Roman Slave Wedding

I would look to Jewish traditions of the time if I were you as the new religion had not yet completely broke from its parent at that time.

Most Romans practiced a type of commonlaw marriage, often without wedding ceremonies. More formal marriages were aristocratic things and centered on property and inheritance concerns (hence the commonlaw version among people for whom this was less of a concern). Slaves definitely fall into this category, those for Christians it may well have been different than for polytheists.

I'm fairly sure that Roman slaves weren't allowed to get married. They could form an unofficial partnership and call themselves married, but I doubt they would be allowed to go through with a ceremony.

What they do in secret, however is up to you - but bear in mind how difficult it could potentially be to get away from their owners for long enough to get married. There's also the issue of the cost of a marriage (even just having a priest perform the service); since they are slaves, it's very unlikely that they'd have money unless it was stolen. Also bear in mind that either of the slaves getting married could be sold at any time, and therefore be forced to leave their husband/wife. A lot of this depends on the strictness/generosity of their master/mistress, but I think even the most lenient Roman citizen wouldn't want their slaves getting married, as it would give them (legal?) loyalties to someone other than the mistress/master themselves ...

Then again, my knowledge of Roman culture and law is hardly that great, and most of it comes from the BC-era, so things might have changed by 1st Century AD ...

"I don’t care. I am me."
~ Valerie (V for Vendetta)

While they would not have the formal, contractual marriage (which only the nobles had because it had to do with property rights), I would be surprised if Romans disallowed ceremonies for less formal marriages if wished. In modern slavery in America, "jumping the broom" was allowed by slave owners as an informal marriage -- kept the slaves happy & breeding and the owners didn't care about such alliances if it came to selling off one of the spouses later. A Christian wedding in Roman times, as a cult disapproved of in the empire -- might be a different story.

And, as with jumping the broom, other slaves might officiate. Remember, a formal priesthood comes later. In our earliest external description of Christians (i.e. not the NT, but a letter from a governor to the emperor), the two leaders of the Christian community ("deaconesses") were slave women. Here too, we see that city slaves did have some freedom of movement (indeed, they were sent on shopping errands, etc.).

And in fact slaves could have money (tips for services if they were loaned out by their masters, esp. if they were skilled such as scribes) and could save up to buy their freedom.

From this we do actually have testimony for slave family units as each person had to have their freedom bought separately, including children. If a freedman had a child by a still slave wife, the child would be considered property. Children born after both parents were free, however, were considered free. But, as I mentioned in my first post, many Romans below the aristocrats just had commonlaw marriages -- they just considered themselves married without ceremony. This could apply to the slave families as well thus the existence of slave family units doesn't speak to the presence or absence of a slave wedding ceremony.

Thank you glh1966 and Black Crystal Dragon for your help.