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Manufacturing Martha’s Madness: Enslavement, Anxiety, and Distraction in Luke 10:38–42

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2025

Meghan R. Henning
Meghan R. Henning*
Affiliation:
University of Dayton; mhenning2@udayton.edu
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Abstract

The story of Mary and Martha is a “text of terror” for women and the mentally disabled, elevating Martha as emblematic of the spiritual failure of the anxious woman. While scholarship has focused upon the precise nature of Martha’s work, this article argues that whether Martha was in the kitchen or doing ministry, she was doing servile labor and incurring the “slavish” worry associated with such work. Attention to the socio-economic context of Martha’s worry recenters the labor dispute that is at the heart of this short passage. Rather than naturalizing ancient norms about worry or continuing to use the disabled body as something to “think with,” this article contextualizes Martha’s “worry and distraction,” demonstrating the ties between the female body, worry, anxiety, and enslaved labor in antiquity. Martha’s worry is a disability that is manufactured by unjust labor structures that purposefully assign worry to some bodies and not others.

Keywords

anxietyworryslaveryworkdisabilitymental illnessLuke 10:38–42gospel

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Harvard Theological Review , Volume 118 , Issue 1 , January 2025 , pp. 19 - 40
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College

Introduction

Disability studies scholars have identified the NT miracle stories as “texts of terror” for the physically disabled, conflating spiritual and physical “wholeness” and demanding bodily transformation as evidence for connection with God.Footnote 1 Similarly, the story of Mary and Martha, as it has been read for millennia, is a text of terror for women and for the mentally disabled and neurodiverse. Every time Martha’s story is retold as her losing out to Mary, the worried and distracted female body has been chiseled into a monument of spiritual failure. Much of the recent feminist and womanist scholarly conversation around Mary and Martha in Luke 10 has turned upon the nature of Martha’s work, largely under the influence of the history of interpretation of the passage. The debate around this passage has focused specifically upon whether Martha’s “service” (διακονία) was the servile labor of the household or the servile labor of ministry. The crux of the passage, however, hinges not on whether Martha was in the kitchen or doing ministry but on her labor dispute and Jesus’s response.

In order to undermine that millennia-old tradition of using the disabled body as something to “think with,”Footnote 2 this article contextualizes Martha’s “worry and distraction” (μεριμνάω and θορυβάζω) with respect to her servile labor and the need to manage “many things.” In antiquity Martha’s worry was the expected consequence of the labor that was assigned to women and enslaved persons. Martha, the audience within the text, and the listening audience of Luke are all being exhorted to select the “correct” kind of worry, eschewing the pathological worry that was socially coded as effeminate and slavish. In this regard Luke’s gospel is using Martha’s body to “think with,” but Martha’s worry is not a spiritual deficit; rather it is the disability that is manufactured by unjust labor structures that purposefully assign worry to some bodies and not others.

Martha’s Work (διακονία)

Biblical scholarship in the last forty years has sought to intervene in the dominant interpretive trajectories that framed Mary and Martha either as rivals, abstractions, or both.Footnote 3 Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza argued that binaries and spiritualizing interpretations have led interpreters of Luke 10 astray because they make women invisible and “obscure the androcentric dynamics of a text that uses women to make its point.”Footnote 4 Taking up the task of re-reading Mary and Martha in a non-dualistic, non-reductive manner, Mary Rose D’Angelo hypothesized that Mary and Martha were a missionary pair, suggesting that their servile labor (διακονία) is ministry.Footnote 5 Others followed the lead of these feminist scholars, seeking to clarify what kind of “service” διακονία represents, to disparate ends. John N. Collins used lexical parallels to counter that this service is a kind of subordinate labor, but it is not “menial” or “domestic” labor, but the “activity of an in-between kind.”Footnote 6 Likewise, Warren Carter sought to get Martha “out of the kitchen,” by identifying her labor as the go-between middle management work of ministry, work that is by its nature subordinate to the divine.Footnote 7 Turid Carlesen Siem and Adele Reinhartz argued from the context of Luke that Martha’s work is domestic labor, albeit domestic labor that is evaluated positively by Luke.Footnote 8 All of these interpretations seek to identify the nature of Martha’s work as a first step in understanding the relationship between her work and her worry.

Part of the reason that interpreters have struggled to disentangle worry and work is because they were explicitly intertwined in antiquity. Labor and the cares that came with it were often discussed in the same contexts in Roman literature, and could be viewed as the source of both dignity and misery.Footnote 9 As earlier interpreters of Luke 10:38–42 noted, the verbiage of being “distracted” (περισπάομαι) and “worried” (μεριμνάω) mirrored the language of the Cynic-Stoic marriage debates about whether domestic labor prevented a person from the study of philosophy.Footnote 10 These parallels provide important context, not to settle the precise nature of Martha’s work, but to frame her conversation with Jesus within ancient socioeconomic debates. Whether Martha is doing domestic labor, the work of a domestic enslaved worker as a household manager, or the work of a go-between in God’s kingdom as a missionary or minister, she is doing the type of labor that philosophers associated with worry and distraction: servile labor that hinged upon one’s deference in a hierarchy.Footnote 11 This kind of deferential labor not only came without remuneration, the laborer also incurred physical costs to complete it, taking on the worry and anxiety of their enslaver or others above them in the hierarchy.Footnote 12

This was not only the case for those enslaved to human enslavers; it appears that work done for the divine Κύριος also incurred a similar cost. In his eschatologically inflected teaching on marriage, Paul reminds the Corinthians that the present ordering or schema (σχῆμα) of this world is “passing away,” and that he wants them to be “without worry” (ἀμερίμνους; 1 Cor 7:31–32). Paul elaborates that the unmarried man only “worries” (μεριμνάω) about the “Lord” (kύριος), how to please the Lord. The married person is worried about worldly things (τὰ τοῦ κόσμου), about how to please his wife or her husband (1 Cor 7:33–34). As other scholars have noted, Paul’s use of “worry” (ἀμέριμνος/μεριμνάω), and the passive form of the verb “to divide” (μερίζω) is a play on words that also mirrors the Cynic argument for avoiding marriage.Footnote 13

Paul’s instructions on the superiority of singleness are not only similar to Cynic philosophy, they are also steeped in the logic of enslavement—just ten verses earlier Paul tells the Corinthians that they are “slaves of Christ,” bought with a price, and warns them not to become enslaved to human enslavers (1 Cor 7:21–24).Footnote 14 Worry is a zero-sum game and one’s devotion to the Lord is compromised by worrying about worldly things. Although Paul says that he wants the Corinthians to be “without worry,” his enslavement metaphor forestalls the possibility that a Christian could dispense with worry altogether. The goal, it would seem, is to avoid enslaving relationships with other humans (like marriage), which multiply worry, and to focus all of one’s servile energy and worry on the Lord. While Paul uses δοῦλος and Luke uses διακονέω to frame discipleship, both participate in a metaphorical discourse that draws rhetorical force from the economic and social realities of enslavement and the lived experiences of enslaved persons. As Angela Parker has powerfully argued, Paul leverages the experiences of enslaved persons, “despite his not having the lived experiences of what that somatic experience entails.”Footnote 15

In this light, Martha’s conversation with Jesus, her “Lord” (Κύριος), looks like an ancient labor dispute about servile labor and worry that was meant to be distributed between the sisters. When Martha asks Jesus, “do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?” and commands, “tell her then to assist me,” her presumption is not unfounded, but is the reasonable expectation that any servile worker would have: that their enslaver would want the labor to be dispatched as quickly as possible, and that no enslaved person was appearing to “sit down on the job.”Footnote 16 Martha’s labor dispute with Jesus is particularly striking given that she is described as the homeowner, having “welcomed him” (a number of important manuscripts include “into the/her house”).Footnote 17 If this is Martha’s home, then this is not a case of an enslaver displacing work and worry onto an enslaved person, but Mary or Jesus placing the homeowner (Martha) in a slavish role. Renita J. Weems’s retelling of the story captures the centrality of the labor issue, imagining Mary’s remorseful response: “Martha was not challenging my right to learn. She was simply challenging my right to do so at her expense.”Footnote 18 Elsewhere in Luke discipleship is framed as servile work that will be reciprocated by those who receive the disciples (Luke 10:4–11), albeit work that attempts to reverse the traditional hierarchies that place enslaver above enslaved, so that Jesus can proclaim that he has come to serve (διακονέω) instead of sit at the table (Luke 22:26–27).Footnote 19 Christy Cobb demonstrates that these Lukan metaphors of enslavement reinscribe ancient hierarchies even as they seek to subvert them.Footnote 20 Indeed, Martha’s question and Jesus’s response to Martha do not refashion the ethics of enslavement. Instead, Jesus’s invitation to focus on “one thing” instead of “many” demands that Martha abandon earthly enslavers so that she can focus all of her worry on Jesus as “Lord” and divine enslaver.

