BIBLICAL VIEWS
60 January/February 2018
Neither Jew nor Greek, Slave nor Free, Male and Female
Karin Neutel
How would we live together in an
ideal society? In his letters, the apostle Paul for-
mulated something of an answer to this question.
Paul expected an imminent cosmic change, a new
creation ushered in by the death and resurrection
of the Messiah. Prominent in his vision of this new
creation was the fact that all the nations of the
world would worship the one true God, together
with Israel. Consequently, the apostle called upon
gentiles to abandon their gods, to accept God’s Mes-
siah, and to live “in Christ,” in expectation of what
was about to happen. “In Christ,” Paul writes, “there
is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor
male and female” (Galatians 3:28).
This verse seems to strike an almost modern note
about human equality. Contemporary interpreters
have updated Paul’s statement and added pairs to
the three original ones: “neither gay nor straight,”
“neither healthy nor disabled,” and “neither black
nor white.” While these creative rewritings make
Paul’s statement speak to new situations, they also
highlight something about the original: These three
pairs must have been as relevant in the first century,
as the additional categories are today.
So why does Paul put exactly these categories
together? The three pairs that Paul includes in
this verse all played a role in first-century concep-
tions of what an ideal world would look like. When
imagining ideal or utopian communities, Paul’s
contemporaries picture different peoples living
together in one homogeneous group under one
law—without ethnic distinction. They also imag-
ine societies where people are not divided into
households and families, but all live as “brothers,”
as equals. Such communities could reject property,
slavery, and marriage, since in the minds of first-
century philosophers, doing away with possessions,
slaves, and wives meant removing the major causes
of social conflict. When Paul sums up the commu-
nity of those who live “in Christ,” he uses catego-
ries that reflect such first-century ideals.
This ideal of unity that Paul shared with his con-
temporaries was influenced by cosmopolitanism,a popular philosophical idea in the early Roman
Empire. Cosmopolitanism’s main component was
the conviction that all people are first and fore-
most citizens of the cosmos, rather than of their
local communities. This shared cosmic origin was
thought to connect all people with each other and
with the divine, and it suggested that all people
could live in a unified society, rather than divided
into different ethnic and geographic communities.
Cosmopolitanism had implications not only for
contemporary ideas about ethnic difference, but
also for ideas about the positions of slave and free
and about marriage and the relationship between
husband and wife. It therefore affected all three of
the pairs mentioned by Paul. We can see how this
works if we take a closer look at each of the pairs.
Like other first-century Jews, Paul expected that
in the end time, people from the nations would turn
to the God of Israel. In Paul’s letters, this expecta-
tion is expressed specifically in terms that have
a cosmopolitan ring to them, in that they appeal
to this ideal of ethnic unity. When he writes that
both Jews and non-Jews can be sons of Abraham
together (Romans 4:9–12), or that there is no differ-
ence between Jew and gentile (Romans 10:12), Paul
denies the relevance of ethnic distinctions, as was
characteristic of cosmopolitanism. In these state-
ments, the cosmopolitan mood of the time shines
through and takes on a clearly Jewish color.
Attitudes toward slaves were also influenced by
the cosmopolitan notion that all people are funda-
mentally connected. Seen in a cosmopolitan light,
slavery constituted a challenge to the brotherhood of
all human beings. Even though conventional society
was thought to require slavery, and cosmopolitan
thought did not challenge this, it could imagine a
utopian society as one without slaves, where people
either shared tasks equally or simply had no need of
labor. Paul’s statements about slaves and free people
draw on such ideals, most clearly when he writes
that there is “neither slave nor free.”
When it comes to the third pair, male-female,
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