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Capitolo № 07 · 50 CE – present

A Frankenstein Religion

An assembled scripture, a stitched-together godhead, and not one line that forbids slavery.

Contenuto in inglese; traduzione in preparazione.
Select Parts of the Holy Bible, 1807JerusalemJudaean apocalyptic: the frameAlexandriaPhilo and the Logos: the metaphysicsNicaeaOusia, hypostasis, homoousiosRomeThe Holy Office, 1866CanterburyAnselm, 1098 — the cross as a feudal debtBaselErasmus, 1516LondonThe Slave Bible printed, 1807GermantownThe Quaker protest, 1688British West IndiesWhere the edited book was delivered2 500 kmN
Atlante Dove è accaduto. A composite object, mapped by where its parts were fitted. The apocalyptic frame comes from Judaea, the metaphysics from Alexandria, the doctrine of God from two councils held under imperial supervision, the theory of the cross from a feudal archbishop at Canterbury, and the clearest trinitarian sentence in the Bible from a printing house in Basel. The arrow west is what the assembly was eventually used for: a Bible edited in London in 1807 for the enslaved of the British West Indies, with Exodus cut out and "slaves, obey your earthly masters" left in.
Cronologia

Quando è accaduto

  1. c. 50–60 Paul’s letters And, in the generation after him, the household codes inserted in his name.
  2. 325 Nicaea supplies the doctrine of God In Greek philosophical vocabulary. The word "Trinity" is not in the Bible.
  3. c. 340 The Council of Gangra Anathema on anyone who teaches a slave to withdraw from his master’s service.
  4. c. 426 Augustine, City of God XIX.15 Slavery unnatural, but God’s just arrangement in a fallen world. Serve faithfully.
  5. 1098 Anselm, Cur Deus Homo The crucifixion as satisfaction of an infinite debt of honour owed to an offended lord.
  6. 1516 Erasmus and the Johannine comma A verse in no Greek manuscript before the fourteenth century enters the printed Bible.
  7. 1688 The Germantown protest Four Quakers put the objection in writing. It takes another century and a half.
  8. 1807 The Slave Bible Nine-tenths of the Old Testament cut. Exodus gone. Ephesians 6:5 kept.
  9. 20 June 1866 The Holy Office on slavery Not at all contrary to the natural and divine law, a year after Appomattox.
  10. 1854 and 1950 The Immaculate Conception, then the Assumption The object is still being assembled inside living memory.
The assembly, and the use. The dates on the left are when each component was fitted; the ones clustered at the right are what the finished object was doing in the Atlantic. Note the Holy Office instruction of 1866, issued after the American Civil War, holding that slavery in its essential nature is not at all contrary to divine law.

I termini evidenziati hanno una breve definizione: passa il mouse o tocca su schermo tattile.

"Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling."

— Ephesians 6:5. Fourteen centuries later, this verse was still in the Bible printed for slaves in the British West Indies. The book of Exodus was not.

This chapter makes two claims. The first is that Christianity is a composite object, assembled over centuries out of incompatible materials, and that the seams are visible to anyone who looks. The second is the one that matters for the rest of this chronicle: nowhere in the Christian scriptures is slavery prohibited: not in the law, not in the prophets, not in the sayings of Jesus, not in the letters of Paul, not in any canon of any church at any point before abolition was won by other means.

The first claim is interesting. The second is load-bearing. Chapters 8, 9, 10 and 11 describe an operation that required the moral cooperation of a religion, and got it, not by distorting the text, but by reading it accurately.

The seams

Take the assembled object apart and the components are datable, and they come from places that did not agree with each other.

Judaean supplies the frame: one God, a coming judgement, a vindication of the oppressed, resurrection of the body. This is the layer chapters 2 and 3 described, and it is the oldest.

Greek philosophy supplies the metaphysics, and it does not fit the frame. The opening of John identifies Christ with the , a term out of Stoic and Hellenistic-Jewish thought; Philo of Alexandria had been using it for decades. The immortal, immaterial soul that goes to heaven at death is Platonic; the Hebrew Bible's picture is , a shadowy common destination, and the New Testament's is bodily resurrection at the end of the age. Most Christians today hold, simultaneously and without noticing, a Greek doctrine of the soul and a Jewish doctrine of resurrection, which are two different answers to the same question.1

The fourth-century councils supply the doctrine of God. The word "Trinity" appears nowhere in the Bible. Its technical vocabulary (ousia, hypostasis, ) is Greek philosophical terminology, hammered out at Nicaea and Constantinople under imperial supervision, as chapter 5 described. The clearest trinitarian sentence in the Bible, at 1 John 5:7, is a medieval forgery that entered the printed text through Erasmus.

Medieval feudalism supplies the theory of the that most Western Christians assume is simply what the cross means. Anselm's Cur Deus Homo (1098) explains it as of an infinite debt of honour owed to an offended lord, an argument that reads exactly like what it is, a feudal transaction, written by an archbishop in a society organised around honour, vassalage and compensation. It is not the only Christian theory of atonement and it is not the oldest, but it took over the West.2

Later councils and popes keep adding. Purgatory is formalised in the thirteenth century. The Immaculate Conception becomes required belief for Catholics in 1854, the Assumption in 1950. Hell as a place of eternal conscious torment with fire and demons owes far more to the Apocalypse of Peter, medieval visionary literature and Dante than to the Gospels, where "" is a rubbish-burning valley outside Jerusalem used as a figure of destruction.3

The joins that were never sanded down

The New Testament preserves its contradictions in plain sight because the was assembled from documents nobody was allowed to rewrite once they were authoritative: chapter 6's process, with its costs.

