Roberta Grimes

The Slavery Question

Posted by Roberta Grimes • January 03, 2026 • 3 Comments
Afterlife Research, Jesus

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation!
O my soul, praise him, for he is your health and salvation!
Come, all who hear; now to his temple draw near,
join me in glad adoration.

Praise to the Lord, above all things so wondrously reigning;
sheltering you under his wings, and so gently sustaining!
Have you not seen all that is needful has been
sent by his gracious ordaining?

Praise to the Lord, who will prosper your work and defend you;
surely his goodness and mercy shall daily attend you.
Ponder anew what the Almighty can do,
if with his love he befriends you.
– Joachim Neander (1650-1680) & Catherine Winkworth, English translator (1829-1878), from “Praise to the Lord” (1680)

As each of us strives to come to ever better know and love the genuine Jesus on an ever deeper level, there are things about the Lord’s earthly life that still seem to be somewhat odd to us. I have talked about some of these issues in the past, especially after my Thomas took me to actually meet Jesus in the astral plane in April of 2022, on Jesus’s riverbank on astral Level Three. The afterlife foyer is on Level Three as well. That’s where we prepare for, and we then enter another new earth-life, and it’s the place to which we then return home again from our earth-lives that have just been lived. What you and I from here refer to as the afterlife is actually a fairly small transit space – you might think of it as a foyer – where we prepare to transition between there and here, and then we enter it on our way back home again. So what we call the afterlife is a foyer, if you will, on the third astral level, between our brief lives on earth and the immense and gorgeous astral realities which are our true eternal home.

And then the whole of Level Three, beyond that small afterlife foyer space, is beautiful and gigantic! Like each of the other astral levels, It is probably the relative size of our entire material universe. Nearly everyone vibrates high enough by the time of our material deaths to comfortably attain that beautiful Third Level; so naturally, even though at this point, Jesus can vibrate even higher than the Godhead level of this whole astral reality, He chooses to be where most of the people are for most of the time. So, He spends His eternity mostly on His humble Level Three riverbank, where if you want to visit Him, you can come and mostly listen to Him and help Him feed His fish, perhaps, with grain that just appears in your hands. And there, amazingly, repeatedly, small groups of people who have just recently died on earth will respectfully come in little groups to visit Jesus. This is the reason why He remains for us on easily accessible Level Three.  He has to tone down His personal energies by a lot to be so approachable by us, and so He does that. Now, to be near Jesus just feels like one long, high note; it is odd, where everyone else vibrates in mixed tones. But it is quite bearable for us.

Still, we wonder about Jesus’s life on earth. It still presents us with some questions! And here are a couple of the questions that we might have about the life that Jesus lived when he was born on earth two thousand years ago. As we reckon it, He seems to have taken at least four thousand years to carefully plan that lifetime as Jesus, once He was perfected after His final regular lifetime on earth as a usual human being. Then, Thomas and I figure, some four thousand years passed before He was born again on earth as a devout Jew with the humble name of Jesus. So He had thousands of years during which He could plan that lifetime very carefully. Why then does His Jesus life in some ways seem so unusual? For example, being born to be a well-educated and very devout Jew, Jesus should have been married in His teens. And yet, insofar as we know, Jesus never married in that entire lifetime. Why wasn’t Jesus ever married? Jesus was very well educated, and His chosen role was to be a Teacher; and yet, He didn’t start to teach until He reached what was at that time the fairly ancient age of thirty years old. That left almost a decade of Jesus’s young adulthood unaccounted-for. What was He doing during that almost a decade of what are now called His “lost years”?

Various notions have been advanced by scholars over the years to explain what are two pretty dramatic oddities in Jesus’s supposedly traditionally strict Jewish life. Perhaps, of course, Jesus did get married at fifteen or sixteen, like every other good Jewish boy of His time. He married Mary Magdalene, let’s say; they had children, of course; and then after His resurrection, the whole family was spirited off to live in the south of France. Hey, that works! Well, except for the fact that Jesus at that point was using a temporary astral body. But perhaps we won’t worry about such details. And those “lost years” in Jesus’s twenties, when He should have been teaching, seem to many to almost require a long trip to India, to Nepal, or to somewhere else both spiritual and exotic, from which Jesus would have returned at the age of thirty, having learned all the wisdom of the east. He might have had time to have done that; true enough. But the Gospels never even hint at such travels. More importantly, the Gospel teachings of Jesus are all His own, and there is no taint in them of any foreign flavor.

More importantly, we can see now that there is a much simpler explanation for these, and for all the other oddities in the reported life of Jesus. I first saw this alternative explanation proposed perhaps four years ago, and while my first thought was to squeamishly reject the whole idea, the more I have thought about it, the more  likely it seems to me to be probably true. The simplest answer always is the likeliest one, is it not? And it does fit psychologically with the Jesus that we know and love, who after those four thousand years at the Godhead level had become so distant from the material world, and from communion with regular humankind, that He had wanted most of all to be close to the very least of us again, to study humble humankind first of all; to come to know better the very least of these before He could really feel best able to do what He had come back to earth again so very eager to do.Which was to teach humankind universally how to love and forgive and to very rapidly raise ourselves spiritually.   

