I am reading one of Tom Holland’s books: Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Basic Books, New York, 2019, pages 381–386). Holland is a British historian of the ancient world, fluent in both Latin and Greek. My first introduction to his writings was his 2015 translation from the original Greek text of Herodotus’ Histories. I am currently slowly reading his 2025 translation from the original Latin text of Suetonius’ The Lives of the Caesars. Both translations have received praise from scholars.
I took a year of Christian History while in seminary and have a good understanding of the subject having traveled internationally and researching for my two publications. What makes Dominion so refreshing is that Holland illuminated how the worship of a crucified human-divinity was so shocking to the ancient world and the penetration of Christianity into our post-modern world. We now take Christian morals and ethics for granted, but these radical concepts were revolutionary and shockingly difficult to ingrain into the Western world.
One sliver of history that I learned while reading Holland’s book concerned an English Quaker (Religious Society of Friends), Benjamin Lay (1682–1759), a mere four-foot-tall hunchback with skinny legs. Although small in stature, he followed “the counsel and direction of the Holy Spirit.” Lay began his career as an apprentice to a glovemaker before dashing off to London to be a sailor. At the age of 36, he and his wife, Sarah, moved to the Caribbean island of Barbados, then a British colony, where he worked as a merchant.
Barbados was dominated by a plantation economy that used slave labor. One day, while visiting a Quaker who lived some miles away, Sarah “was shocked to find a naked African suspended outside his house. The man had just been savagely whipped. Blood, dripping from his twitching body, had formed a puddle in the dust. Flies were swarming over his wounds.” The Quaker told Sarah that the slave had escaped and felt no need to apologize for his brutality.
Christ was born during the height of the Roman Empire where most of the inhabitants were slaves. Both the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures discuss slavery and contain laws which regulate their treatment. In the Apostle Paul’s letter to Titus, Paul states: “Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to answer back, not to pilfer, but to show complete and perfect fidelity, so that in everything they may be an ornament to the doctrine of God our Savior.” (Titus 2:9) Paul does not advocate slavery but did not seek to abolish it. He was more concerned with the soon anticipated second coming of Jesus Christ.
Benjamin Lay did not own slaves but had whipped slaves who stole from him. Then, something changed within him. As he lashed a starving slave, he felt “a crushing sense of self-abhorrence.” It was the Spirit working in him and the overriding meaning of Scripture embraced him. “Oh my Heart has been pained within me many times, to see and hear; and now, now, now, it is so.” The whole of Scripture was about freedom and love, not bondage and torture. The Lays opened their home to slaves and fed them. They learned about their treatment and started to publicly denounce it. Their fellow Quakers became angry, and in 1620 the Lays moved to Pennsylvania, a Quaker colony with slaves. Philadelphia, the ‘City of Brotherly Love,’ and the largest city in the thirteen colonies, was founded by William Penn, a Quaker owner of slaves. Appalled by what he witnessed in Philadelphia, the Lays moved to the nearby town of Abington. They boycotted anything that was procured through slavery, raised their own food, and made their own clothing. The Lays were vegetarian long before it became a fad.
Instead of remaining quiet about his abolitionist views, he created publicity stunts. He would not remain quiet when the Quakers met, so they expelled him. Lay once stood outside a Quaker meeting in winter wearing no coat and one foot bare in the snow. When asked about his health, he said slaves dressed as he did. He temporarily kidnapped a slaveholder’s child and asked him how it felt to lose his child like the Africans. His greatest stunt was while attending the annual meeting of the Philadelphia Friends; he stood up and denounced the practice of slavery, then plunged a sword into a Bible containing a bladder filled with blood-red juice that splattered nearby Quakers. The normally passive Quaker meeting erupted in disgust and Benjamin hobbled out.
Benjamin spent the rest of his life writing and speaking against slavery. His personal campaign against slavery was the cross that he bore: lost friends, verbal and physical attacks, and loneliness after his wife died in 1735. But he never despaired nor abandoned his beliefs. When on his death bed, news reached him that the Quakers had voted to discipline any Quaker who traded in slaves. “I can now die in peace, he sighed.” Holland writes: “Benjamin Lay had succeeded, by the time of his death in 1759, in making the community in which he had lived just that little bit more like him—in making it just that little bit more progressive.” Well done, good and faithful servant.