For many interpreters of Martha’s story, the distinction between ministry and domestic labor rescues Martha and Mary, and all women, from subservience. But when we look closer, that distinction appears to be one of our own making, not one that ancient audiences would recognize. Dιακονία did have a range of meaning that encompassed different types of servile labor, but none of those uses could ever be released from ancient social and labor hierarchies that equated the lowest strata with enslavement. Attempts to free διακονία from this historical context run the risk of papering over ancient enslavement and how it influenced ancient networks of logic and meaning-making, verging on what Angela Parker has deemed as “gaslighting interpretations.”Footnote 21 Parker follows Saba Fatima in defining gaslighting as “when the hearer of testimony (typically about a harm or injustice committed against the speaker) raises doubts about the speaker’s reliability at perceiving events accurately.” As Parker powerfully argues, gaslighting interpretations of the Biblical text occur in our own era whenever the oppressive frameworks of antiquity or today are naturalized, such that the Bible is used to make marginalized people “become complicit in their own oppression.”Footnote 22

Worry and Anxiety in the LXX and NT

The word for worry that we find in Luke 10 is used in the LXX in relationship to one’s social status. In Ben Sira the person who is prosperous, “at peace among possessions,” and strong enough to eat, has only one worry: death.Footnote 23 Fathers of daughters, however, have a “hidden sleeplessness” (ἀπόκρυφος ἀγρυπνία), because they constantly have to worry (μέριμνα) about their daughter’s financial provision.Footnote 24 In 1 Macc 6:8–13 a related word for worry is used by King Antiochus after his military conquest of the Jews has failed and he is dying. Antiochus explains that he is sick and dying because of his own grief (λύπη) and worry (μερίμνης), both because he has lost his power and because he seized the gold and silver vessels of Jerusalem and destroyed the inhabitants of Judah without cause. Antiochus’s deathbed confession may serve as a satisfying critique for the readers of 1 Maccabees, but it also frames death as the consequence of worry, particularly the worry that comes from mismanaged power. In each of the LXX uses of μεριμνάω or related nouns, worry stems from having possessions, financial security, and power, and the potential to lose them.Footnote 25

In the Gospel of Luke, the first mention of “worry” is in the interpretation of the parable of the sower. The seed that falls among the thorns, Jesus explains, refers to people who hear the word but are “choked” by the worry (μέριμνα), riches (πλοῦτος), and pleasures of life (ἡδονή; Luke 8:14).Footnote 26 As in the LXX, worry here is tied to social status, grouped along with riches and life’s pleasures as things that can prevent the flourishing and growth of the word in a person’s life.Footnote 27 In the parallel passages in Mark and Matthew, this worry carries an eschatological valence, juxtaposing the “worries of this age” (μέριμνα τοῦ αἰῶνος) against the word bearing fruit in one’s life (Mark 4:13; Matt 13:18).Footnote 28 Later in Luke’s Gospel, worry has this same eschatological inflection as Jesus instructs the disciples to avoid excess drinking, and the worries of this life. All of these things will prevent the disciples from being attentive and ready to stand before the Son of Man on “that day,” setting up an apocalyptic binary between worrying about this age and the age to come (Luke 21:34–36). In both the parable of the sower and the exhortation to attentiveness, the worries of life (μέριμνα) are at odds with “paying attention” (προσέχετε; Luke 21:34) to the word and the coming judgment of the Son of Man. Luke has divorced the saying on attentiveness from Mark and Matthew’s explicit references to an enslaved overseer remaining awake all night to prepare for the return of the enslaver, and yet here and elsewhere (Luke 12:35–40) he still uses worry in an economic register that demands the parsimonious management and careful expenditure of the disciple’s attention.Footnote 29 Attention was a scarce resource that needed to be guarded, and doing so was the fundamental work of discipleship.

Martha’s story is Luke’s second use of a related form of μεριμνάω (Luke 10:41). The verb μεριμνάω is only used three other times, all in the instructions on discipleship that juxtapose material worries against working as a disciple.Footnote 30 In both Luke and Matthew, these injunctions to avoid anxiety are part of instructional material that is aimed specifically at Jesus’s disciples, disciples who are also told to take no money, food, or changes of clothing on their journey (Luke 9:1–3; Mark 6:8–11; Matt 10:5–15).Footnote 31 Luke 12:11 compresses the tradition about being betrayed to the authorities in Mark 13:9–13 and Matt 10:17–25, simply telling the disciples that when they are handed over to various authorities they should not “worry” about what to say, that the Holy Spirit will intercede. Worry in this case is predictable because the followers of Jesus are being told to expect judicial interrogation, and even death as a consequence of their work as disciples. While judicial interrogation and death might seem like a non sequitur to modern audiences, in ancient systems of punitive justice they are the punishments reserved for the lowest status members of society, particularly the enslaved.Footnote 32 In Luke 12:22–32 (par. Matt 6:25–34) the disciples are told not to be anxious about material concerns, what they will eat, or what they will wear. In the passage that immediately follows (12:35–40) the disciples are told to have their lamps lit, waiting and at the ready for their enslaver in the night like faithful enslaved persons. Joseph Fitzmyer argued that the Lucan Jesus here “changes his topic,” moving on from worry about possessions to attentiveness and fidelity.Footnote 33 However if we read Luke 12 with an awareness of the ancient relationship between worry, work, and enslavement, Jesus has not changed the subject at all. As Candida Moss notes, the “hurry up and wait” lifestyle of an ancient enslaved person was notoriously and intentionally excruciating, meant to exert social control through forced dependency.Footnote 34 Luke describes discipleship as enslaved labor: material poverty, possible betrayal, violent judicial interrogation, corporal punishment, and a life of tedious waiting were all physical realities for enslaved persons in antiquity. In the context of discipleship “worry” is ostensibly a problem because it misrepresents the work of ministry, but also because it interferes with the dependency relationship between the disciple and God that is central to the work.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, this fundamental dependency between the disciple and God is invoked when μεριμνάω is used. Paul describes his own worry as the pinnacle of his physical challenges in ministry: he has endured sleeplessness, thirst, hunger, cold and nakedness, but in addition to all of this he is under daily pressure because of the “worry” (ἠ μέριμνα) he bears for all of the churches (2 Cor 11:28). Worry, for Paul, is a very real physical experience that is an unavoidable part of his ministry, on par with shipwreck and imprisonment. Paul describes Timothy’s ability to worry about others as his main qualification for ministering to the Philippians (Phil 2:20–21).Footnote 35 Timothy’s worry is an essential part of ministry and must be directed exclusively toward that work. This pragmatic approach to worry also seems to cohere with many of the gospel passages that described worry in terms of scarcity—worry must be directed toward eschatological things, toward ministry, toward Christ, because all other worry is wasteful.

Yet this pragmatism toward the conservation of worry is hard to square with other passages, often in the same texts, that describe worry as something that is to be redistributed equitably or avoided entirely (Matt 6:25–34; Luke 12:22–32; 1 Cor 12:25; Phil 4:6; 1 Pet 5:7). How do these aspirational exhortations to not worry about anything, but to pray about everything fit with a vision of ministry as work that, by definition, entails worry? How can Martha escape worry about many things (Luke 10:41), but also ensure that she is worrying enough about the word and the coming eschaton (Luke 21:34)? Is she really doing servile work or Christian ministry if she is not worrying?

Worry and the Ancient Body: Physiological Signs

We could simply answer, as many interpreters have, that Martha’s worry is meant to elevate the spiritual over the worldly, the work of ministry over domestic labor, or to focus worry on the correct things.Footnote 36 This is only a partial answer. All of these previous interpretations have taken for granted the ancient logic of worry and work, unwittingly joining an already in-progress conversation about how worry, work, possessions, and power are interrelated and in need of careful management not only by Christians, but all members of society. The tension that we see in the New Testament between pragmatism and aspirational approaches to worry is more legible when read in the context of ancient bodily norms around worry. There has been a tendency in scholarship on mental states in antiquity to argue that mental distress is a universal phenomenon.Footnote 37 While that approach helps to solidify the relevance of this interpretive work for today, it fails to take into account the extent to which environments impact brain development.Footnote 38 The following discussion of anxiety and worry will begin with a cultural model of disability, acknowledging that mental disabilities are both biological and culturally defined. As María Isabel Cantón and others have demonstrated, what constitutes worry and anxiety or a “normal” brain is not only determined by the culture; cultural variables like socioeconomic stratification also do the disabling.Footnote 39 Thus, the following discussion of worry and anxiety will not only define what constitutes anxiety in antiquity, but will also explore how ancient life manufactured certain kinds of mental disability for nonelites.

