I am regularly stunned by the wide array of self-help and theology books available to the Christian community. Every copy of the latest from Wayne Grudem, John MacArthur, N.T. Wright, R.C. Sproul, or a dusty reprint of a C.S. Lewis or Dietrich Bonhoeffer indicate a deeply-felt need for the Bible to have conclusive answers to many modern-day questions.

It is distressing to see how frequently seekers return to the apologetic theological and scholarly sources for those answers, whose authors remain purposely confined to live within their denominational walls. Readers must settle for book upon book filled with philosophical conclusions that feel good but explain little, offering only a temporary satisfaction. To seriously consider the underlying issue that prompts the need for these explanatory books would require apologists to highlight a growing problem with the Bible’s outdated views on modern life.

Shouldn’t it concern the reader that a Bible from a timeless deity feels so “of its time?” Don’t these shelves laden with contradicting explanations for the various views put forth in the Christian scriptures worry the reader that perhaps none of these authors have any good evidence for what they claim? And why are Christians even still having to ask these questions? Why has nothing been settled? If the Bible is a living testimony to an eternal deity, then why does it read like such an historical document?

There is a yearning for the broader knowledge than what is provided within the confines of one’s denomination, but most Christians don’t know how to sate that hunger. There are a multitude of superior sources not tied to religious dogma that offer actual answers to many of the questions average Christians have asked their religious leaders for centuries. But these sources are skeptical of the claims of Christianity; these sources sometimes come from those denominations deemed heretical, or from outside the halls of religion. How can a Christian read these sources without feeling like they’ve betrayed their heritage?

I feel that the answer is clear: the Christian Bible clearly needs an update. Christians desperately require a new New Testament, another addition that conclusively provides the answers sought and debated for centuries. The average pew-sitting Christian needs a new addition to their sacred texts, a collection of the answers the more liberal, critical, or secular world have offered students for decades but have remained out of reach of the conservative evangelical Christian community.

When they were wrong, I could never keep quiet
I’d search for the truth and had faith that I’d find it

If It’s Not God — Maddie Zahm

I imagine that if I were to have this sort of conversation face-to-face, the first rebuttal I would hear is that I am not to add anything to the text of the Christian Bible, based on a passage from its last book, Revelation: “I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy contained in this book: If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book”. (Revelation 22:18, NET Bible) Which is a grim warning, if it were to apply to every bit of text in the Bible or any future additions to the corpus; however, the text to which it refers is merely the text of the book you were already reading: the book of Revelation. The practice of adding to or subtracting from the canon of the Bible was well-practiced throughout its creation.

If God inspired certain books in the decades after Jesus died, how do I know that the later church fathers chose the right books to be included in the Bible? I could accept it on faith—surely God would not allow noninspired books in the canon of Scripture. But as I engaged in more historical study of the early Christian movement, I began to realize that there were lots of Christians in lots of places who fully believed that other books were to be accepted as Scripture; conversely, some of the books that eventually made it into the canon were rejected by church leaders in different parts of the church, sometimes for centuries.

In some parts of the church, the Apocalypse of John (the book of Revelation) was flat out rejected as containing false teaching, whereas the Apocalypse of Peter, which eventually did not make it in, was accepted. There were some Christians who accepted the Gospel of Peter and some who rejected the Gospel of John. There were some Christians who accepted a truncated version of the Gospel of Luke (without its first two chapters), and others who accepted the now noncanonical Gospel of Thomas. Some Christians rejected the three Pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, which eventually made it in, and others accepted the Epistle of Barnabas, which did not.

If God was making sure that his church would have the inspired books of Scripture, and only those books, why were there such heated debates and disagreements that took place over three hundred years? Why didn’t God just make sure that these debates lasted weeks, with assured results, rather than centuries?

Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible — Bart D. Ehrman

Every person who has at least at some point believed the text of the Bible to contain spiritual truth will likely share with you one or more of their own “struggles” they’ve had with the implications of or the direct reading of the text. Some may bring up the rather important issues of the “problem of evil” or “divine hiddenness” but the one I wish to bring up today is the matter of slavery within the text of the Christian Bible. This subject has been a problem for the western world for centuries, and time hasn’t been especially on the side of the Biblical texts.

