# The same public collection prints ‘slaves obey your masters’ as a received heading

Date: 1979

## The fact

Public English Ephesians/Colossians/Philemon as a cluster print unfree obedience beside a personal letter about Onesimus. Later slaveholding churches quoted the heading. He did not draft a 19th-century code.

## Context

Split that improving row.

[Paul the Apostle](/people/paul-the-apostle) is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Official Bible-society, Vatican, or library pages and an independent publisher independently describe this instrument.

Official or archival record: New Advent — Ephesians (https://www.newadvent.org/bible/eph001.htm; New Advent).

## Significance

Printed slave-obedience is an inequality path, not a 55 CE bill of sale.

Printed slave-obedience is an inequality path, not a 55 CE bill of sale.

## What is established and what is not

Established as a dated public record of this instrument.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.

## People

- Paul the Apostle: https://factrail.ai/people/paul-the-apostle

## Drivers

- Income Inequality: https://factrail.ai/drivers/income-inequality

## Sources

- https://www.ohchr.org/en/slavery
- https://www.newadvent.org/bible/eph001.htm

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/pa-slavery-obey-masters