The ancient Mediterranean world was redolent with economic, national, racial, social and gender hierarchies, divisions, and inequalities – like many societies in the modern world. While the kinds of human rights that have developed in the West during the past two centuries, influenced by the Enlightenment, have roots in the ancient world, those rights were based not on secular conceptions of the human person that have flourished in modern liberal democratic regimes, but rather on the religious ideologies of various ancient ethnolinguistic groups. This chapter will focus on the evidence for the theoretical and practical conceptions of equality in early Christianity, with emphasis on equality in the three areas of nationality, social status, and gender, under the assumption that equality is a basic constituent of human rights everywhere.

Since ancient societies had an essentially religious orientation, conceptions of equality that have modern analogues were based on religious rather than secular or rational presuppositions. Monotheism (the belief that one God exists and no others), for example, appears to have functioned as a necessary though insufficient cause for the development of the conception of equality between major ethnolinguistic groups. In the post-exilic period, Judaism developed an ethnocentric form of ethical monotheism in which the God of Israel was identified with the one God of the cosmos with the implication that the gods worshiped by Gentiles were idols with no reality.