For generations the Bible has been behind the curve of progress against the practice of slavery. Plenty of Christians have been able to defend abolition using the Bible, but not exactly because of the Bible. Christianity seems to have fostered thinkers who sought to ease the suffering of others, but the Bible was only part of the puzzle of philosophy and syncretism that brought about cultural change.¹ There were plenty of Christians who saw the slavery plainly endorsed in the Bible and saw no sin in keeping people as property. This lack of clarity causes some real problems for modern-day Christianity, whose audience and critics seek plainly-spoken terms for morality.

It’s not as if the entirety of the Bible is unclear. Should one wear mixed fabrics? There’s a definite rule for that. Should one work on a Saturday? There’s a commandment about that. Keeping people as property is where things suddenly need study — where apologists claim one needs to “dig deep” to understand. Why is speaking out against slavery so vague in the Bible? Why has it taken thousands of years for Christians to understand that God is against the repugnant practice of slavery, and why has it happened no faster than the cultural views outside of Christianity?

The Incrementalism Ain’t Incrementalizing

The Final Main apologetic claim, that the Bible is incrementally trying to bring Israel and Christianity to an understanding of the fundamental evils of silvery, is rooted in the idea that God tolerated slavery as a compromise because Israel was too deeply embedded within societies that relied on it. According to this line of argumentation, it would be too jarring a change for them to quit cold turkey, and it would put them at a disadvantage amidst the empires around them. God wouldn’t want to interfere too directly anyway. This argument entirely overlooks that God is represented throughout the Bible as miraculously interfering in human affairs to overthrow and overturn entire social systems on multiple occasions without ever hesitating. Additionally, any incremental change that is identifiable within the Bible has entirely and exclusively to do with how well or poorly enslaved peoples are treated, not with the fundamental morality of immorality of the system of enslavement itself. That system is never questioned in any way, shape, or form whatsoever.

…

The history of slavery between second-century CE Christianity and the widespread abolishment of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries CE also shows no consistent or curated trajectory toward justice. The rhetoric of the Bible certainly doesn’t achieve any such progressive incrementalism. While there are sporadic and notable exceptions beginning from the earliest generations of Christians, the Bible was leveraged overwhelmingly by Christian readers to defend the institution of slavery, and the reason is that the Bible repeatedly endorses that institution. In my opinion, the consensus view regarding the morality of slavery was overturned primarily because of (1) advocacy on the part of enslaved people themselves and abolitionists who supported them—frequently via liberationist renegotiations of the biblical texts—and (2) the influence of Enlightenment rationalism and the philosophical arguments it developed for universal human rights. If one wants to argue that these two processes were orchestrated by God, that’s one thing—and a dogmatic one at that—but to argue they’re baked into the biblical texts or were an inevitable outcome of what’s in the Bible is just pure and utter nonsense.

Conclusion

The modern apologetic arguments that God didn’t get it wrong on slavery in the Bible rests on three main rhetorical pillars: (1) the Hebrew Bible’s approach to slavery was more merciful and just than those of the nations around Israel, (2) the Bible prohibits the slave trade, and (3) God incrementally moved first Israel and then Christianity toward acknowledgement of the fundamental evils of buying, selling, and inheriting other human beings. All three of these pillars are either not clearly supported by the data or are flatly precluded by it.

There’s not a single syllable of the Bible that condemns or disapproves of the practice of slavery itself. At best, the Bible encourages (in inconsistent ways) the fair and just treatment of enslaved people, whatever that might have meant for ancient Israel, early Judaism, or early Christianity. That encouragement also only ever existed as rhetoric that doesn’t seem to have been widely known, much less enforced, until around the second century BCE. If there is any incremental change at all, it is in the New Testament’s expansion of the scope of that encouragement from the enslaved Israelite to any and all enslaved peoples. Whether or not this actually resulted in discernibly better treatment of enslaved peoples within early Christianity is not clear. What is clear is that the Bible absolutely nowhere says that slavery is wrong.

