2. Prisoners and Jailers

Paul uses various titles to describe his status vis-à-vis Christ. The most common are ‘apostle of Jesus Christ’ (ἀπόστολος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, 1 Cor 1.1) and ‘slave of Jesus Christ’ (δοῦλος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, Rom 1.1). Writing to Philemon from prison, however, a new title occurs to him: δέσμιος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ, prisoner of Christ Jesus. Paul’s carceral circumstances changed his experience (or at least his expression) of relationship with the divine. Prison made him see himself in a new way – as a δέσμιος rather than a δοῦλος – and we can logically infer that his image of Christ might have altered correspondingly: from a slave-owning κύριος to an imprisoner. I argue here that Paul’s prisoner-of-Christ construction may have drawn upon his direct experience of the relationship of a prisoner with a carceral agent.

First, however, it is worth considering exactly what kind of carceral agent Paul might have had in mind. Ancient Mediterranean society (like our own) contained a plethora of such authority figures: the staff of city-run prisons, often themselves enslaved;Footnote ⁹ the magistrates who presided over city criminal justice and their enforcers, the lictors;Footnote ¹⁰ the governor, the chief carceral authority in provincial capitals;Footnote ¹¹ the soldiers who organised and guarded military prisons;Footnote ¹² and finally the emperor, the author and instigator of a carcerally run empire. The person to whom a prisoner can be said to ‘belong’ in a genitive relationship could, plausibly, inhabit any of the above-mentioned roles.

Paul, in and out of jail many times over his career (2 Cor 11.23), certainly interacted with at least some of these figures. In prison, he experienced a web of carceral power relationships from which an analogy to his relationship with God might plausibly have presented itself, in a similar way to his other explicitly relational metaphors for God – God as father, or God as slave-master. Though the analogy of God’s relationship to Paul as that of a local magistrate or lictor towards a prisoner hardly seems an emotionally positive one, the same could well be said for that of a master towards an enslaved person.

Of all the possible carceral-relational dynamics posited above, it is the relationship between jailer and prisoner – rather than judge and prisoner, or governor and prisoner – that is most frequently suggested as the likely implication of Paul’s prisoner-of-Christ construction. ‘Jailer’ is not a particularly technical term, but I employ it here in its broad sense of a member of prison staff, usually either the manager of the prison or a guard, though in a small carceral facility these roles might be elided. What, then, did this relationship entail in ancient Mediterranean life?

The limited evidence of prisoner-jailer relationships in antiquity is problematic, being largely literary and highly rhetorical. We should approach with caution both the villainous, fasces-wielding lictor of Cicero’s Verrine Orations (2.5.45) and the overly deferential and considerate centurion tasked with guarding Paul in Acts 27. As Alexander Schwennicke argues, the ‘cruel jailor’ is a key element of the widespread literary topos of the carcer in antiquity.Footnote ¹³ The papyri contain more complaints of hunger and poor health in prison (suggesting neglect or indifference on the guards’ part) than of active brutality against the prisoners.Footnote ¹⁴ Some late antique attempts to regulate the behaviour of prison guards indicate that guard-on-prisoner violence was seen as a problem, but also suggest instances of laxness or even sympathy on the part of the guard, to the point of allowing escape.Footnote ¹⁵ Other legislation endeavours to curb the extortion of prisoners by their guards and the theft of personal property.Footnote ¹⁶ Whatever the legal picture, however, anecdotal evidence continues to suggest that a degree of brutality was the norm in guard-on-prisoner interactions, and death in prison appears to have been commonplace.Footnote ¹⁷

At the very least, the evidence collectively suggests that prison guards enjoyed a significant degree of power over their prisoners and that their accountability was limited: on their whim, a prisoner might be murdered or arbitrarily released, despite later legal efforts to prevent such outcomes. As far as the day-to-day life experiences of the prisoner were concerned, the jailer possessed near omnipotence: their power was, in a word, godlike. A striking modern analogy is provided by the human rights advocate Mohamed Soltan, arrested for his participation in protests against the military coup in Egypt in 2013, who gave this account of his prison guards:

In this grim account, the jailer in his unrestrained exercise of carceral power fills the place of God himself.

In positing that Paul saw Christ as his jailer, we infer Paul’s starkly realised conception of the power Christ held over him; it is not necessary (though it is possible) also to infer that he saw Christ as abusive and sadistic. What seems certain, however, is that the imprisonment which occasioned the letter to Philemon also occasioned a new, carceral development in Paul’s concept of the relationship between himself and Christ.

