“There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; since you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Galatians 3:28 · CSB
In the year 203, in Carthage, a handful of young Christians were arrested — among them Vibia Perpetua, a well-born young mother still nursing her infant son, and Felicity, a slave who was eight months pregnant.
We know their story in unusual detail because Perpetua wrote part of it herself, in prison, awaiting death. Her diary is the oldest surviving piece of writing we have from a Christian woman — a frightened young mother wrestling with her father's pleading, her baby, her visions, and her resolve.
Her father begged her again and again to recant — to think of the child, to think of him. She loved him and would not do it. Felicity, meanwhile, prayed to deliver early so she would not be held back from martyrdom with her companions; her daughter was born in prison and taken in by a Christian woman.
On the day of the games, mistress and slave walked into the arena together. Roman society was built on the gulf between their stations. The church had quietly erased it: they died as sisters, with the same hope, holding on to the same Lord.
The gospel does its most radical work not by abolishing an empire from the outside but by making a noblewoman and her slave into sisters who die holding hands. Whatever the world uses to rank you — above or below — the Name you carry is the only measure that will survive the arena.
Rank meant nothing; the Name they carried meant everything.
A note on sources
- Documented: the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, which contains what is widely regarded as Perpetua's own prison diary (early 3rd century).