The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues — Dan McClellan

It’s as if those who view the Bible as infallible or at least historically accurate simultaneously see the Bible [as just a series of fables! There is no consideration for the huge amount of suffering portrayed on its pages. Entire generations were doomed to unknowingly perpetuate immoral behavior that God was quietly condemning just so modern-day Americans could later feel sanctified? Doesn’t it seem like nonsense to allow for a deeply awful pattern of behavior to continue when something could have been done to dissuade its continued existence? What of all those people who have suffered under the hands of those who used their Biblical authority to inflict that pain? Why did God ignore this misinterpretation of the Bible for millennia? These stories are supposed to be about real people — real people who suffered their entire lives under a lie that slavery was good. Families were to suffer for generations to be an object lesson for someone else, all to secretly point toward a conclusion that could’ve just been a commandment!

Is it deliver-iver-iverance?
If you can never, never change?
Is it deliver-iver-iverance?
If you hurt me in exchange?

Deliverance — CHVRCHES

Maybe you, dear reader, have never faced these moral challenges in your life. Maybe you’ve never been religious, or you’re from a denomination that long-ago dealt with these issues and found satisfactory answers. I come from a fundamentalist Evangelical background, and that created some heavy issues for me to manage. My denomination required the Bible to be perfect and timeless, a physical and limited representation of an all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present deity. To doubt any part of it was to doubt the entirety of it, so one could not consider the lack of a defined standpoint against slavery as anything but an intentional subtlety. I couldn’t find a way to mesh the love and empathy I thought Jesus prescribed with the punitive laws found elsewhere in the Bible without feeling uncomfortable with my conclusions. Some within the denomination might say that I was being influenced by worldviews outside of Christianity and that I needed to become more Biblically-minded, but I couldn’t see the Christlike love in the direction that advice would take me.

“Inspired” Slavery

Perhaps the bible was inspired upon the subject of human slavery. Is there, in the civilized world, today, a clergyman who believes in the divinity of slavery? Does the bible teach man to enslave his brother? If it does, is it not blasphemous to say that it is inspired of God? If you find the institution of slavery upheld in a book said to have been written by God, what would you expect to find in a book inspired by the devil? Would you expect to find that book in favor of liberty? Modern christians, ashamed of the God of the Old Testament, endeavor now to show that slavery was neither commanded nor opposed by Jehovah. Nothing can be plainer than the following passages from the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus. “Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession, they shall be your bond-men forever. Both thy bond-men, and thy bond-maids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bond-men, and bond-maids.”

Can we believe in this, the Nineteenth Century, that these infamous passages were inspired by God? that God approved not only of human slavery, but instructed his chosen people to buy the women, children and babes of the heathen round about them? If it was right for the Hebrews to buy, it was also right for the heathen to sell. This God, by commanding the Hebrews to buy, approved of the selling of sons and daughters. The Canaanite who, tempted by gold, lured by avarice, sold from the arms of his wife the dimpled babe, simply made it possible for the Hebrews to obey the orders of their God. If God is the author of the bible, the reading of these passages ought to cover his cheeks with shame. I ask the christian world to-day, was it right for the heathen to sell their children? Was it right for God not only to uphold, but to command the infamous traffic in human flesh? Could the most revengeful fiend, the most malicious vagrant in the gloom of hell, sink to a lower moral depth than this?

According to this God, his chosen people were not only commanded to buy of the heathen round about them, but were also permitted to buy each other for a term of years. The law governing the purchase of Jews is laid down in the twenty-first chapter of Exodus. “If thou buy a Hebrew servant, six years shall he serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing. If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself: if he were married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master have given him a wife, and she have borne him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself. And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: Then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door-post: and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl: and he shall serve him forever.”

Do you believe that God was the author of this infamous law? Do you believe that the loving father of us all, turned the dimpled arms of babes into manacles of iron? Do you believe that he baited the dungeon of servitude with wife and child? Is it possible to love a God who would make such laws? Is it possible not to hate and despise him?