• Please consider the possibility now that Jesus chose to be born on earth two thousand years ago as an actual slave. The institution of slavery was common at that time, but slavery was then very different than it was in our world in the recent American South. In Jesus’s day, it was more like a kind of indentured servitude, with occasional universal emancipations. And with strict Biblical rules about how “slaves” were to be treated (see, e.g., Exod 21.2-6; Lev 25.10, 38-41; and Deut 23.15,16). Jesus’s mother, Mary, identifies herself to the Archangel Gabriel as a slave when Gabriel announces to her the coming birth of Jsus. In doing so, she uses the female version of a Greek word which is translated as “slave” whenever it is used for a male (see LK 1:38). And if Mary is a slave, then her child will be born into her same legal status. In which case, insofar as I can determine, Jesus’s status as a slave at birth would ordinarily have been for life. But when Jesus was four, the Roman Emperor Augustus decreed that those born into slavery as Jesus would have been born into slavery were now to be freed at the age of thirty.
• If Jesus’s mother, Mary, was a slave, and so Jesus Himself was born as a slave, then His lack of a wife and His “Lost Years” are entirely explained. He could not have been married until after He was freed; and then, when He was freed at thirty, He was rapidly at last deep into His primary planned teaching role. Of course, too, until Jesus reached the age of thirty, He would have been unable to travel, because He was indentured to Joseph and working for Joseph as a carpenter.  
• Since from the age of four, Jesus was set to be freed at thirty, Joseph was required by law to give Jesus a good religious education. And, so he did! Jesus could read fluently, and He knew the Hebrew scriptures well. Joseph seems to have cared deeply for Jesus, who was the first male born into Joseph’s household. Joseph cared for Jesus to the extent of even carrying Him out of harm’s way and into Egypt for a time during Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents. 
• But Joseph seems never to have married Mary. She followed her Son throughout His life. And then Jesus from the cross asks His disciple, John, to look after His mother (see JN 19:27), so we know that Jesus is not certain that Joseph will care for his mother after His own impending death death. As indeed apparently Joseph does not care for her, according to a close reading of the Gospel of Luke, since Mary soon moves into John’s household.
•  Jesus was oddly despised by His childhood neighbors for speaking with authority at the start of His ministry, when He is freed at His age thirty. After Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, He returned to Galilee. And then comes an astonishing scene that never really made sense to me before, in which He speaks in His home synagogue and announces that He is the fulfillment of Hebrew prophesy. And his home-folks promptly try to throw Him off a cliff. Here it is:

¹⁴ And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about Him spread through all the surrounding region. ¹⁵ And He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all.

¹⁶ And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. ¹⁷ And the scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to Him. And He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
¹⁹ To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

²⁰ And He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all the people in the synagogue were intently directed at Him. ²¹ Now He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” ²² And all the people were speaking well of Him, and admiring the gracious words which were coming from His lips; and yet they were saying, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” ²³ And He said to them, “No doubt you will quote this proverb to Me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! All the miracles that we heard were done in Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.’” ²⁴ But He said, “Truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his hometown. ²⁵ But I say to you in truth, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut up for three years and six months, when a severe famine came over all the land; ²⁶ and yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. ²⁷ And there were many with leprosy in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” ²⁸ And all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; ²⁹ and they got up and drove Him out of the city, and brought Him to the crest of the hill on which their city had been built, so that they could throw Him down from the cliff. ³⁰ But He passed through their midst and went on His way (LK 4:14-30). A presumptuous local boy who had grown up as a slave among them and only just recently been emancipated might inspire such rage, but surely nothing less!

We all plan our lives on earth before we are born, and that was especially true of Jesus. The Jesus that we have come to know so well surely would have planned an earth-life as the poorest of the poor; and in that time and place, that may well have meant that Jesus deliberately chose to be born of a slave mother, and to live as a slave Himself during most of His human life. My Thomas tells us that Jesus was born as God on earth, so God could “look through His eyes,” as Thomas puts it, and observe and come to very much better understand humanity. And how much better could God come to understand people than when God viewed us from the perspective of the least of these (see MT 25:44-46)? What better perspective could there be than that of an actual slave?

That perspective of “the least of these” would have additionally suited Jesus’s purpose as He fine-tuned His teachings in preparation for His active teaching phase. And God could easily have influenced Caesar Augustus’s mind to decree an emancipation at the age of thirty for those born into slavery, in plenty of time for Jesus to begin His planned teaching phase when He was thirty. That coincidence of ages seems simply too neat for it actually to have been a coincidence.

So I have come to accept the probability that Jesus did indeed begin and live most of His life when He was Jesus on earth as a slave. And He did so by His own strategic choice, to better serve God’s need to more perfectly understand God’s people. But I think it was also done by personal choice. I slapped my forehead when I realized that! The Jesus that I have been coming to ever much better know, the Jesus who loves each individual person to the point of obsession, could not have borne the thought of planning a lifetime to be lived among so many slaves unless He was going to be a slave Himself. Jesus has just lived the past seventeen hundred earth-years doing nothing but loving hundreds of millions of Christianity’s victims back into mental and spiritual health, even though He had no part in causing any of their pain himself!

I think I get it now. I do. Back in the spring of 2022, soon after I had first personally met Jesus, when I was still trying to get my mind around all the details of so closely knowing Him, I was asking my Thomas a lot of questions. Why did Jesus do this or that, or was this or that really true about Jesus? And the sense I got was that Thomas wasn’t always thrilled with these details about Jesus, either, but I just had to accept what Jesus did, and who He was. And I now realize that Jesus would have had to teach as a free Man, but until the public teaching phase of His life began, He would have actively wanted to have the same status as the very poorest people around Him. He would  have wanted to be a slave, since He lived where so many people were slaves. And if I had asked my Thomas why that would have been so, since I would certainly never have wanted to be a slave, myself! Thomas’s answer would have been the same answer that I always got when I asked him these questions about Jesus. He would have said simply, “That is because He is Jesus, and you are not.”

Praise to the Lord! O let all that is in me adore him!
All that has life and breath, come now with praises before him.
Let the Amen sound from his people again;
gladly forever adore him.
– Joachim Neander (1650-1680) & Catherine Winkworth, English translator (1829-1878), from “Praise to the Lord” (1680)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)