John MacArthur nails it on this one! Do a little research on the Greek δοῦλος and I think you’ll agree.
Posts Tagged master
Bonds
Doulos (δοῦλος) is not an ambiguous term. It suggests a very specific concept, which — while repugnant to our culture and our natural minds — should not be toned down or backed away from. It is the main Greek word that was used to describe the lowest abject bond slave — a person who was literally owned by a master who could legally force him to work without wages. In other words, a doulos (δοῦλος) was a person without standing or rights. According to Kittel’s definitive dictionary of New Testament expressions, words in the doulos (δοῦλος) group
serve either to describe the status of a slave or an attitude corresponding to that of a slave. . . . The meaning is so unequivocal and self-contained that it is superfluous to give examples of the individual terms or to trace the history of the group. Distinction from synonymous words and groups . . . is made possible by the fact that the emphasis here is always on “serving as a slave.” Hence we have a service which is not a matter of choice for the one who renders it, which he has to perform whether he likes or not, because he is subject as a slave to an alien will, to the will of his owner. [The term stresses] the slave’s dependence on his lord.
Unfortunately, readers of the English Bible have long been shielded from the full force of the word doulos (δοῦλος) because of an ages-old tendency among Bible translators to tone down the literal sense of the word — translating it as “servant,” or “bond servant” rather than “slave.” The practice goes back hundreds of years, even before the King James Version. The Geneva Bible, the main Bible of the Puritan era, consistently translated doulos (δοῦλος) as “servant” (though in the distinctive spelling of the time, it appears as “seruant”). Murray Harris surveyed twenty major translations of the New Testament in English and found only one, E. J. Goodspeed’s The New Testament: An American Translation (1923) — where doulos (δοῦλος) was consistently rendered “slave.” No doubt that reflects our society’s longstanding discomfort with the practice of slavery and the severe abuses that have always occurred in institutionalized versions of human slavery.