The heathen are not spoken of as human beings. Their rights are never mentioned. They were the rightful food of the sword, and their bodies were made for stripes and chains.

In the same chapter of the same inspired book, we are told that, “if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he dies under his hand, he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished, for he is his money.”

Must we believe that God called some of his children the money of others? Can we believe that God made lashes upon the naked back, a legal tender for labor performed? Must we regard the auction block as an altar? Were blood hounds apostles? Was the slave-pen a temple? Were the stealers and whippers of babes and women the justified children of God?

It is now contended that while the Old Testament is touched with the barbarism of its time, that the New Testament is morally perfect, and that on its pages can be found no blot or stain. As a matter of fact, the New Testament is more decidedly in favor of human slavery than the old.

Some Mistakes of Moses — Robert Green Ingersoll

As I read through the text of the Old and New Testaments, I began to question whether my view of its infallibility and timelessness seemed logical in light of how rooted in time the text read. Did the Jewish and Christian God influence or outright control writers to record the words of the Bible, or was it something else far more human? I realized it was far more likely that an ancient civilization would want to write their current-day morality into the pages of their religious texts; and, in an effort to validate their way of life and build a national mythology supporting it, to then claim deistic blessing of these newly-penned words. Once I considered more possibilities like these that tended to go unpermitted in theological circles, I began to see a clearer picture of what likely happened thousands of years ago — and what continued to happen throughout the preservation of these texts.

Reading the Bible will never be quite the same. Aware of the Bible’s extraordinary history and its resulting complexity, we can—and probably must—read the book with a new depth of appreciation. We can read a page of the Bible and know that three or even four persons, all artists, all writing from their own experience, in their own historical moments, separated by centuries, contributed to composing that page. And, at the same time, we can read the page as it is, to enjoy the story, to learn from it, to find out how others interpreted it over millennia.

Who Wrote the Bible? — Richard Elliot Friedman

Letting go of the need for Biblical inerrancy (in the sense that it was perfect and timeless) was certainly a bit scary for me, but it was also ultimately freeing. Instead of being bound to hold to standards that I found hateful, I was free to interpret the text for myself and not be defined by traditions that felt out of touch. Because I could see how the flaws in the inerrancy argument caused people to contort their arguments into ever-deepening levels of silliness: for instance, to claim that the original documents were perfect but were lost to time, with only the imperfect scribal copies remaining. Why all this effort to hold to a literary standard that plenty of other denominations never felt necessary to keep?

As the years went by and I continued to study the text of the New Testament, I gradually became less judgmental toward the scribes who changed the scriptures they copied. Early on, I suppose I was a bit surprised, maybe even scandalized, by the number of changes these anonymous copyists of the text had made in the process of transcription, as they altered the words of the texts, putting the text in their own words rather than the words of the original authors. But I softened my view of these transcribers of the texts as I (slowly) came to realize that what they were doing with the texts was not all that different from what each of us does every time we read a text.

For the more I studied, the more I saw that reading a text necessarily involves interpreting a text. I suppose when I started by studies I had a rather unsophisticated view of reading: that the point of reading a text is simply to let the text “speak for itself,” to uncover the meaning inherent in its words. The reality, I came to see, is that meaning is not inherent and texts do not speak for themselves. If texts could speak for themselves, then everyone honestly and openly reading a text would agree on what the text says. But interpretations of texts abound, and people in fact do not agree on what the texts mean. This is obviously true of the texts of scripture: simply look at the hundreds, or even thousands, of ways people interpret the book of Revelation, or consider all the different Christian denominations, filled with intelligent and well-meaning people who base their views of how the church should be organized and function on the Bible, yet all of them coming to radically different conclusions (Baptists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Appalachian snake-handlers, Greek Orthodox, and on and on).

