Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

1 Peter 2:18-25

The household is next dealt with as an institution obviously included under the ‘every ordinance of man' (1 Peter 2:13). And in the house the duty of servants is first declared. The bond-servant formed an extremely numerous class both in Greek and in Roman society. Rich citizens possessed slaves sometimes by the thousand. Pliny tells us, for example, of a single proprietor, Claudius Isidorus, leaving by will upwards of four thousand slaves (Nat. Hist, xxxiii. 47). They occupied a position of the most miserable helplessness. Of himself the slave had nothing, and was nothing. In the eye of the law he had no rights. Varro, ‘the most learned of the Romans,' in a treatise written only between thirty and forty years before the Christian era, gives a classification of ‘implements,' and first among these appears the slave (De Re Rustica, i. 17). Aristotle defines the slave as a ‘live chattel' (Pol. i. 4). In his case there could be no such thing as relationships. Not till Constantine's time did the law begin to recognise marriage and family rights among this class. His master's power over him was absolute. No punishment the scourge, mutilation, crucifixion, exposure to wild beasts was too much for him. Not till Hadrian's time was the power of life and death taken from the master. Though there is ample reason to believe that often personal kindliness secured for the slave what the law denied him, history has many a page dark with the record of the cruel woes and tragic wrongs of the slave. It is no wonder, therefore, that when Christianity entered with its Gospel of freedom and its abolition of all distinctions between bond and free in Christ, and made numerous converts, as we know it did, from this class, questions both grave and numerous arose as to the relation of the Christianized slave to the heat hen master and the heathen law. Hence the distinct place given to the slave in Peter's counsels. Hence, too, the large space given by Paul to the slave's matters, not only in the Epistle to Philemon, but in important sections of other Epistles (e.g. 1 Corinthians 7:20-24; 1 Corinthians 12:13; Galatians 3:29; Ephesians 6:5-8; Colossians 3:11; Colossians 3:22-25; 1 Timothy 6:1-2; Titus 2:9-10) addressed to very different parties.

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

1 Peter 2:18-25

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