For philosophers and medical authors alike, worry was an important part of life, but one that was tied to the desires and passions and thus needed to be carefully managed to attain balance within one’s body. Plato thinks that worry is central to the “good life,” the necessary thought and reflection that characterize the examined life.Footnote 40 Worry (μερίμνης) is a “natural exercise” listed alongside hearing, seeing, and speaking in the Hippocratic Regimen.Footnote 41 As a natural exercise, worry warms and dries the soul. The warming and drying capacity of worry means that it can be both beneficial and harmful (just like exercise or fasting), if done in excess or applied to a body that is already too hot or dry.Footnote 42 Both μερίμνης and φροντίς can mean “care,” “thought,” “worry,” or “anxiety” precisely because of this close relationship and narrow boundary between desired and distressing states of mind.Footnote 43 For the philosopher, worry is like an invisible tightrope, such that the philosopher is constantly worrying about worry, checking to see if he has fallen off the precipice of self-examination into pathological anxiety.Footnote 44

It is difficult to diagnose when precisely worry verges from healthful care and philosophical introspection toward pathology, but there is no shortage of attempts.Footnote 45 Anxiety as a disordered state could manifest as a trembling voice, sweaty feet, loss of sleep, memory loss, distraction, erratic pulse, weight loss, withdrawal, or social isolation.Footnote 46 For some medical authors these symptoms were signs pointing to changes in one’s mental and physical state that had altered the soul.Footnote 47 The Hippocratic Regimen, for example, tells us that if a person dreams of the planets wandering around it is a symptom of a soul that is disturbed by anxiety (ψυχῆς τινα τάραξιν σημαίνει ὑπὸ μερίμνης).Footnote 48 A parallel passage in Epidemics describes worry as a wandering of the soul (ψυχῆς περίπατος, φροντὶς ἀνθρώποισιν).Footnote 49 An anxious person can be recognized through antisocial behaviors, including flight: “he flees light and people.”Footnote 50 The wandering “madman” was a familiar trope in Greek literature, such that wandering and erratic movements became associated with anxiety and disordered thinking.Footnote 51 Among these examples, wandering was particularly associated with effeminate bodies, bodies of women and the enslaved. Perhaps it is not coincidental, then, that itinerant followers of Jesus received explicit instructions from him about how to best manage a bodily state that was associated with wandering and the transformation of the soul.

Indeed, the lifestyle prescribed to them by Jesus was rife with risk factors for worry or anxiety: excessive thought, social pressure, asceticism, or working long hours so that one ate dinner too late at night. Whereas some attributed extraordinary intellectual ability to melancholy or worry-prone individuals, others like Rufus see intellectual activity as the cause of a fundamental imbalance, leading to worry, fear, or delusions.Footnote 52 Whichever way the direction of causality flowed in the minds of ancient philosophers and doctors, it would appear that the link between thought and worry was taken as a given, such that the “melancholic genius” became a widely recognizable version of the “super crip” trope in first- and second-century CE medicine and literature.Footnote 53 Galen tells the story of the grammarian Diodorus who has seizures whenever he puts in late hours on his intellectual work, fasts, or experiences worry (φροντίς) or depression (λύπη).Footnote 54 It is particularly instructive that thought or asceticism was just as likely to lead to physiological distress as manual labor in the first and second centuries CE. Later interpretations of Mary and Martha’s story stray from this context when they assign Mary’s attentive listening to the realm of thought or contemplation and view it as the antipode to Martha’s worry and physical labor.

Worry and Work: Manufacturing Worry, Anxiety, and Distraction

Worry and anxiety were tied to work in antiquity, but that work could just as likely be intellectual as physical. From the perspective of elite men, however, worry had to be carefully managed so that their worry did not corrupt their souls. As a result worry and care were socially coded as slavish and effeminate.Footnote 55 Plutarch, in emending the literary axioms of Sophocles, says that true freedom from enslavement only comes when a person can choose what he worries about, or better yet, can worry about that which is good.Footnote 56 Taking on another person’s worries, or worry about banal or domestic affairs, was characteristic of an enslaved person.

The assumption that worry was slavish was part of the scaffolding that propped up ancient economies of intellectual labor and enslavement. Enslavers offloaded worry to enslaved persons in order to manage the corrupting effects of worry. Aristotle describes this as a given, saying that anyone who could afford to “avoid personal trouble” would have an enslaved overseer (ἐπίτροπος) to manage their affairs, freeing up the enslaver to think about philosophy or politics.Footnote 57 Philodemus, in his reflection on an Epicurean approach to property management, explains why this might be preferable, namely because paying attention to money will corrupt a person.Footnote 58 In addition to being morally corrosive, the management of everyday affairs was known to be a distraction from intellectual and philosophical formation, as evidenced by the practice of sending enslaved workers with children to university. In these educational contexts the servile labor of enslaved workers created time and space for the enslavers’ children to be singularly focused on their intellectual labors.Footnote 59

Enslavement manufactured worry or offloaded it to the enslaved worker and then labeled it as pathological and in need of medical treatment. Galen tells a story in On Prognosis in which an enslaved steward has lost some of his enslaver’s money and as a result is sleepless with anxiety (φροντίδος) about giving an accounting to his enslaver.Footnote 60 In this story, fear of the enslaver is the cause of the enslaved man’s condition, and sleeplessness is the symptom. Galen treats the enslaved man by reassuring him that he will not need to give recompense, and in the absence of fear, the anxiety subsides. In Galen’s thinking fear (φόβη), worry (φρόντις), and anxiety (λύπη) share physiological roots: they all cause blood to retreat within the body so that the pulse becomes faint, the skin becomes pallid and cold, the eyes look hollow, accompanied by overall weight loss.Footnote 61 So naturally, treating the source of the enslaved man’s fear (inability to give recompense to his enslaver, and violent punishment from his enslaver) would alleviate his worry. If fear lay at the heart of anxiety, many other ancient enslaved persons might not have been so easily cured.

Fear, after all, was part of the enslaved person’s life by design. In addition to taking on the enslaver’s fears and worries, the enslaved person also lived in constant fear of physical and structural violence.Footnote 62 Sleeplessness, for instance, was not only a symptom of anxiety, it was also a chief cause. Along with fear, sleep deprivation was a tactic for keeping enslaved persons under the control of the enslaver. Enslaved bodies functioned as time-keeping devices and were often required to perform nighttime labor or keep vigil at night.Footnote 63 In these activities the potentially anxiety-inducing aspects of elite life were outsourced to enslaved persons, putting them in a constant state of attentiveness that was known by elites to be harmful.Footnote 64 As Mitzi Smith has powerfully stated, sleep deprivation was “state-sanctioned torture.”Footnote 65 This “chronometric violence,” as Candida Moss has argued, was not simply a job hazard, it was a punitive mechanism that was designed to keep elites in constant control of the enslaved.Footnote 66 For the enslaved person or other nonelites, forced social isolation resulted in what Orlando Patterson has termed “social death,” a state that Luis Menéndez-Antuña equates with madness and the loss of subjectivity: “unhinging subjectivity, undoing consciousness, distorting body boundaries, maddening reason.”Footnote 67 Worry, distraction, and anxiety were omnipresent pathologies that elites wanted to avoid, and that simultaneously could be weaponized to maintain hierarchy and social control.

The Enslaver’s Ethics and Distraction by Design: “Do Not Worry” as Gaslighting Morality

Although anxiety and fear were tools for managing the enslaved and offloaded onto the enslaved, enslavers were quite open about the worry they still carried. Elites publicly touted the great magnitude of their own residual worry as a selfless service that they provided for the people they subordinated.Footnote 68 They were also keen to protect their economic interests by ensuring that the enslaved persons who worried for them did not veer so far into excess or misdirected worry that they might be deemed “mad,” or unfit for labor. In Roman law an enslaved person was considered “mad” anytime she pursued freedom or her own interests, including directing her attention to art or the games.Footnote 69 This is the antipode to Plutarch’s assertion that the truly free person can worry about whatever he wants—the enslaved person was pathologized if her worry and attention strayed from the paths prescribed by her enslaver. Roman law shows us that mental disability is not only culturally determined and tied to historical variables, it is also tightly linked to socioeconomic variables as well. An elite person’s free mind is an enslaved person’s madness.

