war and forced to perform slave labor. The Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BC) mentions captured Lydian, Egyptian, Ionian, and Eretrian rebels being taken by the Persians into slavery on several occasions in his Histories. Herodotos is not always entirely reliable as a historian, but other sources seem to support the idea that, at least in some cases, defeated rebels could be forced into slave labor as punishment.Additionally, although debt slavery seems to have generally been uncommon, in some cases, in at least some Achaemenid provinces, insolvent debtors could be forced to work as unpaid laborers for their creditors for a certain number of years to pay off their debts. A debtor working as a slave for his creditor, however, could not be sold as a slave to a third party.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bas-relief from Persepolis depicting Achaemenid soldiers. The Achaemenids seem to have generally opposed most forms of chattel slavery.The “others” mentioned by Aristotle who thought slavery was “contrary to nature”Ironically, while slavery was rare in the Achaemenid Empire, which was ruled by an absolute monarch (i.e. the shah-in-shah or “king-of-kings”), slavery was practically ubiquitous throughout all parts of classical Greece. Even democratic city-states such as Athens relied heavily on slave labor.Indeed, while most poor and lower-middle-class Athenian citizens probably could not afford to own slaves, nearly every Athenian at least aspired to own slaves. Owning slaves was seen as a sign that a person was prosperous and owning more slaves meant that a person was of higher status. Additionally, much of Athens’s wealth during the fifth century BC was reliant on the work of brutally oppressed slaves who were forced to work in unbearable and unsafe conditions in the silver mines at Laurion in the southern Attic Peninsula.Strangely, though, even though Athens was a direct democracy where the idea of freedom was elevated to highest degree, there seems to have been very little opposition to the institution of slavery and virtually no organized opposition at all, insofar as we can tell from the surviving sources. I think the closest we find to a serious attack on the morality of slavery as an institution from classical Greece probably comes from the unnamed people briefly mentioned in the following passage written by the Greek philosopher Aristotle of Stageira (lived 384 – 322 BC) in his Politics 1.1253b, which has been translated here by H. Rackham:“For some thinkers hold the function of the master to be a definite science, and moreover think that household management, mastership, statesmanship and monarchy are the same thing, as we said at the beginning of the treatise; others however maintain that for one man to be another man's master is contrary to nature, because it is only convention that makes the one a slave and the other a freeman and there is no difference between them by nature, and that therefore it is unjust, for it is based on force.”This is, unfortunately, an extremely brief mention. Aristotle tells us nothing about how common this viewpoint was and he does not list any examples of individuals who held this viewpoint. We have no surviving sources from classical Greece written by any of the people who held this view that Aristotle mentions and Aristotle immediately goes on to argue against this view, arguing that slavery is, in fact, perfectly natural, meaning we only know of these people from the perspective of the opposition.Furthermore, this is the only classical Greek text I am aware of in which people who thought slavery was categorically immoral are even mentioned. All this evidence seems to strongly indicate that these people who believed slavery was institutionally wrong were a very tiny minority indeed.Notice that, as far as Aristotle tells us, even the people he is speaking about here do not seem to have had any kind of realistic plans for abolishing slavery; Aristotle merely tells us that these people thought that slavery was “contrary to nature” and “unjust,” which is hardly a compelling argument for abolition.ABOVE: Roman marble copy of a late fourth-century BC Greek bust of Aristotle by the sculptor Lysippos. Aristotle records that there were some people in ancient Greece who thought slavery was “contrary to nature” and therefore “unjust,” but this is probably the closest thing we find to a serious argument against the morality of slavery in all of ancient Greek literature.Seneca the Younger on the treatment of slavesWhile individuals arguing for the outright abolition of slavery seem to have been extremely rare in classical Greece and Rome, if they existed at all, there were certainly many individuals in those civilizations who argued against the extremely brutal mistreatment of slaves that was all too common in the ancient world. For instance, perhaps most famously, the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger (lived c. 4 BC – 65 AD) writes the following in his Moral Letter to Lucilius 47.1–10, as translated by Richard M. Gummere:“I am glad to learn, through those who come from you, that you live on friendly terms with your slaves. This befits a sensible and well-educated man like yourself. ‘They are slaves,’ people declare. Nay, rather they are men. ‘Slaves!’ No, comrades. ‘Slaves!’ No, they are unpretentious friends. ‘Slaves!’ No, they are our fellow-slaves, if one reflects that Fortune has equal rights over slaves and free men alike.”“That is why I smile at those who think it degrading for a man to dine with his slave. But why should they think it degrading? It is only because purse-proud etiquette surrounds a householder at his dinner with a mob of standing slaves. The master eats more than he can hold, and with monstrous greed loads his belly until it is stretched and at length ceases to do the work of a belly; so that he is at greater pains to discharge all the food than he was to stuff it down. All this time the poor slaves may not move their lips, even to speak. The slightest murmur is repressed by the rod; even a chance sound, – a cough, a sneeze, or a hiccup, – is visited with the lash. There is a grievous penalty for the slightest breach of silence. All night long they must stand about, hungry and dumb.”“The result of it all is that these slaves, who may not talk in their master’s presence, talk about their master. But the slaves of former days, who were permitted to converse not only in their master’s presence, but actually with him, whose mouths were not stitched up tight, were ready to bare their necks for their master, to bring upon their own heads any danger that threatened him; they spoke at the feast, but kept silence during torture. Finally, the saying, in allusion to this same high-handed treatment, becomes current: ‘As many enemies as you have slaves.’ They are not enemies when we acquire them; we make them enemies.”“I shall pass over other cruel and inhuman conduct towards them; for we maltreat them, not as if they were men, but as if they were beasts of burden. When we recline at a banquet, one slave mops up the disgorged food, another crouches beneath the table and gathers up the left-overs of the tipsy guests. Another carves the priceless game birds; with unerring strokes and skilled hand he cuts choice morsels along the breast or the rump. Hapless fellow, to live only for the purpose of cutting fat capons correctly, – unless, indeed, the other man is still more unhappy than he, who teaches this art for pleasure’s sake, rather than he who learns it because he must. Another, who serves the wine, must dress like a woman and wrestle with his advancing years; he cannot get away from his boyhood; he is dragged back to it; and though he has already acquired a soldier’s figure, he is kept beardless by having his hair smoothed away or plucked out by the roots, and he must remain awake throughout the night, dividing his time between his master’s drunkenness and his lust; in the chamber he must be a man, at the feast a boy.”“Another, whose duty it is to put a valuation on the guests, must stick to his task, poor fellow, and watch to see whose flattery and whose immodesty, whether of appetite or of language, is to get them an invitation for to-morrow. Think also of the poor purveyors of food, who note their masters’ tastes with delicate skill, who know what special flavours will sharpen their appetite, what will please their eyes, what new combinations will rouse their cloyed stomachs, what food will excite their loathing through sheer satiety, and what will stir them to hunger on that particular day. With slaves like these the master cannot bear to dine; he would think it beneath his dignity to associate with his slave at the same table! Heaven forfend!”“But how many masters is he creating in these very men! I have seen standing in the line, before the door of Callistus, the former master, of Callistus; I have seen the master himself shut out while others were welcomed, – the master who once fastened the “For Sale” ticket on Callistus and put him in the market along with the good-for-nothing slaves. But he has been paid off by that slave who was shuffled into the first lot of those on whom the crier practises his lungs; the slave, too, in his turn has cut his name from the list and in his turn has adjudged him unfit to enter his house. The master sold Callistus, but how much has Callistus made his master pay for!”“Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies. It is just as possible for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see in you a slave. As a result of the massacres in Marius’s day, many a man of distinguished birth, who was taking the first steps toward senatorial rank by service in the army, was humbled by fortune, one becoming a shepherd, another a caretaker of a country cottage. Despise, then, if you dare, those to whose estate you may at any time descend, even when you are despising them.”Clearly, Seneca had some degree of concern for the wellbeing of slaves. Notice, though, that Seneca never even considers the notion of abolishing slavery. The very notion that slavery could realistically be abolished never seems to have even crossed his mind. Seneca just accepts the perpetual existence of slavery as an institution without question.