see Edwin Yamauchi, "Slaves of God," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 9, no. 1 (Winter
What Does Jesus Mean When He Says, "Follow Me"?
serve either to describe the status of a slave or an attitude corresponding to that of a slave. . . . Th e meaning is so unequivocal and self-contained that it is superfl uous to give examples of the individual terms or to trace the history of the group. Distinction from synonymous words and groups . . . is made possible by the fact that the emphasis here is always on "serving as a slave." Hence we have a ser vice which is not a matter of choice for the one who renders it, which he has to perform whether he likes or not, because he is subject as a slave to an alien will, to the will of his owner. [Th e term stresses] the slave's dependence on his lord.2
Unfortunately, readers of the English Bible have long been shielded from the full force of the word doulos because of an ages-old tendency among Bible translators to tone down the literal sense of the word — translating it as "servant," or "bond servant" rather than "slave." The practice goes back hundreds of years, even before the King James Version. The Geneva Bible, the main Bible of the Puritan era, consistently translated doulos as "servant" (though in the distinctive spelling of the time, it appears as "seruant"). Murray Harris surveyed twenty major translations of the New Testament in English and found only one, E. J. Goodspeed's The New Testament: An American Translation (1923) — where doulos was consistently rendered "slave."3 No doubt that reflects our society's longstanding discomfort with the practice of slavery and the severe abuses that have always occurred in institutionalized versions of human slavery.4
Still, ser vice and slavery are not really the same thing, and it is extremely unfortunate that the full impact of the expression doulos has been obscured in our English translations for so long.
2. Karl Heinrich Rengstorf, "Doulos," in Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, eds., Geoff rey Bromiley, trans., Th eological Dictionary of the New Testament, 10 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), 2:261. 3. Harris, Slave of Christ, 17. 4. For a fascinating discussion of early English Bible translators' hesitancy to render doulos as "slave," see Edwin Yamauchi, "Slaves of God," Journal of the Evangelical Th eological Society 9, no. 1 (Winter 1966): 31 – 49. Yamauchi shows that by the end of the thirteenth century, "slavery disappeared from northwestern Europe. . . . Slavery therefore was known to the 17th century Englishmen — at least at the beginning of that century — not as an intimate, accepted institution but rather as a remote phenomenon" (p. 37). Th eir concept of what it means to be a "servant" was shaped by their knowledge of serfdom — a type of servitude where the laborer was bound to the land where he worked. He was duty-bound to the landowner, but his ser vices could be sold only when the land itself was sold. By contrast, "slavery" in their minds evoked "the extreme case of a captive in fetters" (p. 37), so they doubtless wanted to avoid the implication of cruelty inherent in that imagery. But in doing so they have unwittingly diminished the force of the actual biblical expression. In Yamauchi's words, "If we keep in mind what 'slavery' meant to the ancients, and not what it means to us or the 17th-century theorists, we shall gain a heightened understanding of many passages in the New Testament" (p. 37).