3. Carcerality and Imperialism

This development was not entirely without precedent, however.Footnote ¹⁹ In 1 Cor 4.9 and 2 Cor 2.14, Paul explicitly casts God as a carceral authority:

First Corinthians 4.9 and 2 Cor 2.14 thus both employ imperial-carceral metaphors for God. The imagery in both verses is intended to evoke Rome’s carceral methods for dealing with its internal and external enemies; the first relates to civil criminal justice, the second to military subjugation.

In 1 Cor 4.9, Paul likens himself to a convicted criminal who is brought out as the final act of a spectacle in the amphitheatre and executed.Footnote ²⁰ As Henry Nguyen argues, this verse casts Paul and his fellow-apostles in the role of noxii, not gladiators but criminals whose death is public and inevitable.Footnote ²¹ God, meanwhile, is cast in the role of editor of the games, the political authority who directs the spectacle.Footnote ²² The ‘most significant’ editor in the Roman Empire was, of course, the emperor himself, although local magistrates could also put on games.Footnote ²³ In this verse, Paul places God in the emperor’s own seat, exercising ultimate power over incarcerated human bodies.Footnote ²⁴ The emperor presiding over Roman games could exercise mercy and allow the victim to live, but the clear implication of 1 Cor 4.9 is that, where Paul is concerned, this has not been the case.

Second Corinthians 2.14, meanwhile, refers to the practice of a triumphal procession when a Roman general returned victorious from a foreign campaign. In this metaphor, Paul casts the apostles as the vanquished captives of the enemy nation, bound and forced to walk before the carriage of the general, and paraded thus ignominiously through the streets.Footnote ²⁵ God, meanwhile, plays the general, a carceral authority of a martial character, who displays his captives as a visual testimony of his military superiority before executing them at the end of the show.

The nineteenth-century commentator George Findlay expresses common anxieties about this theological validity of such imagery:

Calvin reads θριαμβεύω to mean that Paul ‘had a share in the triumph that God was celebrating’.Footnote ²⁷ Findlay meanwhile demilitarises the verb θριαμβεύω, positing a meaning of ‘to lead in festal […] procession’ that even he admits is found nowhere else in contemporary Greek.Footnote ²⁸ Such interpretative stretches seem unnecessary when the usual transitive sense ‘to triumph over’, that is, God triumphs over Paul, is perfectly consistent with Paul’s carceral imagery elsewhere.Footnote ²⁹ As Peter Marshall argues, if we cannot countenance the thought of Paul being God’s captive enemy, we will make equally little sense of him being a ‘slave of Christ’,Footnote ³⁰ or indeed a prisoner of Christ. The transitive reading, therefore, is both the most semantically accurate and the most theologically probable one.

Carceral-imperial language for God can be found in many Jewish and early Christian texts from this period, most notably in descriptions of hell or eschatological places of judgement, which are frequently figured as carceral spaces over which God presides.Footnote ³¹ Jesus’ famous Parable of the Unforgiving Servant (Matt 18.23–35) features a king equated with God (v. 35) who consigns his unfortunate slave to the jailers or torturers on his staff (βασανιστής, v. 34). In Rev 20.1–3, God deputises an angel to arrest the dragon-Satan with a ‘great chain’ (ἅλυσιν μεγάλην, v. 1) and lock him in a ‘bottomless pit’ (ἀβύσσου, v. 1), which is then ‘sealed’ (ἐσφράγισεν, v. 3) over him, in a likely reference to the sealable manholes which were the only entrance and exit to many Roman-era jails.Footnote ^{32 ,} Footnote ³³

Tertullian, meanwhile, envisions an eschatological reversal of fates in which emperors and magistrates – the editors of the torture and death of Christians in this world’s arenas – are subjected to the same treatment by the editor God on the Day of Judgement:

Here we have perhaps the most vivid picture of the imperial-carceral God, the imprisoner and judge of the wicked, and editor of their fate.

Paul, however, presents himself not (as Tertullian does) as the spared righteous who voyeuristically enjoys the eschatological sufferings of the wicked. Instead, he himself is the object of carceral punishment, the raw material for God’s spectacle of captivity and death. Whereas other New Testament and early Christian texts direct God’s imperial, carceral wrath towards the wicked and disobedient, Paul names himself and his fellow-apostles as its target.