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of the Stoic philosopher Seneca the YoungerSeneca advocates for slaves to be treated more humanely, but he never advocates that those slaves should be set free. In fact, in section eighteen of the letter, Seneca makes this point very much crystal-clear when he writes (once again in Gummere’s translation):“Some may maintain that I am now offering the liberty-cap to slaves in general and toppling down lords from their high estate, because I bid slaves respect their masters instead of fearing them. They say: ‘This is what he plainly means: slaves are to pay respect as if they were clients or early-morning callers!’ Anyone who holds this opinion forgets that what is enough for a god cannot be too little for a master. Respect means love, and love and fear cannot be mingled.”Here Seneca not only rejects abolitionism, but also compares the relationship between a slave and a master to the relationship between a man and a god—a comparison which probably would not have endeared him very much to anyone who might have supported abolition.An article titled “Seneca’s ‘Lost Cause,’” written by Stephanie McCarter and published on the classics social justice site Eidolon in February 2019, even goes so far as to equate Seneca the Younger with contemporary supporters of the myth of the “Lost Cause” who romanticize slavery as a benevolent, paternalistic institution. I think that the comparison is not entirely unfair, since there are similarities between what Seneca says here and what certain proponents of the “Lost Cause” claim.Nonetheless, I think that this comparison is deeply anachronistic. Seneca the Younger was writing at a time when slavery was widely accepted as normal and very few people—if, indeed, any at all—were openly advocating its abolition; whereas people today who seek to justify slavery in the American South are doing so in a time when slavery is nearly universally recognized as a moral abomination. To say that Seneca and contemporary “Lost Cause” supporters are the same is to fail to recognize the nearly 2,000-year gap that separates them.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a modern commemorative statue from Córdoba, intended to represent Seneca the YoungerEpiktetos on slaveryNow, you might wonder, “What did people who were actually enslaved think of slavery? Surely they must have wanted to abolish it, right?” This is a difficult question to answer, because we have very, very few surviving writings from people in ancient Greece or Rome who were enslaved. The vast majority of our surviving works on the subject of slavery come from people who were masters of slaves rather than people who were slaves themselves. Nonetheless, we do have some surviving works from mainly former slaves.In particular, one of the best known former slaves of antiquity was the Greek philosopher Epiktetos of Hierapolis (lived c. 55 – 135 AD), who was born into slavery and spent his youth as a slave to the freedman Epaphroditus. He acquired his freedom sometime around 68 AD and eventually became a renowned Stoic philosopher with many students.A number of informal oral lectures delivered by Epiktetos were transcribed by his pupil, the historian Arrianos of Nikomedia (lived c. 89 – after c. 146 AD). If Arrianos’s transcripts of his lectures are anything to judge by, though, even Epiktetos did not advocate the abolition of slavery. Instead, he adopted a perspective very much along the lines of the perspective adopted by Seneca that all people are slaves of fortune and that people should treat their slaves humanely.Epiktetos does provide us with some information about what slaves wanted, though. In a passage towards the first chapter of Book Four of Epiktetos’s Discourses, Arrianos attributes the following words to Epiktetos, as translated by P. E. Mattheson:“The slave is anxious to be set free at once. Why? Do you think it is because he is anxious to pay the tax on his manumission? No! the reason is he imagines that up till now he is hampered and ill at ease because he has not got his freedom. 'If I am enfranchised,' he says, 'at once all will be well, I heed nobody, I talk to all men as an equal and one of their quality, I go where I will, I come whence I will and where I will.' Then he is emancipated, and having nothing to eat he straightway looks for some one to flatter and to dine with; then he either has to sell his body to lust and endure the worst, and if he gets a manger to eat at, he has plunged into a slavery much severer than the first; or if perchance he grows rich, being a low-bred fellow he dotes on some paltry girl and gets miserable and bewails himself and longs to be a slave again.”