Although the pathology of worry and distraction were context dependent, the treatments were the same. Emotional states that were seen as pathological were treated by discovering the cause and either removing it or distracting from it. The therapy of distraction could take the form of any leisure or activity that the patient enjoys, or of provoking an impassioned response (like anger) to someone else’s troubles. Either way, the treatment for excess or inappropriately oriented worry and attentiveness was to redirect the mind to a different focal point, to replace one form of attentiveness with another.Footnote 70

This tactic of consolation through distraction, though endorsed by ancient physicians, is credited to Epicurus, who saw distraction as the only available response to pain, grief, or anxiety. Epicurus recommended a two-part process by which a person would call their mind away from that which is distressing and then contemplate past pleasures.Footnote 71 This Epicurean technique was widely popular and practiced by Epicurus himself as he was dying from bladder and intestinal diseases. He wrote to his own students to tell them about how the joyful memories of their shared intellectual discoveries buoyed him amid the pain of death.Footnote 72

It is not coincidental that Epictetus, a formerly enslaved person who studied Stoicism, also espouses a version of the consolation-of-distraction technique, instructing readers to focus on choosing the good and to ignore things that they cannot control (like their bodies and their possessions).Footnote 73 This tactic is well known to us through Cicero, Seneca, and Paul, but in the ancient world it was thought to be the way that enslaved persons could transcend the dangerous worries and attendant physical pains that were put upon them by their enslavers. In one manual for the use of shorthand (a writing tactic honed by enslaved secretaries), for instance, the secretary is reminded to “be temperate in your desire, remember the joyful.”Footnote 74 As the enslaved secretary notes, this is easier said than done, even if it is held out as the universal cure for worry.

The consolation of distraction was a one-size-fits-all approach to worry that bridged moral philosophy, medicine, and economics. As a result, it effortlessly entered the Christian lexicon of worry and work. Paul and the gospel authors find “do not worry” close at hand as they describe discipleship as enslavement to a divine enslaver. Discipleship necessitates taking on the worries of God, but the disciple is encouraged to eliminate worry (Matt 6:25–34; Luke 12:22–32), to think instead about virtue (Phil 1:3; 4:8–9), or to cast her anxieties upon God (1 Pet 5:7), a directive that is explicitly couched in the language of enslavement in the Shepherd of Hermas 23.5: “And you serve the Master blamelessly the rest of your days. Cast your worries upon the Master and he will set them straight.”Footnote 75 Worry was seen as both pathological and fundamental to the dependency relationship between humans and God. As a result, the worry/work constellation is one that plagued Christian thought for centuries as Christians continued to articulate their human and divine relationships around the ethics of enslavement.Footnote 76

Gaslighting Spirituality: Martha and Manufactured Anxiety

Early Christian texts about worry navigate the fundamental tension that arises in an economic system founded upon enslavement and related hierarchies.Footnote 77 New Testament texts frame discipleship as labor that is wholly focused on the Lord to the exclusion of all other possible enslavers and relationships. The story of Mary and Martha in particular appears in a chapter of Luke’s Gospel that frames discipleship and ministry in terms of ancient enslavement. Philosophical and medical reflections on worry and anxiety reveal the extent to which elites were preoccupied with managing worry so that it was always of the correct type and amount. Worry either had to be outsourced to enslaved persons or traded through the technique of consolation of distraction. The best an ancient person could hope for was finding herself on the right side of the despotic equation, the one where she had any options at all with respect to work, worry, and dependency. Jesus’s statements to Martha, that she is worried about “many things,” that she should trade worry about many things for worry about “one thing,” and that Mary has “chosen” the “better part,” would have been familiar advice for ancient audiences.

The material and cultural realities of ancient worry and work suggest a few interpretive possibilities for Martha’s story. In this setting, Jesus’s instructions to Martha could be read as transgressive, extending her the opportunity to set aside worry and servile labor in a system that assigned both inequitably. If Martha’s question is one about unjust labor standards, then Jesus’s response invites Martha to resist the axioms of that labor economy, rejecting the premise that the solution to anxiety is to shift her “many worries” to another person. While there is good reason to be cautious about the extent to which such a response replicates ancient hierarchies, such a statement coming from Jesus could represent resistance precisely because it comes “from below.”Footnote 78

Although Jesus’s words can be read as a site of resistance, Martha’s story also accomplishes particular narrative aims for the gospel’s author. Situated just after Jesus’s instructions on discipleship as itinerancy, Martha and Mary do important public relations work for those who might have seen the disciples as “wandering madmen.” As women, Mary and Martha are the most likely candidates among the disciples to have slipped off the narrow track of “appropriate worry” into the canyon of the pathological. Mary suggests that even those who were voted by society as “least likely to achieve normality” could achieve the narrow ancient ideals of appropriate worry within the Jesus movement.

The socioeconomic embeddedness of worry also raises another interpretive possibility: that the gospel’s author is replicating the enslaver’s logic around worry. Trading bad worries for correct worry was the telos for the normative body in antiquity. Frequently this telos was only attainable for elite members of society. The language of Mary’s “better choice” mirrors ancient gaslighting morality around this bodily norm. For Luke’s elite audience members Martha represents a homeowner who has taken on slavish work and worry, offering a cautionary tale about what types of dependency were acceptable for elite disciples. Yet for Martha, and others like her, abandoning worry might not have been a real option, but rather an aspirational ideal that was never really within reach. Mary’s attentiveness and Martha’s inattentiveness are both enmeshed in hierarchical notions of the body and labor that were instrumental to the enslaved labor economy. Within that ancient economy the means of eliminating worry for some frequently created mental disability for others. The idea of discipleship as dependence drew heavily on the practices of enslavement, describing followers of Jesus as “slaves of God” and Jesus as their “master.” This definition of discipleship would have maintained the marginal status of enslaved Christians, nonelites, and women by asking Martha to do the very thing she could not do, linking Jesus’s words and the gaslighting morality of a culture that passed along worry to the marginalized and then pronounced them “mad.”

In the ancient economy of worry it is hard to read Jesus’s words as anything other than gaslighting. Jesus is a guest in Martha’s home and has already deferred worry to her as his hostess, so his observation that she is “worried about many things” is coming from a position of relative privilege. Because of his relative luxury, Jesus’s advice to trade up her many worries and choose the “one thing” mirrors the way in which ancient treatments for worry were used to blame the enslaved and other marginalized members of society for their inescapable worries, making them complicit in their own oppression. What is more, when Jesus tells Martha that Mary’s part will “not be taken away from her,” he implies that Martha’s worry is inevitable, that some disciples, like Martha, will be forced into slavish worry and distress so that others can enjoy attentiveness to the “better part.” Within the ancient economy of worry, Jesus’s words reinforce the enslaving logic around worry, so that her worry is simultaneously inevitable and a “choice.” Luke 10:38–42 traps Martha in the gaslighting morality around worry, framing discipleship as chasing after an illusory choice at the behest of someone who holds the power of real choice.

Unfortunately, it’s not just first-century audiences who readily understood the advice to simply “trade up” one’s worries in a system that is itself the font of worry. The endurance of Stoic and Epicurean notions of worry from antiquity to the present, and social norms that still stigmatize mental disability, help to naturalize the enslaving logic of Luke 10:38–48 in different times and places.Footnote 79 If we want to understand ancient texts about disability on their own terms we must be keenly aware of the places where ancient bodily norms might match our own, obscuring our understanding of the ways they diverge. This is one of those places.

Helpful as it might seem in other circumstances, “mind over matter” is hideous and violent advice coming from those who have created the material circumstances that they are asking you to “overcome.” Paradoxically, I propose that we as historians come closer to what Jesus’s words to Martha “meant” when we are able to think about what they could mean in our own era. Interpreters have worked hard to find a reading of this passage that redeems it in a variety of ways, scrutinizing its stance on work, Martha’s domestic labor, or Jesus’s words. When we read Luke 10:38–42 in the context of ancient economies of worry we realize that the terror this text has wielded is much larger than any of those individual components, and our redemptive efforts only play into gaslighting spiritualities. Martha is begging us to keep asking her questions and to disrupt the manufacture of mental disability and systems that selectively assign worry to the marginalized.

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Travis Ables for his editorial assistance, which always improves my work. I would also like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers, Luis Menéndez Antuña, Dustin Atlas, Esther Brownsmith, Christy Cobb, Vince Miller, Nils Neumann, Taylor Petrey, Laura Tringali, and the University of Dayton Department Colloquy for reading and offering critical feedback on drafts of this essay. As ever, this article would never have been dreamt up nor completed without the inspiring scholarship and friendship of Candida R. Moss, who has shared her pre-publication work and offered invaluable insights.

References

1 Jennifer L. Koosed and Darla Schumm, “Out of the Darkness: Examining the Rhetoric of Blindness in the Gospel of John,” in Disability in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Sacred Texts, Historical Traditions, and Social Analysis (ed. Darla Schumm and Michael Stoltzfus; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 77–92; Sharon Betcher, “Disability and the Terror of the Miracle Tradition,” in Miracles Revisited: New Testament Miracle Stories and Their Concepts of Reality (ed. Stefan Alkier and Annette Weissenrieder; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013) 161–81, at 165 (cf. Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1984]); David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “ ‘Jesus Thrown Everything Off Balance’: Disability and Redemption in Biblical Literature,” in This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies (ed. Hector Avalos, Sarah Melcher, and Jeremy Schipper; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007) 173–84.