God becomes, in the Corinthian correspondence, a different kind of carceral authority: not an ordinary jailer whose power lies in their direct, unregulated contact with the imprisoned, but a high-ranking person who orders the binding, parading and execution of human bodies in a display of political or military power. The carceral rhetoric of empire pervades Paul’s writing, offering itself as suitable terminology with which to describe the conquering, obliterating power of God over the world and his own body. Reflecting on his own experiences of administrative violence, Paul concludes that his carcerally marked life is merely part of a greater spectacle of which God is the editor and orchestrator.

4. The Good Jailer

We come now to the final context in which δέσμιος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ might be understood to imply a carceral Christ: the early Christian concept of God and/or Jesus as a ‘good jailer’. Early Christian literature enthusiastically embraced the God who punishes the wicked with imprisonment, but it also posited a different kind of carceral God: the protective guard of the righteous, who creates and guards a jail-within-the-jail in which the virtuous prisoner is defended from earthly carceral abuses.

Victor Brombert, discussing French Romantic literature, identifies the trope of the ‘happy prison’: a carceral space transformed by the prisoner’s positive inward disposition.Footnote ³⁵ A similar topos is visible in early Christian literature. In an epistle to a group of imprisoned Christians on death row, Tertullian describes his readers as ‘transferred from prison to a guard-house (de carcere in custodiarium […] translatos)’ (Mart. 2.3), meaning that the carceral forces intended for their punishment now function as safeguards, protecting them from the outside world’s iniquities.Footnote ³⁶ At one level, this statement is illogical: his addressees are still in prison, and their conditions remain just as bad. However, Tertullian (who is, notably, not himself incarcerated) reinterprets that prison as a haven, at least relative to the yet more evil world outside. What his imprisoned addressees made of this statement, we will never know. However, Tertullian’s Carthaginian contemporary Perpetua, who was certainly incarcerated when she wrote her prison diary, attributes a similar transformation to her prison: when her child is permitted to stay with her in jail and her health recovers, the prison becomes a praetorium – a noble house of which she is the domina, not the prisoner.Footnote ³⁷ By the beginning of the third century, therefore, Christian prisoners were reinterpreting their confinement as glorious or consolatory.Footnote ³⁸

The good jail is found in ancient and modern prison writing alike.Footnote ³⁹ Monika Fludernik argues that the jail’s confining structures are in fact inherently ambiguous, potentially evoking either oppression or safety:

Not only are prisons ambiguous spaces: their guards, their staff, are ambiguous figures. They enforce the physical confinement of their charges, but this very enforcement may be presented as either threatening or protective. The English noun guard itself contains this double edge: it is used both for those who enforce punitive confinement and for those who protect others. The account of the twentieth-century Gandhian activist and political prisoner Sri Aurobindo illustrates this paradox:

For Sri Aurobindo, divine jailers and their spiritual jail exist in opposition to the human, material prison with all its attendant miseries. ‘Guarding’ becomes a benevolent rather than an oppressive activity. The confinement of prison walls is transformed into the confinement of loving arms, playing on the essential ambiguity of containment, its potential to be felt either positively or negatively.Footnote ⁴²

Turning again to late antiquity, Didymus the Blind’s fourth-century Commentary on Zechariah demonstrates the ambiguous and sliding values of both the prison as topos and its inhabitants, guard and prisoner. Didymus creatively makes the prophet Zechariah a Pauline commentator, or at least a commentator of the Pauline construction ‘prisoner of Christ’ (δέσμιος Χριστοῦ). The following verse from Zechariah is the subject of discussion:

Didymus expounds on this passage carefully. First, he explains that Zechariah is talking about the imprisonment of the righteous: ‘many of the holy men’, he claims, can be found ‘thrown into dry cisterns (εἰς ἀνύδρους λάκκους βεβλημένους) by those plotting murderously against them’ (3.161 [698]).Footnote ⁴⁴ But then he considers that the former-cistern-turned-prison is also representative of ‘the Hades (ὁ ᾅδης) of the ungodly and the sinners (τῶν ἀσεβῶν καὶ ἁμαρτωλῶν)’, where ‘there is no water of life (ὕδατος ζωτικοῦ)’ (3.163 [698]). Here, Didymus slips seamlessly between the wrongful incarceration of the righteous and the rightful incarceration of the wicked. However, he moves on under the assumption that the prisoners are indeed righteous, and proceeds to consider their transfer from the evil prison of the dry cistern, or the ‘blameworthy prisons (ψεκτὰ ὀχυρώματα)’, to the ‘praiseworthy (ἐπαινετά)’ prisons of their new incarceration, which are associated with God (3.174 [702]).