“'What ailed me in those days? Another gave me clothes and shoes, another fed me and tended me in sickness, and the service I did him was a small matter. Now, how wretched and miserable I am, with many masters instead of one! Still, if I can get rings on my fingers I shall live happily and prosperously enough.'”“And so first, to get them, he puts up with what he deserves, and having got them repeats the process. Next he says, 'If I go on a campaign I am quit of all my troubles.' He turns soldier and endures the lot of a criminal, but all the same he begs for a second campaign and a third.”“Lastly, when he gets the crown to his career and is made a senator, once more he becomes a slave again as he goes to the senate; then he enjoys the noblest and the sleekest slavery of all.”Judging from this passage attributed by Arrianos to Epiktetos and from other sources, it seems that most slaves in ancient Greece and Rome yearned for their own personal freedom but did not generally yearn for the wholesale abolition of slavery itself.ABOVE: Imaginative portrayal of the Greek philosopher Epiktetos from the frontispiece to a book printed at Oxford in 1715. Epiktetos was born into slavery.Christian critics of slavery in late antiquityCriticism of slavery as an institution seems to have arisen to greater prominence with the rise of Christianity in late antiquity. While most Christians accepted slavery as the pagan Greeks and Romans had before them, some Christians came to view slavery as fundamentally incompatible with the Christian teaching that all human beings are made in the image of God. They thought: If all human beings are made in the image of God, then how is it we are allowed to own other humans? Isn’t that like owning God?Early Christian views on slavery were fairly diverse. The eastern Church Father Ioannes Chrysostomos (lived c. 349 – 407 AD) writes in his Homily 22 on Ephesians, as translated by Gross Alexander:“But should any one ask, whence is slavery, and why it has found entrance into human life, (and many I know are both glad to ask such questions, and desirous to be informed of them,) I will tell you. Slavery is the fruit of covetous, of degradation, of savagery; since Noah, we know, had no servant, nor had Abel, nor Seth, no, nor they who came after them.”Thus, Chrysostomos interpreted slavery as the product of sin. He did not, however, argue for the abolition of slavery and instead adopted an attitude reminiscent of that of Seneca and Epiktetos: that masters should love their slaves and treat them humanely and that slaves should obey their masters and love them in return.The western Church Father Augustine of Hippo (lived 354 – 430 AD), a theologian from North Africa, probably of Berber descent, held a similar sentiment. Augustine believed that slavery was contrary to God’s will, but that it was the inevitable consequence of Original Sin. Augustine writes in his book The City of God 19.15, as translated by Marcus Dods:“He [i.e. God] did not intend that His rational creature, who was made in His image, should have dominion over anything but the irrational creation, — not man over man, but man over the beasts. And hence the righteous men in primitive times were made shepherds of cattle rather than kings of men, God intending thus to teach us what the relative position of the creatures is, and what the desert of sin; for it is with justice, we believe, that the condition of slavery is the result of sin. And this is why we do not find the word slave in any part of Scripture until righteous Noah branded the sin of his son with this name. It is a name, therefore, introduced by sin and not by nature. The origin of the Latin word for slave is supposed to be found in the circumstance that those who by the law of war were liable to be killed were sometimes preserved by their victors, and were hence called servants. And these circumstances could never have arisen save through sin. For even when we wage a just war, our adversaries must be sinning; and every victory, even though gained by wicked men, is a result of the first judgment of God, who humbles the vanquished either for the sake of removing or of punishing their sins. Witness that man of God, Daniel, who, when he was in captivity, confessed to God his own sins and the sins of his people, and declares with pious grief that these were the cause of the captivity. The prime cause, then, of slavery is sin, which brings man under the dominion of his fellow — that which does not happen save by the judgment of God, with whom is no unrighteousness, and who knows how to award fit punishments to every variety of offense.”ABOVE: Sixth-century AD fresco from Rome, probably intended to depict Augustine of HippoGregorios of NyssaWhile many early Christians engaged in displays of hand-wringing over the injustice of slavery only to affirm its inevitability, the Christian Church Father Gregorios of Nyssa (lived c. 335 – c. 395 AD), an older contemporary of both Ioannes Chrysostomos and Augustine of Hippo, took a significantly stronger anti-slavery stance than most. For instance, in his Fourth Homily on Ecclesiastes 336.6–337.13, Gregorios of Nyssa delivers a lengthy condemnation of slavery in response to the line “I got me slaves and slave-girls” from the Book of Ecclesiastes. Here is the passage, as translated by Stuart G. Hall, and Rachel Moriarty:“For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling the being shaped by God? God said, Let us make man in our own image and likeness (Gen 1,26). If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or rather, not even to God himself. For his gracious gifts, it says, are irrevocable (Rom 11,29). God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God’s?”