2 On Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous declaration that “women (like pigs) are good to think with” and the way that ancient Christian authors used the female body as an object to “think with,” see Elizabeth Clark, “Thinking with Women: The Uses of the Appeal to ‘Woman’ in Pre-Nicene Christian Propaganda Literature,” in The Spread of Christianity in the First Four Centuries (ed. William Harris; Leiden: Brill, 2005) 43–52.

3 François Bovon, Luke 2: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 9:51–19:27 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013) 75–77.

4 Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “A Feminist Critical Interpretation for Liberation: Martha and Mary; Lk. 10:38–42,” Religion and Intellectual Life 3 (1986) 21–36, esp. 27; Jaime Clark-Soles, Women in the Bible: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2020) 212–13, has recently echoed this call, arguing that we should not “belittle or lionize” Mary or Martha.

5 Mary Rose D’Angelo, “Women Partners in the New Testament,” JFSR 6 (1990) 77–81. D’Angelo also hypothesized that Mary and Martha might have been sexual partners as well, working as a missionary team in the same way that a male/female married couple might. For the authoritative discussion of love between women in antiquity broadly and in Judaism and early Christianity see Bernadette Brooten, Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). More recently, see Sara Parks, Shayna Sheinfeld, and Meredith J. C. Warren, Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean (New York: Routledge, 2022) 190–91, who cite D’Angelo and Brooten, noting that irrespective of any sexual or romantic relationships, the pairs of women named in the NT at the very least represent couples of women who “opted to form a core relationship with each other rather than with a husband.”

6 John N. Collins, Diakonia: Reinterpreting the Ancient Sources (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) 148; also idem, “Did Luke Intend a Disservice to Women in the Martha and Mary Story?,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 28 (1998) 104–11, at 110.

7 Warren Carter, “Getting Martha Out of the Kitchen: Luke 10:38–42 Again,” in A Feminist Companion to Luke (ed. Amy-Jill Levine; Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2001) 214–31.

8 Turid Karlsen Seim, The Double Message: Patterns of Gender in Luke–Acts (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994) 58–60, 81–88, 99–112, 251–53; Adele Reinhartz, “From Narrative to History: The Resurrection of Mary and Martha,” in A Feminist Companion to the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament (ed. Athalya Brenner; Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic, 1996) 197–224, at 207.

9 Cicero, Brut. 233, Att. 2.24.4, Fam. 1.7.9. On the relationship between labor and cura see Dieter Lau, Der lateinische Begriff labor (Munich: Fink, 1975) 33; Monica R. Gale, Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 145–46.

10 For comparisons with the Cynic discussion of marriage (Epictetus, Diatr. 3.22.67–82) see Archibald Robertson and Alfred Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians (2nd ed.; ICC; Edinburgh: Τ&T Clark, 1914) 158; Kurt Niederwimmer, Askese und Mysterium: Über Ehe, Ehescheidung und Eheverzicht in den Anfängen des christlichen Glaubens (FRLANT 113; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975) 113 n. 162; Werner Wolbert, Ethische Argumentation und Paränese in 1 Kor 7 (Moraltheologische Studien, systematische Abteilung 8; Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1981) 130–31. Others have noted the Stoic parallels (Musonius Rufus, frag. 3.40.8–42.29 L; Hierocles 53.30 ν. Α.; Menander, frag. 575 K; Sent. 14.17 J): Gerd Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977) 10–17, 88; Will Deming, Paul on Marriage and Celibacy: The Hellenistic Background of 1 Corinthians 7 (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004) 95–96, 195–200.

11 Sheila Briggs, “Slavery and Gender,” in On the Cutting Edge: The Study of Women in Biblical Worlds: Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (ed. Jane Schaberg, Alice Bach, and Esther Fuchs; New York: Bloomsbury, 2004) 171, argues that enslavement and gender are always intertwined in antiquity as low-status forms of existence.

12 Jennifer Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 51–59, describes the way in which enslaved persons were uniquely susceptible to the physical and psychic violence of corporal punishment, torture in order to elicit testimony, and constant sexual availability to free persons. In one rabbinic text the idea that enslavement was disabling was central to a story that described eschatological healing as liberation, as Julia Watts Belser has demonstrated in “Disability, Animality, and Enslavement in Rabbinic Narratives of Bodily Restoration and Resurrection,” JLA 8.2 (2015) 288–305, at 297.

13 Adela Yarbro Collins, “Ancient Christians on Marriage and Celibacy: Readings of 1 Corinthians 7 in the Early Church,” BR 64 (2019) 6–24, at 13; cf. Deming, Paul on Marriage and Celibacy, 83, 121–25, 195–98, 200. Here Paul appears to be engaging with forms of Jewish apocalypticism that were also influenced by Wisdom literature and Hellenistic philosophy. For an example of an apocalyptic tradition that is influenced by Stoicism and similarly juxtaposes sex and prayer in the eschatological age see T. Naph. 8:7–10. For the Cynic teaching on marriage as a distraction from one’s mission see Epictetus, Diatr. 3.22.47–48.

14 J. Albert Harrill, “Paul and Slavery: The Problem of 1 Corinthians 7:21,” BR 39 (1994) 5–28; Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 65–69; Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre and Laura S. Nasrallah, “Beyond the Heroic Paul: Toward a Feminist and Decolonizing Approach to the Letters of Paul,” in The Colonized Apostle: Paul through Postcolonial Eyes (ed. Christopher D. Stanley; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011) 161–74, at 162–63; Katherine A. Shaner, Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Laura S. Nasrallah, “Paul’s Letters: The Archeology of Their First Recipients and the Responsibility of Their Modern Readers,” TR 40 (2019) 85–104; J. Albert Harrill, “Revisiting the Problem of 1 Corinthians 7:21,” BR 65 (2020) 77–94. Mitzi J. Smith, Chloe and Her People: A Womanist Critical Dialogue with First Corinthians (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2023). Here and throughout this work I am indebted to the ground-breaking work of Candida R. Moss in God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (New York: Little Brown, 2024).

15 Angela N. Parker, “One Womanist’s View of Racial Reconciliation in Galatians,” JFSR 34.2 (2018) 23–40, at 37. On enslavement metaphors in Paul see S. Tsang, From Slaves to Sons: A New Rhetorical Analysis on Paul’s Slave Metaphors in His Letter to the Galatians (Studies in Biblical Literature 81; New York: Peter Lang, 2005); Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse: Double Trouble Embodied (London: Routledge, 2018) 21–46; and Emerson Powry, “Reading with the Enslaved: Placing Human Bondage at the Center of the Early Christian Story,” in Bitter the Chastening Rod: Africana Biblical Interpretation after “Stony the Road We Trod” in the Age of BLM, Say HerName, and MeToo (ed. Mitzi J. Smith, Angela N. Parker, and Erika S. Dunbar Hill; New York: Fortress, 2022) 71–90. On the enslavement language in Luke see M. A. Beavis, “Ancient Slavery as an Interpretive Context for the New Testament Servant Parables with Special Reference to the Unjust Steward (Luke 16:1–8),” JBL 111 (1992) 37–54; Mary F. Foskett, A Virgin Conceived: Mary and Classical Representations of Virginity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) 13; J. Albert Harrill, Slaves in the New Testament: Literary, Social, and Moral Dimensions (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006) 66; M. A. Beavis, “Slave Parables in the Gospel of Luke: Gospel ‘Texts of Terror’?,” ABR 56 (2008) 61–68; James N. Hoke, “ ‘Behold, the Lord’s Whore’? Slavery, Prostitution, and Luke 1:38,” Biblical Interpretation 26.1 (2018) 43–67; Christy Cobb, Slavery, Gender, Truth, and Power in Luke–Acts and Other Ancient Narratives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) 27–33.

16 Enslaved persons were often characterized as lazy or sleepy and were seen as “domestic enemies” who were in need of constant oversight. See J. Albert Harrill, “The Domestic Enemy: A Moral Polarity of Household Slaves in Early Christian Apologies and Martyrdoms,” in Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (ed. David Balch and Carolyn Osiek; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003) 231–54. For examples of the “lazy enslaved person” trope see Columella, Rust. 1.8.2; Dig. 11.3.5; Dig. 21.1.18; 21.1.65 pr.; Petron., Sat. 95; Cato, Agr. 2.2. Candida R. Moss, God’s Ghostwriters, 84–86, 133–34; eadem, “Chronometric Violence: Sleeplessness, Incarceration, and the Mechanics of Control,” in The Wakeful Night (ed. Dawn LeValle Norman and Kylie Crabbe; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

17 While the text of Luke 10:38b in the NA28 reads “Martha welcomed him” (Μάρθα ὑπεδέξατο αὐτόν), a number of important witnesses go on to say “into the house” (εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν), or “into her house” (εἰς τὸν οἶκον αὐτῆς).

18 Renita J. Weems, Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible (San Diego: Lura Media, 1988) 39–48, at 47. Weems’s retelling of the story frames the conflict as an interpersonal one between sisters that centers on domestic service.

