14 October 2019
Memorial of St. Callistus
In most ancient civilizations there were two classes of people: slave and free. At the time of Jesus and the first Christians, the New Testament expressed this division (cf. 1 Cor 7:21, 1 Cor 12:13) with two Greek words: δουλος (doulos, slave) and ελεύθερος(eleutheros, free). When the scriptures were translated into Latin in the first few centuries A.D., this same division was expressed with the Latin words servus (slave) and liber (free). A millennium later, when the scriptures were translated into English, the translators always translated δουλος as servant instead of slave. I suppose this choice was made because servant is etymologically closer to the Latin servus, which was already a familiar word in ecclesiastical settings. The result of all of this is that all older translations of the Bible into English use the word servant when what is really meant is slave. Thus, St. Paul, at the outset of his letter to the Romans, calls himself a “δουλος of Jesus Christ,” and our Bibles typically read “servant of Jesus Christ,” with a little footnote that the Greek word is really slave.
This is not a website on Bible translation, and besides, that is not my field. I am not suggesting that we go around and retranslate our English Bibles. Instead, I am inviting you to reflect on whether it is enough to be a servant of Jesus Christ without also being his slave. Our English word slave carries a lot of negative connotations that are not found in our word servant, so we tend to prefer the latter term, but doesn’t the former term, slave, suggest something about how much of ourselves we wish to commit to God? Had St. Paul gone overboard in this case, or was he on to something?