The ‘praiseworthy’ prison is indisputably a carceral space, but here it has a reassuring, protective function. ‘The prisons are salvation (Σωτήρια δὲ τ[ὰ] φρούρια)’ (3.173 [702]), Didymus claims in his most explicit positive spin on incarceration yet.Footnote ⁴⁵ These prisons are a place of rest and refreshment: ‘there (ἔνθα) the prisoners of the assembly (οἱ δέσμιοι τῆς συναγωγῆς) take their rest after removal from the waterless cistern (ἐκ τοῦ ἀνύδρου λάκκου)’ (3.173 [702]).Footnote ⁴⁶ It is essential to note that the prisoners, thus relieved, are still prisoners (δέσμιοι). The same terminology is used whether the prison is intended to represent the powers of evil or good.

Didymus now approaches the climax of his argument: a prisoner inside this good prison is a prisoner of Christ, the good jailer.

Though Didymus is ostensibly commenting on Zechariah, his ‘prisoner of Christ’ language is distinctly Pauline. Paul is the first and almost the only known author to use this epithet prior to the fourth century, despite the many other prisoners who could have laid claim to the title.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is hard not to conclude that, consciously or unconsciously, Didymus has Paul in mind at least as much as Zechariah (who, in any case, nowhere mentions the Messiah or Christ in this passage). Paul-via-Didymus-via-Zechariah makes ‘prisoner of Christ’ a profoundly positive statement: Christ becomes a benevolent guard, defending ‘his’ prisoner from external enemies and internal fears.

Didymus offers us a fully fleshed-out carceral theology: an understanding of the term ‘prisoner of Christ’ where Christ is indeed an imprisoner, a carceral agent, who both releases people from prison (the waterless cistern) and incarcerates them again (in his own benevolent prisons). The fact that Didymus’ interpretation of this divine incarceration is so positive – it is a place of rest and refreshment; it represents rescue from the cistern-prison – should not blind us to the fact that it is still incarceration. Its inhabitants are prisoners; its authorities, God and/or Christ, are jailers.

Obviously, Paul – writing more than three centuries prior to Didymus – spells out this point nowhere near as thoroughly. He does not explicate his epithet δέσμιος Χριστοῦ in Phlm 1 and 9 as a comment on the nature of Christ as an incarcerator. However, whether or not he intends to sow this seed, the idea of God as a benevolent incarcerator circulates through early Christian literature and eventually re-attaches itself to Paul’s words, opening up the ‘prisoner of Christ’ image to more liberatory interpretation.

5. Conclusion: Can a Carceral God Liberate?

The passages to which I have drawn special attention in this article – Phlm 1 and 9, 1 Cor 4.9, and 2 Cor 2.14 – speak to a particularly raw and poignant aspect of Paul’s own relationship with the divine. Reflecting on his repeated experiences of earthly incarceration, Paul appears to conclude that God is, somehow, the most important agent in these imprisonments. This idea seems to have been intensely significant for Paul. But since the ripples from Paul’s letters extend far beyond himself and his immediate recipients, in the remaining paragraphs I will offer a few reflections on the implications of Paul’s carceral theology for the world we inhabit, a world also strongly characterised by (imperial) carcerality.

In Sheila Briggs’s 1989 article ‘Can an Enslaved God Liberate?’, she speaks of the ‘theological reduplication of the social reality of slavery’ in the Christ-hymn of Phil 2.6–11, where Christ is depicted as both slave and κύριος.Footnote ⁴⁸ Paul’s depiction of Christ as an enslaved person might be thought liberating for real-life enslaved people: Briggs, however, argues that it is not, or at least not straightforwardly so, as Christ’s self-emptying is depicted as voluntary and therefore not truly slave-like.Footnote ⁴⁹ Though Paul might have ‘challenged the ethical and anthropological assumptions about the slave’ commonly held in Mediterranean antiquity, the effect of Phil 2.6–11 is instead indirectly to reinforce these assumptions.Footnote ⁵⁰

Paul’s jailer-Christ is still more difficult, as Paul offers no parallel imagery in which Christ takes the form of a prisoner as he takes the form of a slave. Christ is both master and slave, but he is not both imprisoner and imprisoned.Footnote ⁵¹ The ‘theological reduplication’ of the social reality of incarceration is, in Paul’s carceral imagery for God, unilateral: God is the imprisoner, Paul and his fellow-apostles the imprisoned. This raises a modified version of Briggs’s question: can a carceral God liberate?