19 Reinhartz, “From Narrative to History,” 207–8, argues that Mary and Martha “provide a graphic illustration of the inverted master-servant dichotomy.”

20 Cobb, Slavery, Gender, Truth and Power, 69, 206–7. As Ronald Charles, The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts (New York: Routledge, 2020) 151–52, has argued, even though Luke and Acts contain statements of political reversal, both remain “politically ambiguous” and still consider enslaved women to be “deviant Others.” Mitzi Smith argues that the Gospel of Matthew reveals a similar set of power relations, one that “does not speak against the status quo of Roman hegemonic imperial power.” Mitzi J. Smith, “Slavery, Torture, Systemic Oppression, and Kingdom Rhetoric: An African American Reading of Matthew 25:1–13,” in Insights from African American Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017) 80–97, at 95.

21 Angela N. Parker, If God Still Breathes Why Can’t I? Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021) 79, argues, “no longer can New Testament scholars disregard the abuse and violence that were ubiquitous during the reign of the Roman Empire and how these realities may have influenced the way gendered women heard Paul’s letter to the Galatian church.” On interpretive gaslighting see 44–62. As Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 9–38, demonstrates, violence was central to Stoic and Christian metaphors of enslavement, even as Epictitus and Paul downplayed the importance of physical enslavement.

22 Angela N. Parker, If God Still Breathes Why Can’t I?, 49–50; Saba Fatima, “I Know What Happened to Me: The Epistemic Harms of Microagression,” in Microaggressions and Philosophy (ed. Lauren Freemen and Jeanine Weekes Schroer; New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2020) 163–83, at 168.

23 Sir 41:1.

24 Sir 42:9.

25 Bovon, Luke 2, 214–15, notes that μεριμνάω is absent from Philo, Josephus, and the Stoa, and that these LXX uses reflect standard Greek usage. In m.’Abot 2.7 Hillel says “many possessions, many worries.”

26 In comparison with Mark 4:20 and Matt 13:23, the Lukan version of this saying removes “of the world” and “deceit” as qualifiers of “worries” (μέριμνα) but adds “the pleasures of life.” Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX (Anchor Bible Commentary; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981) 714, sees a parallel with the Damascus document (defiling the sanctuary, wealth, and multiple wives; CD 4:15–5:10). François Bovon, Luke 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1–9:50 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002) 308, argues that Luke here and elsewhere (7:25; 12:19; 16:19) is warning audiences about the way in which worry arises out of having wealth.

27 Sharing possessions and hospitality are a major motif in Luke and Acts that is imbued with salvific significance, as argued by Joshua W. Jipp, Divine Visitations and Hospitality to Strangers in Luke–Acts: An Interpretation of the Malta Episode in Acts 28:1–10 (Leiden: Brill, 2013); idem, Saved by Faith and Hospitality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017). On the material evidence for “theo-economic rhetoric” see Jennifer A. Quigley, Divine Accounting: Theo-economics in Early Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021) 16–33.

28 Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, 712, argues that Luke maintains some of the apocalyptic tenor of the passage, noting the parallels between Luke 8:14 and 2 Esdr. 8:41–44.

29 Mark 13:33–37; Matt 24:43–51; Luke 12:35–40; Moss, God’s Ghostwriters, 84–86; eadem, “Chronometric Violence,” forthcoming, compares the topoi of the wakeful enslaved persons who are attentive overseers waiting for their returning dominus to other ancient examples of enslaved waiting and the nocturnal labor that was expected of enslaved persons and otherwise coded as slavish. See also James Ker, “Nocturnal Writers in Imperial Rome: The Culture of Lucubratio,” Classical Philology 99 (2004) 209–42.

30 Mark uses the word μεριμνάω once, Matthew 7 times, all in the parallels to the Lukan materials that are discussed here. The noun μέριμνα occurs twice in Luke, and once each in Mark 4:19 and Matt 13:22 (the parallels to Luke 8:14).

31 In Matt 10:8–10 they are told explicitly not to accept pay for their preaching or healing, making life below subsistence level a requirement for discipleship. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, 752, argues that the emphasis in Luke 9:1–3 is not on “poverty” but on the extent to which material things interfere with “reliance and trust in the providence of God himself.” Bovon, Luke 1, 345, notes that this is similar to the instructions to the Cynics, and is meant to distinguish the disciples from those traveling philosophers who came to market with a travel bag, walking stick, and cloak (Epictitus, Diatr. 3, 22, 9–12). Bovon goes on to say that here the Levitical renunciation of possessions and income is being adapted to the disciples (Num 18:31). Perhaps rather than thinking in terms of philosophy or priestly norms we need to consider whether these instructions that prompt dependency are part of what frames Christian discipleship in terms of enslaved labor.

32 Page duBois, Torture and Truth (Routledge Revivals; New York: Routledge, 1991); Julia Hillner, Prison, Punishment and Penance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) 51–63, 131–50; on the extent to which these practices influenced the Christian imaginary see J. Albert Harrill, “ ‘Exegetical Torture’ in Early Christian Biblical Interpretation: The Case of Origen of Alexandria,” Biblical Interpretation 25 (2017) 39–57.

33 Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X–XXIV (Anchor Bible Commentary; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985) 984.

34 Moss, “Chronometric Violence,” forthcoming; Moss, God’s Ghostwriters, 201–235, offers incisive treatment of the interpretive legacy of NT notions of discipleship as enslavement.

35 On the ways in which social stratification and enslavement informed Philippians see Joseph A. Marchal, The People beside Paul: A History from Below (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015) 142. Shaner, Enslaved Leadership; eadem, “Seeing Rape and Robbery: ἁρπαγμαός and the Philippians Christ Hymn (Phil. 2:5–11),” Biblical Interpretation 54.3 (2017) 342–63.

36 See, for examples of these interpretive tendencies, the readings of Clement, Origen, Augustine and Chrysostom. Clement of Alexandria, Ques. div. 10; Origen, Hom. in evangelium secundum Lucam frg. 72; Augustine, Serm. 103; 104; Quaest. ev. 2; John Chrysostom, Hom. Jo. 44.1.

37 Susan P. Mattern, “Galen’s Anxious Patients: Lypē as Anxiety Disorder,” in Homo Patiens—Approaches to the Patient in the Ancient World (ed. Georgia Petridou and Chiara Thumiger; Boston: Brill, 2016) 203–5; Inbar Graiver, “The Paradoxical Effects of Attentiveness,” JECS 24.2 (2016) 199–227, at 210, proceeds with the premise that “modern and historical people are sufficiently similar in general cognitive function,” but she first frames that with the caveat that “human cognition is shaped, to a large extent, by the cultural context in which it takes place.”

38 For insights from neuroscience see Bruce E. Wexler, Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change (Boston: MIT Press, 2008); Joan Y. Chiao and Katherine D. Blizinsky, “Population Disparities in Mental Health: Insights from Cultural Neuroscience,” American Journal of Public Health 103.1 (2013) 122–32. For social-scientific studies see Carol J. Peng, “Sociological Theories Relating to Mental Disabilities in Racial and Ethnic Minority Populations,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 19.1 (2009) 85–98; Wulung Hanandita and Gindo Tampubolon, “Does Poverty Reduce Mental Health? An Instrumental Variable Analysis,” Social Science & Medicine 113 (2014) 59–67; Dennis Tyler, Disabilities of the Color Line: Redressing Antiblackness from Slavery to the Present (New York: NYU Press, 2022).

39 María Isabel Cantón, “Why We Must Talk about De-medicalization,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Mad Studies (ed. Peter Beresford and Jasna Russo; New York: Routledge, 2022) 205–16. Margaret Price, “Defining Mental Disability,” in The Disability Studies Reader (ed. Lennard J. Davis; 5th ed.; New York: Routledge, 2017) 333–42; Angela Sweeney and Billie Lever Taylor, “De-pathologizing Motherhood,” in Routledge International Handbook of Mad Studies (ed. Beresford and Russo),166–76. For the cultural model of disability as applied to ancient history and biblical studies see Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper, “Mosaic Disability and Identity in Exodus 4:10; 6:12, 30,” Biblical Interpretation 16 (2008) 428–41, at 432–33. For an application of this model to the power structures that define mental disabilities in the NT see Louise Lawrence, Bible and Bedlam: Madness, Sanism, and New Testament Interpretation (New York: T&T Clark, 2018).

40 Plato, Phaed. 229e5–230a8, cited in Katja Maria Vogt, “Plato on Madness and the Good Life,” in Mental Disorders in the Classical World (ed. William V. Harris; Leiden: Brill, 2013) 177–92, at 191–92.