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why — Bart Ehrman

Maybe this is all old news. I feel like I tend to be the last to figure out things like this. I thought I was smart, but I started to feel as if I had long been just told I was smart. It wasn’t until I began to think for myself that I felt like I started learning. I didn’t know how much had been kept from me, fenced off to protect me from dangerous thoughts. There was so much out there, and I wasn’t alone in seeking answers.

Opposition to the critical examination of the Bible has also diminished among Protestants. The Bible has come to be studied and taught by critical scholars, in leading Protestant institutions of Europe and Great Britain. In the United States as well, critical scholars teach at major Protestant institutions such as Harvard Divinity School, Yale Divinity School, Princeton Theological Seminary, Union Theological Seminary, and a great many others.

Critical examination of the text and its authors also has become accepted at leading Jewish institutions, particularly Hebrew Union College, which is the Reform rabbinical school, and the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative rabbinical school. It is also taught at major universities around the world.

Until the past generation there were orthodox Christian and Jewish scholas who contested the Documentary Hypothesis in scholarly circles. At present, however, there is hardly a biblical scholar in the world actively working on the problem who would claim that the Five Books of Moses were written by Moses—or by any one person.

Scholars argue about the number of different authors who wrote any given biblical book. They argue about when the various documents were written and about whether a particular verse belongs to this or that document. They express varying degrees of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the usefulness of the hypothesis for literary or historical purposes. But the hypothesis itself continues to be the starting point of research, no serious student of the Bible can fail to study it, and no other explanation of the evidence has come close to challenging it.

Who Wrote the Bible? — Richard Elliot Friedman

Free to consider new ideas about the Bible and Christianity, I started to investigate the authors, the history, the surrounding culture, the morality of the neighboring nations — anything I could find that was previously unreachable to me. Truth should be able to stand up to scrutiny and criticism, and I was desperate to find that truth. I felt as if that was a tenet so indoctrinated in me that now, truly free to seek it, I was insatiable. But finding that truth suddenly seemed far more complicated, because I was going to have to go find it on my own.

This act of choice—which the term heresy originally meant—leads us back to the problem that orthodoxy was invented to solve: How can we tell truth from lies? What is genuine, and thus connects us with one another and with reality, and what is shallow, self-serving, or evil? Anyone who has seen foolishness, sentimentality, delusion, and murderous rage disguised as God’s truth knows that there is no easy answer to the problem that the ancients called discernment of spirits. Orthodoxy tends to distrust our capacity to make such discriminations and insists on making them for us. Given the notorious human capacity for self-deception, we can, to an extent, thank the church for this. Many of us, wishing to be spared hard work, gladly accept what tradition teaches.

But the fact that we have no simple answer does not mean that we can evade the question. We have also seen the hazards—even terrible harm—that sometimes result from unquestioning acceptance of religious authority. Most of us, sooner or later, find that, at critical points in our lives, we must strike out on our own to make a path where none exists. What I have come to love in the wealth and diversity of our religious traditions—and the communities that sustain them—is that they offer the testimony of innumerable people to spiritual discovery. Thus they encourage those who endeavor, in Jesus’ words, to “seek, and you shall find.”

Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas — Elaine Pagels

The more I learned, the more I understood why pastors keep so much of this information hidden. The complexity it brings to the conversation is disruptive to the order sought after in denominations. They’ve split for less. The discordant opinions shared within the Bible displayed the growing schisms within the first generation of followers. I think many Christians see doctrine as a settled thing, but it has always been fluid.

It’s been said by many an apologist that the endorsing of slavery in the Old Testament was just a concession by God for humans not yet capable of something better. As the millennia passed, Jews and then Christians did mature and become capable of handling the far more difficult mindset of seeing slavery as morally wrong, so the references to the practice of slavery in the Old Testament should be seen as outdated descriptions of events and not prescriptive commands for modern-day behavior. But Jesus said that not one bit of the Law would pass away.² Jesus was Jewish; Jesus endorsed and followed the whole Law. All this text was important to the Jewish community, but Christians changed the interpretation and crossed out a bunch of it. This process doesn’t seem to bother the average Christian or apologist; in the end it makes things easier to have a map of what to ignore.