Or to put it another way: can Paul’s imprisoning deity of Phlm 1, 1 Cor 4.9 and 2 Cor 2.14 be interpreted as liberating in a modern world where imprisonment is frequently retributive, unjust and/or violent? This seems to me very debatable, and the answers are surely as plural as those suffering the effects of incarceration. On the one hand, ascribing one’s carceral destiny to God may indeed offer liberation in that it reduces the agency of human carceral authorities, the local gods of the prison.Footnote ⁵² On the other hand, as Briggs argues in respect to slavery, the same theological move may re-inscribe the oppressive structures of carcerality for those suffering from incarceration, transferring the brutality of the local, national or imperial incarcerator onto an equally brutal carceral deity.Footnote ⁵³

Paul’s carceral theology is a potentially high-stakes question for those affected by imprisonment. As Meghan Henning argues, Christian theologies of hell as an eschatological prison, and God as the judge and jailer of the wicked, are reflected in the retributive carceral systems of the US – and elsewhere – today.Footnote ⁵⁴ Indeed, the modern Western prison has been profoundly shaped (for better or worse) by Protestant reformers who were deeply influenced by Pauline theology.Footnote ⁵⁵ In his opening sermon to the Bedford assizes in 1758, John Wesley, preaching before prisoners and judges, invoked Paul to compare the earthly prison with the eschatological one:

Thus, Wesley turns the earthly carceral into a scaled-down model of the divine carceral. This quotation demonstrates what Douglas Campbell calls an ‘authoritarian’ reading of Paul, in which his theology is read primarily in terms of transgression and punishment – a reading which has been central to the carceral philosophy of the West.Footnote ⁵⁷ Interpretation of Paul has been appropriated for the justification of increasingly conservative, retributive and often vindictive attitudes towards criminal detention, in an ironic and lamentable twist of fate for the words of a serial detainee in the ancient Roman Empire.

Against this formidable hermeneutical backdrop, how should we interpret Paul’s self-identification as a ‘prisoner of Christ’ and the associated ideas in 1 Cor 4.9 and 2 Cor 2.14? Does Paul see himself simply as one more victim of an authoritarian carceral God, who imprisons people both in this life and the next? Or is Paul making a claim for a benevolent carceral God, who undermines the power of earthly carceral authorities? Are there elements of both carceral Gods in his thinking?

Though Paul is (perhaps unfairly) strongly associated with the authoritarian carceral God, there is an important distinction in Paul between the God who punishes the guilty with eschatological imprisonment and God as Paul’s imprisoner. Paul does not see his own divine incarceration as retributive. He is not Christ’s prisoner because he has transgressed against Christ. If anything, the punishing treatment he undergoes is the reward of his faithfulness. Paul’s carceral God exercises painful, personal sovereignty over the apostle’s life, and Paul speaks with wry self-deprecation of the earthly degradation this entails. Nonetheless, he codes his visible carceral objectification as a wished-for revelation of God’s power, made plain to the world at large. As emperors and generals display their power through those they hold captive, Paul speaks through his own imprisoned body to prove God’s superior sovereignty.

For Paul to cast Jesus Christ as his incarcerator, as I have argued the prisoner-of-Christ construction implies, is to denote, much like the slave-master conjunction, a relationship marked by violence and subjection. Paul experienced these things very profoundly during his apostolic career. It is both fascinating and troubling that he speaks of God or Christ as the ultimate authority behind these carceral experiences. This aspect of Paul’s theology certainly may be read as a refutation of human carceral powers, of the magistrates and jailers whose inflicted cruelties he had come to know well. Like Sri Aurobindo, perhaps he even saw the divine as an antagonist to human jailers, and a welcome defence against the abuses of the earthly jail; like Didymus, perhaps he experienced divine incarceration as a protective haven. For all this, though, there is no denying that Paul’s God is a carceral God, his Christ a possessor – for good or ill – of prisoners.