41 Hippocratic Corpus, Vict. 2.61 (Hippocrates, Volume IV. Heracleitus on the Universe (trans. W. H. S. Jones; LCL 150; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). The LCL translation renders μερίμνης as “thought,” likely to match hearing, sight, and voice, as an ability rather than a pathology.

42 Galen, San. Tu. 318K; for references to worry as the cause of humoral imbalance and physiological symptoms in Galen see Mattern, “Galen’s Anxious Patients,” 208–9.

43 See especially Galen, Cris. 2.13, which discusses those “worried because of study or contemplation.” On the wide range of meaning of φροντίς within Galen’s works see Susan P. Mattern, Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) 133; Mattern, “Galen’s Anxious Patients,” 209. The worry/care relationship was so blurry that lovesickness was sometimes pathologized. Peter Toohey, “Love, Lovesickness and Melancholia,” Illinois Classical Studies 17 (1992) 265–86. This is exemplified in the 5th cent. CE poet Nonnos, who describes love as debilitating worry, “melting in a flood of care [μερίμνῃτήκετο]” (Nonnos, Dianysiaca 33, line 262, translation in Nonnos, Dionysiaca, Volume II: Books 16–35 [trans. W. H. D. Rouse; LCL 354; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940] 484–85). In Latin literature cura functioned similarly. See Caesar, Bell. gall. 7.67.4; Cicero, Fam. 13.7.4, 13.29.2, 15.8; Horace, Sat. 1.2.78, Carm. 1.7.17, 1.9.2f, 2.9.6; Tibullus 1.1.3; 3.6.7; Ovid, Tr. 5.5.47; Pont. 2.6.22; Seneca, Ben. 2.27.2; Mart. 1.15.7; Gale, Virgil on the Nature of Things, 146.

44 As Vogt, “Plato on Madness,” argues, this pathology is characterized by Plato as a monstrous version of the self (Resp. 588c; Phaed. 229e6–230a8). Galen warns one young man to control his passions after he spent a sleepless night worrying about frivolous things (Aff. Pecc. Dig. 1.7). Véronique Boudon-Millot, “What Is A Mental Illness, and How Can It Be Treated? Galen’s Reply as a Doctor and Philosopher,” in Mental Disorders in the Classical World (ed. Harris), 129–45, at 142.

45 As Chiara Thumiger, A History of the Mind and Mental Health in Classical Greek Medical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 359, notes, a range of distinct physiological states are associated with each emotion in the medical authors, sometimes in ways that are contradictory. She observes that this tight connection between emotions and bodies led to a process of differential diagnosis that was as capacious as it was meticulous: “a calculated project of naturalisation of human experiences, whereby detailed bodily signs are sought for each emotion.”

46 Hippocratic Corpus, Morb. sacr. 2.72; ps.-Aristotle, Problemata 2.26, 11.31–36; Galen, Loc. Aff. 3.10; De praecogn. 6; Cris. 2.13. When worry is pathologized in the medical authors the words used to refer to worry or anxiety include μεριμνάω and related nouns, but also other words like ἀλύκη, ἀγωνία, λύπη, φροντίς can be used to describe anxiety or other conditions that reflect a troubled mind or soul. On grief (λύπη) as an anxiety disorder see Susan P. Mattern, “Galen’s Anxious Patients: Lypē as Anxiety Disorder,” in Homo Patiens (ed. Petridou and Thumiger), 203–23.

47 On the framing of worry as a “troubled soul” in ancient medical thinking see Thumiger, History of the Mind, 40, 402–5. Hippocratic Corpus, Vict. 4.89; Hum. 9; Epid. 6.5.5. As Thumiger notes, these texts only hint at an understanding of the soul in the “psychological sense” and are anomalous in treating the soul in conversation with mental distress. They do, however, describe the soul as a part of the body that governs character and mental states. On the relationship between the brain and the soul in early Christian thought see Jessica L. Wright, The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022).

48 Hippocratic Corpus, Vict. 4.89. Hippocratis De Diaeta (ed. and trans. R. Joly and S. Byl; CMG I, 2,4; Berlin, 1984) 222.29.

49 Hippocratic Corpus, Epid. 6.5.5. Ippocrate Epidemie, libro sesto (ed. and trans. D. Manetti and A. Roselli; Florence: La nuova italia editrice, 1982) 110.4

50 Hippocratic Corpus, Morb. sacr. 2.72 (Hippocrates, Affections. Diseases 1. Diseases 2 [trans. Paul Potter; LCL 472; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

51 Silvia Montiglio, Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005); Thumiger, History of the Mind, 156–62. Thumiger uses ancient literature to assist in her interpretation of madness in the Hippocratic Corpus. For instance, Io’s wandering is seen as a classical sign of her madness.

52 Ps.-Aristotle, Problemata 30.1 contra Rufus, On Melancholy F11–13, F36, F68, F70–71. Melinda Letts, “Mental Perceptions and Pathology in the Work of Rufus of Ephesus,” in Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine (ed. Chiara Thumiger and Peter Singer; Leiden: Brill, 2018) 176–97, at 182–83.

53 George Kazantzidis, “Between Insanity and Wisdom: Perceptions of Melancholy in the Ps.-Hippocratic Letters 10–17,” in Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine (ed. Thumiger and Singer), 35–78, at 77–78; On the figure of the “super-crip” in literature and media see Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Times Books, 1993); Sami Schalk, “Reevaluating the Supercrip,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 10.1 (2016) 71–86.

54 Galen, San. Tu. 6.14; Loc. Aff. 5.6; Ven. Sect. Er. 9. For discussion of these passages see Mattern, “Galen’s Anxious Patients,” 213 and Kazantzidis, “Between Insanity and Wisdom,” 77. On nighttime intellectual work see Ker, “Nocturnal Writers,” 209–42. In addition to the “super-crip” trope, Galen’s story about Diodorus also fits with Galen’s tendency to critique grammarians, using pathological worry as a slur or insult.

55 This view was exemplified in a scene from Oedipus Rex, in which worry is the word that is used to describe the scope of enslaved work, as Oedipus inquires after an elderly enslaved shepherd’s previous occupation, asking him “what work or way of life was your worry?” (ἔργον μεριμνῶν ποῖον ἢ βίον τίνα). Sophocles, Oed. tyr. line 1125 (Sophocles, Volume I. Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus [ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones; LCL 20; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), translation mine). On the overlap of worry and work in Virgil such that labor is sometimes characterized as “insane” (insanus; Aen. 6.135) see Susan Scheinberg Kristol, Labor and Fortuna in Virgil’s Aeneid (New York: Garland, 1990) 22–42, 90–108.

56 Plutrach, Mor.; Adol. poet. aud. 33E (Plutarch, Moralia, Volume I [LCL 197; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927]). Plutarch is quoting and rewriting a statement on the relative nature of freedom by Sophocles, Trag. Graec. Frag., No. 789.

57 Aristotle, Pol. 1.1255b. As Jennifer Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 11, argues, enslavers relied upon the enslaved as “body doubles” in a range of undesirable circumstances, including imprisonment. On the view that people could be seen as extensions of their enslaver see Brandon Reay, “Agriculture, Writing, and Cato’s Aristocratic Self-Fashioning,” CA 24 (2005) 331–61; Sarah Blake, “Now You See Them: Slaves and Other Objects as Elements of the Roman Master,” Helios 39.2 (2012) 193–211; Blake, “In Manus: Pliny’s Letters and the Arts of Mastery,” in Roman Literary Cultures: Domestic Politics, Revolutionary Poetics, Civic Spectacle (ed. A. Keith and J. Edmondson; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016) 89–107. On the role of the overseer (ἐπίτροπος) in the labor economy see Arjan Zuiderhoek, “Sorting out Labour in the Roman Provinces: Some Reflections on Labour and Institutions in Asia Minor,” in Work, Labour, and Professions in the Roman World (ed. Koenraad Verboven and Christian Laes; Leiden: Brill, 2016) 20–35, at 27–28.

58 Philodemus, De Oec. 14.23–15.3. “I think that the right administration of wealth lies in this, i.e., in not feeling distressed about what one loses and in not [trapping oneself on treadmills] because of an obsessive [zeal] concerning the more and the less. For the labour involved in the [acquisition] of wealth consists both in dragging oneself [by force] and in agonizing over one’s losses on the grounds that they might bring one directly into pain, whether present or expected. But if one has removed from oneself such difficulties and does not eagerly desire to amass and make one’s property as great as possible and, moreover, does not procure for oneself those resources that wealth offers by oneself watching painfully over one’s possessions or [by collecting] them in rich abundance, [for these reasons] a readiness for acquisition would become indistinguishable from one’s readiness to share things on one’s own initiative too.” Text and translation from Philodemus, On Property Management (trans. Voula Tsoula; Writings from the Greco-Roman World; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2012). The following section builds upon the work of Candida R. Moss on enslavement and intellectual labor. Candida R. Moss, “Between the Lines: Looking for the Contributions of Enslaved Literate Laborers in a Second-Century Text (P. Berol. 11632),” SLA 5.3 (2021) 432–52; Moss, “The Secretary: Enslaved Workers, Stenography, and the Production of Early Christian Literature,” JTS 20.20 (2023) 1–37. On Philodemus as an Epicurean response to the dangers of acquisitiveness see Tim O’Keefe, “The Epicureans on Happiness, Wealth, and the Deviant Craft of Property Management,” in Economics and the Virtues (ed. Jennifer Baker and Mark White; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) 37–52.