“How too shall the ruler of the whole earth and all earthly things be put up for sale? For the property of the person sold is bound to be sold with him, too. So how much do we think the whole earth is worth? And how much all the things on the earth (Gen 1,26)? If they are priceless, what price is the one above them worth, tell me? Though you were to say the whole world, even so you have not found the price he is worth (Mat 16,26; Mk 8,36). He who knew the nature of mankind rightly said that the whole world was not worth giving in exchange for a human soul. Whenever a human being is for sale, therefore, nothing less than the owner of the earth is led into the sale-room. Presumably, then, the property belonging to him is up for auction too. That means the earth, the islands, the sea, and all that is in them. What will the buyer pay, and what will the vendor accept, considering how much property is entailed in the deal?”“But has the scrap of paper, and the written contract, and the counting out of obols deceived you into thinking yourself the master of the image of God? What folly! If the contract were lost, if the writing were eaten away by worms, if a drop of water should somehow seep in and obliterate it, what guarantee have you of their slavery? what have you to sustain your title as owner? I see no superiority over the subordinate accruing to you from the title other than the mere title. What does this power contribute to you as a person? not longevity, nor beauty, nor good health, nor superiority in virtue. Your origin is from the same ancestors, your life is of the same kind, sufferings of soul and body prevail alike over you who own him and over the one who is subject to your ownership – pains and pleasures, merriment and distress, sorrows and delights, rages and terrors, sickness and death. Is there any difference in these things between the slave and his owner? Do they not draw in the same air as they breathe? Do they not see the sun in the same way? Do they not alike sustain their being by consuming food? Is not the arrangement of their guts the same? Are not the two one dust after death? Is there not one judgment for them? a common Kingdom, and a common Gehenna?”Even Gregorios of Nyssa, though, never advocated the total abolition of slavery; that idea seems to have been too inconceivable even for him. Nonetheless, he does portray slave ownership as immoral and at several points in his extant writings seems to urge slave owners to manumit their slaves. He was not as radical as we might have liked him to be, but he was still more radical than Seneca or Epiktetos.ABOVE: Eleventh-century mosaic intended to represent the Christian Church Father Gregorios of Nyssa, who repeatedly condemned slavery in his homiliesConclusionAbolitionism as we think of it today does not seem to have existed in the ancient Mediterranean world. There were apparently a few people who believed slavery was immoral, but, as far as we know, no one ever developed any kind of realistic plans to abolish it. Even to the most ardent critics of slavery in antiquity, the idea of abolishing it seems to have just been absurd and unthinkable. After all, slavery was basically ubiquitous; it was thoroughly embedded in the culture. Even the slaves themselves seem to have mostly longed only for personal freedom and not for the abolition of the entire institution of slavery altogether.Criticism of slavery seems to have become more prominent following the rise of Christianity in late antiquity, but, even in late antiquity, this criticism does not seem to have ever developed into anything resembling a full-scale abolition movement. This reveals, I think, just how utterly radical the notion of abolishing slavery truly was when it finally came about. It was an extremely wild, far-out idea that no one had previously even seriously considered.The fact that slavery is now illegal in every single country on Earth shows us how far we have come, but also reveals how far we have left to go. If something that was seemingly unimaginable to people in the Mediterranean world only around 2,000 years ago has now come to pass, what evils are there in our world today that we all take for granted that might be abolished 2,000 years from now?(NOTE: I have also published a version of this article on my website titled “Abolitionism in Ancient Greece and Rome?” Here is a link to the full version of the article on my website.)
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