So then what if Christians were to do the same to the New Testament? If Jews had progressed enough to handle the arrival of Jesus in only about 400 years, what of the Christians raised on the New Testament? It’s been 2,000 years since those texts were written. Has any progress been made? What if Christianity were to make a new New Testament? It would be incredibly difficult, but how rewarding would it be to give future generations a solid foundation upon which to progress?

But as we have seen, within a century of Jesus’ death, some of his most loyal followers had determined to exclude a wide range of Christian sources, to say nothing of borrowing from other religious traditions, although, as we have also seen, this often happened. But why, and in what circumstances, did these early church leaders believe that this was necessary for the movement to survive? And why did those who proclaimed Jesus the “only begotten son of God,” as the Gospel of John declares, dominate later tradition, while other Christian visions, like that of Thomas, which encourages disciples to recognize themselves, as well as Jesus, as “children of God,” were suppressed?

Traditionally, Christian theologians have declared that “the Holy Spirit guides the church into all truth”—a statement often taken to mean that what has survived must be right. Some historians of religion have rationalized this conviction by implying that in Christian history, as in the history of science, weak, false ideas die off early, while the strong and valid ones survive.

…

But how are visions received, and which are divinely inspired? Practically speaking, who is to judge? This central—and perplexing—question is what Christians since ancient times have called the problem of discerning spirits: how to tell which apparent inspirations come from God, which from the power of evil, and which from an overheated imagination. Although most people at the time—Jews, pagans, and Christians alike-assumed that the divine reveals itself in dreams, many people then, as now, recognized that dreams may also express only wishes and hopes, and that some may lead to fatal delusions. We have seen that Irenaeus recognized God’s power in certain prophets, healers, and teachers, perhaps especially in those whose teaching agreed with what many Christians accepted in common. In others, however, he saw Satan at work—for example, in the case of Marcus, whom he called “Satan’s apostle” and accused of inventing visions in order to deceive his followers and to exploit them for sexual favors and money.

Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas — Elaine Pagels

I certainly think the message of the New Testament is a great progression of ethics and a better framework for how one could relate to a deity, but it does have its share of problems. What about the references to slavery in the New Testament? Oh, there’s no endorsement of slavery to be found? Uh oh, wrongo-bongo.

“Neither Slave nor Free” in Galatians 3:28

The next verse that is cited in this regard is Galatians 3:28, where Paul writes, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus”.

New Testament Scholar Hans Dieter Betz summarizes how this verse could be understood with respect to slavery:

”Taken alone the statement can be understood in two ways: (a) as a declaration of the abolishment of the social institution of slavery, or (b) as a declaration of the irrelevancy of that institution, which would include the possibility of its retainment.”

If Betz is correct, then there are two ways of interpreting the phrase “neither slave nor free”:

1. abolishing the institution of slavery; or
2. showing it to be irrelevant.

If the former position is taken, then one could argue that Jesus came to do away with the social institution of slavery. However, Betz explains why scholars hold to the latter position: ”The overwhelming evidence in early and later Christianity seems to recommend only the second option viable, a view taken by most commentators” (emphasis mine).

That Galatians 3:28 is not intended to do away with the social institution of slavery is clear for several reasons. First, the other two statements in the verse — “neither Jew nor Gentile” and (especially) “neither male nor female” — can hardly be understood as doing away with such distinctions. Whatever one would argue concerning the attitude of the New Testament writers on the role and status of women (another topic entirely), it would be difficult to maintain that passages like 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 would allow the social distinction between men and women to be ignored.

The point of Galatians 3:28, it would seem, is to express the unity that members of the “Body of Christ” share by being “in Christ”. In his 1995 commentary on the NIV, New Testament professor Scott MacKnight writes, “To be ‘in Christ’ is to be in spiritual fellowship with him through God’s Spirit. This is one way of defining what a Christian is: one who is ‘in Christ’”. Although believers are now all united and equal in the eyes of God — having been baptized into Christ — this does not negate the reality of social and role distinctions between members of the referenced social groups, including slaves.