59 Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 26, 35; Joseph A. Howley, “In Ancient Rome,” in Further Reading (ed. Matthew Rubery and Leah Price; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) 15–27.

60 Galen, De praecogn. 6 (K. 14.633–35); Moss, God’s Ghostwriters, 30–32.

61 Mattern, “Galen’s Anxious Patients,” 208–10, explains that fear is frequently mentioned alongside worry and anxiety in Galen’s work as one of the main causes of anxiety, and that the symptoms of each varies only in intensity, not kind. She argues that this may reflect a dependence upon a Stoic understanding of the emotions. Physiologically, the treatment of psychic distress was thought to alleviate the bodily symptoms. See also Vivian Nutton, “Galenic Madness,” in Mental Disorders in the Classical World (ed. Harris), 119–27, at 125–26.

62 In Affections of the Soul, Galen offers therapeutic advice to a Cretan friend who severely injured two enslaved persons in a fit of rage, a medical intervention aimed at the problem of an enslaver’s anger resulting in the injury or disability of an enslaved person (Aff. Pecc. Dig. 1.4). Violence toward the enslaved was both a social and legal norm, such that extreme torture was prescribed by law in order to elicit “truth” from enslaved persons. Peter Garnsey, Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970) 213–16; Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 166–67; Olivia Robinson, “Slaves and the Criminal Law,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte (romanistische Abteilung) 98 (1981) 213–54; John Bodel, “Graveyards and Groves: A Study of the Lex Lucerina,” American Journal of Ancient History 11 (1986) 1–133, at 73; Page duBois, Torture and Truth, 63–74; Jennifer Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 51–52; Harrill, Slaves in the New Testament, 158–59.

63 Here I am following the work of Candida Moss in “Chronometric Violence,” forthcoming.

64 See, for instance, the discussion of curae and insomnia in Latin literature in Scheinberg Kristol, Labor and Fortuna, 102–5, who notes that sleep can drive away cares for some (Lucr. 4.907) while worry can also make sleep impossible for others (Horace, Sat. 2.7.114).

65 Smith, “Slavery, Torture, Systemic Oppression,” 89. Smith offers an important corrective here to Page DuBois’s foundational work Torture and Truth, 63, which does not list sleep-deprivation among ancient mechanisms of torture. Smith argues that the torture of sleep deprivation is operative in the Matthean slave parables, which equate the submissive endurance of torture with wisdom, and “sacralize and normalize violent and abusive behaviors” (90–93).

66 Moss, “Chronometric Violence,” forthcoming.

67 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Luis Menéndez-Antuña, “Of Social Death and Solitary Confinement: The Political Life of a Gerasene (Luke 8:26–39),” JBL 138.3 (2019) 643–64, at 663.

68 Frequently elites like to remind others that their life is far from worry free, and that the subordinates who are being asked to shoulder worry are told that their worry does not compare to that of the king or enslaver. The classic example is when Cambyses receives the title of king, “the gift of the gods,” but his younger brother Tanaoxares is consoled that he will be happier because he will have fewer worries (Xen., Cyr. 8.7.11). Plutarch (Mor. 830A [De vitando aere alieno]) says that that freedom from care (ἡ ἀμεριμνία) is the benefit of poverty. In Dio Chrysostom, Orat. 10.8–13 we learn that enslavers worry more than the enslaved; however, their wives worry less. The implication here is that worry can only be partially passed on for certain elites (wives) and that additional subordinates bring additional worry. Deming, Paul on Marriage and Celibacy, 200, notes that Plutarch’s statement might be influenced by its Stoic context (829F, 830B–D).

69 Dig. 21.1.4.3 and 21.1.65. Peter Toohey, “Madness in the Digest,” in Mental Disorders in the Classical World (ed. Harris), 441–60, at 447–48.

70 Galen, In Epid. VI comm. VIII: CMG V.10,2,2, pp. 494–95, in Nutton, “Galenic Madness,” 126. Ancient medical thinking about the mind had a significant overlap with Stoic and Epicurean thinking in which even typical human dissatisfaction or unhappiness could be treated with philosophy. Thumiger, History of the Mind, 127 n. 106, 128 n. 109, 415 n. 196; Brooke Holmes, “Disturbing Connections: Sympathetic Affections, Mental Disorder, and the Elusive Soul in Galen,” in Mental Disorders in the Classical World (ed. Harris), 147–76, at 152, 159–64.

71 On this two-part process see Epicurus, Sent. Vat. 55; Cicero, Tusc. 3.15.33; Philodemus, D. 3 col. d (2) 23; Mort. 38.21; Paul A. Holloway, Philippians (Heremeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017) 73, 184; Holloway, “Thanks for the Memories: On the Translation of Philippians 1.3,” NTS 52 (2006) 419–32. Holloway enumerates a broad range of thinkers who utilized Epicurean consolation or a revised form of it: Cicero, Tusc. 3.16.35–3.17.37; Seneca, Ep. 99.25; Seneca, Ad Poly. 18.7–8 and Ad Marc. 24.1–4; Pseudo-Ovid, Cons. Ad. Liv. 377–416; Pseudo-Plutarch, Ad. Apoll. 116a–b; Pliny, Ep. 8.5.2; Julian, Or. 8.246c–248d; Ambrose, Exc. 1.3; Jerome, Ep. 60.7.3; 108.1.2; 118.4.2; Basil, Ep. 5.2; 269.2; Paulinus of Nola, Ep. 13.6. Holloway has also argued that this is the strategy employed by Ben Sira in Sir 14:16; 30:23 and by Paul in Phil 1:3; 4:8–9.

72 The letters from Epicurus to his students are preserved in Cicero, Fin. 2.96 and Diogenes Laertius, Vit. 10.22.

73 Epictetus, Diatr. 1.1; Ench. 1.

74 Greek Shorthand Manual, Sentence 31 (Sofia Torallas Tovar, To the Origins of Greek Stenography [Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2006], 127). The fifth sign, added at the end of this sentence, notes that this is “difficult to appease.” I am grateful to Candida Moss for this reference.

75 Καὶ τὰς λοιπὰς τῆς ζωῆς ἡμέρας ὑμῶν δουλεύσητε τῷ κυρίῳ ἀμέμπτως. ἐπιρίψατε τὰς μερίμνας ὑμῶν ἐπὶ τὸν κύριον, καὶ αὐτὸς κατορθώσει αὐτάς (translation mine). Compare with Ps 54 (MT 55):23 and Shepherd of Hermas 19. On the use of enslavement language and metaphors in Hermas see Chance E. Bonar, “Hermas the (Formerly?) Enslaved: Rethinking Manumission and Hermas’s Biography in the Shepherd of Hermas,” Early Christianity 13.2 (2022) 205–26.

76 John Chrysostom argued that worry makes one slavish and possessions induce sadness, mirroring the medical and philosophical approaches to worry that we have seen in ancient Judaism, Cynicism, Stoicism, and Galen. Chrysostom, Exp. Ps. 4 [PG 55:55]; Hom. 1 Cor. 39.8 [PG 61:344]; Hom. Phil. 2.4 [PG 62:196–97]; Hom. Acta. 13.3 [PG 60:110]; Hom. Col. 12.7 [PG 62.390]; Hom. 1 Tim. 13.3 [PG 62.568]. Blake Leyerle, “The Etiology of Sorrow and Its Therapeutic Benefits in the Preaching of John Chrysostom,” JLA 8.2 (2015) 368–85; Leyerle, The Narrative Shape of Emotion in the Preaching of John Chrysostom (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020) 64–77.

77 On “doulology” as the way in which enslavement and mastery create an entire discursive frame for early Christian theology see Chris L. De Wet, The Unbound God: Slavery and Formation of Early Christian Thought (London: Routledge, 2018) 8. De Wet is here influenced by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s language of “kieriarchy,” in But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992) 115.

78 Leyerle, The Narrative Shape of Emotion, 69–70 argues that a similar nuance is needed when approaching Chrysostom’s instructions regarding the emotional discipline of nonelites and enslaved persons. Cf. Daniel Jordan Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) 53–87.

79 One salient example of the appropriation of Stoicism in the present day is in William B. Irivine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 241–42. Irvine argues for practicing Stoicism in place of “taking Xanax” to treat anxiety, rehearsing a number of stereotypes that are frequently used against the mentally disabled.