Avalos concludes:

Gal. 3.28 was clearly meant solely to establish the reckoning of believers as Abraham’s seed regardless of their gender, ethnicity, or slave status. Other New Testament authors certainly did not see this passage as incompatible with having Christian slaves or ordering Christian slaves to serve their slavemasters (Eph. 5.24 or 6.5).

Does the Old Testament Endorse Slavery? — Joshua Bowen

Slavery and Christianity were not enemies and remained closely connected for generations. I contend that the effects of the Bible not explicitly condemning slavery remain with Christian churches throughout the United States to this day, as many continue to refuse to see some people as worthy of love and equality.

So then what if it was possible for Christians to change that? What if slavery was explicitly condemned by Scripture? Imagine if it was possible for Christians to be able to simply point to even one verse that just plainly stated that slavery was considered a sin?

Colossians and Ephesians

In Galatians 3:28, Paul quotes a primitive baptismal formula: for those in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, not male and female. Within a few decades, however, Christians articulated moral codes that specified distinctive roles for slaves and for slaveholders, for husbands and wives. Today, we perceive the baptismal formula and the household codes to be contradictory. Whether ancient Christians also sensed this opposition is unclear. Colossians 3:11 repeats a version of the baptismal formula: “There is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all in all!” Along with this ringing declaration of the dissolution of barriers between slave and free, Colossians also includes a household code, which devotes an unusual amount of attention to expectations for the comportment of slaves-more attention than wives, husbands, fathers, children, or indeed slaveholders receive. The letter writer urges slaves to be obedient and wholehearted in their service to their owners (3:22–25). The abolition of cultic distinctions between slaves and slaveholders proclaimed just a few verses earlier does not transform the obligations nor relations of members of the same Christian household.

Although Colossians identifies Paul along with his coworker Timothy as its author, scholars generally (but not unanimously) dispute Paul’s personal authorship of the letter. Colossians is usually identified as the earliest of the deutero-Pauline epistles, letters written under the mantle of Paul’s apostolic authority by his associates and/or successors. In the seven authentic Pauline letters, Paul alludes in various places to the presence of both slaves and slaveholders in the Christian congregation. He hints at how slaves and slaveholders should regard one another, particularly in his letter to Philemon. However, the letters do not establish the kind of institutionalized code of behavior that we find in the deutero-Pauline letters, which prescribe behavior appropriate for those who play particular roles within Greco-Roman households: husbands and wives, fathers and children, slaveholders and slaves.

Obedience, humility, industriousness, patience, self-effacement-the behavior and virtues prescribed for slaves in the early Christian household codes easily fall within Nietzsche’s rubric of slave morality. Paul himself speaks only obliquely of praiseworthy behavior for slaveholders, for example, instructing Philemon to regard Onesimus as a brother. I have argued in chapter three that Paul’s highly personal relations with the two men, Philemon and Onesimus, dictated the content and style of his rhetorical intervention in the relationship between them. His words do not dictate how slaveholders’ entry into the Christian community should generally affect their treatment of household slaves. Even those who attempt to draw wide ranging conclusions from Philemon about norms for slaveholder behavior would have to concede that the letter does not comment on expectations or standards for the behavior of Christian slaveholders toward non-Christian slaves. Moreover, nowhere in the authentic letters does Paul attempt to establish norms of behavior for slaves.

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How did first-century slaveholders understand instructions to treat slaves justly and fairy? Did many slaveholders in the Roman Empire perceive themselves to be unjust and unfair? Did the author of Colossians intend anything different than any other Greco Roman moralist would intend with these words? Carolyn Osiek and David Balch argue that, although all the New Testament haustafeln accepted slavery as an institution, “abusive Christian owners were not acceptable.” Such a formulation begs the question. The range of behaviors that we would consider abusive today is wider than the range of behaviors considered abusive in the first century. For example, I would consider one person beating another to be abusive, regardless of provocation. Precisely in question is whether first- or second-century Christians would consider slaveholders abusive if they whipped slaves who had neglected their duties or performed those duties beneath a required standard. If there were distinctive, countercultural norms for the comportment of Christian slaveholders, I find it surprising that writers in the first or second generation of the church did not reinforce those norms whenever they addressed slaveholders. Roman slaveholders considered the disciplining of slave bodies a standard and even necessary dimension of household management. Did the author of Colossians consider corporal punishment within the parameters of just and fair behavior? Without specification of what he meant by “just and fair” conduct, his readers would have resorted to the codes of behavior with which they had lived all their lives.

The household code in Ephesians is adapted from the household code in Colossians. The variation in instructions to slaves and slaveholders is minimal. Andrew Lincoln and A. J. M. Wedderburn conclude that the Ephesians household code “accommodates to and modifies the conventions of the Greco-Roman patriarchal household.” Specifically, they claim that the love patriarchalism of the Christian household codes transforms the hierarchical relationships within households. Many Greco-Roman slaveholders understood the benefits of treating slaves fairly in order to maintain the stability of the household. As we have seen, for example, Seneca directed his advice to slaveholders toward the goal of stabilizing relations with household slaves through benign treatment. In turn, many Greco-Roman slaves understood that compliance with their owners’ demands was a safer course of action than outright defiance. Perhaps the most striking modification of wider cultural values in the haustafeln is the articulation of a theological basis for the submission of slaves to slaveholders. The author of Ephesians advises, “Slaves, obey your masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.” Throughout the Empire, slaves understood that obedience and hard work might promote their own interests. With their eyes cast deferentially down, slaves hoped that their faithful execution of duties might spare them from the sting of the whip or aid them in securing their own manumission or the manumission of others they loved. Colossians and Ephesians disparage such motivation for servile cooperation, advocating instead that slaves submit their bodies and souls to their masters because such behavior is pleasing to God.

Slavery in Early Christianity — Jennifer A. Glancy

The problem Christianity faces now is that new “revelations” like those claimed by Paul, generally the only way for new texts to be added to the canon, are no longer in vogue. Modern-day attempts spin off new religions or new denominations, but the core Christian community remains moored in its history with a text largely sealed from edits.

Some denominations have attempted to resolve the situation of stale data by using the Holy Spirit of the Trinitarian view of God as a source of new information and understanding about the Bible. As with most apologetic responses to criticism, the consequence of a simple answer reveals several new and potentially more alarming questions. Why would the Holy Spirit be incredibly open to revealing new information in popular or trendy topics but profoundly distant and uninvolved in other more important issues in the Christian community? Why is theology so frequently indistinguishable from opinion, as if no new information came from without the mind of the apologist? This is too large a subject to discuss in this post; perhaps one day I will go into further detail.

I don’t actually think Christianity will ever add any more books to its library of Scripture; signs and miracles seem to wither under the scrutiny of a camera, and just making claims merely places one on The New York Times bestseller list. But so much could be solved if people could come to an agreement to add something new, something official to the Bible that answered just a little more.

Christianity could become known again for the thing its history has claimed it was always intended to accomplish: to free people from bondage.

Race and Fear (June 1956) — William Faulkner

Soon now all of us—not just Southerners nor even just Americans, but all people who are still free and want to remain so—are going to have to make a choice, lest the next (and last) confrontation we face will be, not Communists against anti-Communists, but simply the remaining handful of white people against the massed myriads of all the people on earth who are not white. We will have to choose not between color nor race nor religion nor between East and West either, but simply between being slaves and being free. And we will have to choose completely and for good; the time is already past now when we can choose a little of each, a little of both. We can choose a state of slavedom, and if we are powerful enough to be among the top two or three or ten, we can have a certain amount of license—until someone more powerful rises and has us machine-gunned against a cellar wall.

But we cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it; our freedom must be buttressed by a homogeny equally and unchallengeably free, no matter what color they are, so that all the other inimical forces everywhere—systems political or religious or racial or national—will not just respect us because we practice freedom, they will fear us because we do.

Voices in Black & White: Writings on Race in America from Harper’s Magazine — Harper’s Magazine

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