  • Two nativities that cannot both be true. Matthew has the family living in Bethlehem, a star, magi, Herod's massacre, and a flight to Egypt; Herod died in 4 BCE. Luke has the family living in Nazareth, travelling for a census (the census of Quirinius, which took place in 6 CE, at least ten years later), and going home afterwards, with no massacre and no Egypt. The genealogies given to establish the descent name different fathers for Joseph and run through different sons of David.
  • Four different mornings at the tomb. The number of women, the number of figures they meet, what they are told, whether they tell anyone, and where the appearances then happen (Galilee in Mark and Matthew, Jerusalem in Luke) differ across the four accounts. And the oldest manuscripts of Mark end with the women running away in terror and saying nothing to anyone; the resurrection appearances at the end of Mark were added later.
  • Two incompatible ethics of law. Matthew's Jesus says not one stroke of the law will pass away; Paul says a person is justified apart from works of the law. That is not a nuance. It is chapter 4's fight, fossilised in the same book.

The decisive absence

Now the central question. A reader raised in a post-abolition culture assumes that a religion of universal love must, somewhere, forbid owning people. It does not. The texts are not evasive about it; they legislate for it.

The law regulates slavery and makes it heritable. Leviticus 25 draws an explicit distinction: an Israelite who falls into debt-bondage is to be treated as a hired worker and released, "but as for your male and female slaves whom you may have — you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations around you." Those slaves, the text continues, may be bequeathed to your children as inherited property, permanently. The chapter that contains the (the great charter of debt release) is the same chapter that establishes for foreigners. That is chapter 1's boundary written into statute: obligations inside the moral community, property rights outside it.4

The law prices the slave's body. Exodus 21 provides that a man who beats his slave to death is to be punished, but that if the slave survives a day or two, there is no penalty, on the stated grounds that the slave is the owner's money. Elsewhere the same code sets out the ceremony for a man who chooses to remain a slave permanently: his ear is pierced with an awl against the doorpost.

Jesus does not address it. He is recorded as speaking about wealth constantly, and about debt, taxation, and the treatment of the poor. On slavery, nothing, and the parables use enslaved people as ordinary furniture of the world, including one that describes the beating of a servant with many stripes as a natural comparison for judgement.

The letters instruct slaves to obey. Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Timothy, Titus and 1 Peter all contain instructions to slaves to obey their masters; 1 Peter adding that this applies to harsh masters as well as kind ones. Paul's letter to Philemon concerns a runaway named Onesimus, and Paul sends him back. He asks Philemon to receive him kindly. He does not tell him to stop owning people, and the letter is in the canon precisely because it was read for centuries as authority for the return of fugitives.5

The single verse most often cited on the other side, 1 Corinthians 7:21, is grammatically ambiguous in the Greek to the point that translations split down the middle on whether it advises a slave who can gain freedom to take it or to remain as he is. A civilisation-defining prohibition cannot rest on a clause whose meaning has been contested for two thousand years.

The receipt · what the church actually taught

Council of Gangra, c. 340: anathema on anyone who, under the pretext of piety, teaches a slave to despise his master, or to withdraw from his service rather than serve with goodwill and respect. This is a canon of a church council, directed against Christians who were freeing or harbouring slaves.

Augustine, City of God XIX.15: slavery is not natural to humanity but is God's just arrangement in a fallen world, and the enslaved are told to serve faithfully.

The Holy Office, 20 June 1866, under Pius IX, in an instruction to a vicar apostolic dealing with the slave trade in Africa: slavery itself, considered in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law, and it is not against divine law for a slave to be sold, bought, exchanged or given, provided the required conditions are observed. This was issued after the American Civil War.

Canon 3 of Gangra; Augustine, De civitate Dei; Instruction of the Holy Office, 1866

The comparison that settles it

One rejoinder deserves a direct answer: perhaps the text simply does not legislate on economic institutions at all, and slavery's absence is part of a general silence. It is not. The same scriptures prohibit, explicitly and repeatedly, (in Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, the Psalms and Ezekiel), and the medieval church enforced that prohibition seriously for centuries. They prohibit mixing two kinds of fabric in a garment, sowing a field with two kinds of seed, eating shellfish, and getting a tattoo.

So the text is entirely capable of forbidding a profitable economic practice. It forbade one that inconvenienced lenders. It did not forbid owning human beings.

Title page of Select Parts of the Holy Bible, for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands, London 1807
"Select Parts of the Holy Bible, for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands", London, 1807. Roughly nine-tenths of the Old Testament and half the New were cut. Exodus (the liberation of an enslaved people) is gone. "Slaves, obey your earthly masters" remains. The editors were missionaries, and the volume is the clearest surviving statement of which parts of scripture the enslavers considered useful.Wikimedia Commons · public domain
Where this chapter argues with itself

Christians also abolished slavery. The Germantown Quaker protest of 1688, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, the Clapham Sect, Wilberforce, the Black churches of the American South, Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth: abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic world was substantially a religious movement, and it is dishonest to leave that out.

But look at what the abolitionists had to do. They could not cite a prohibition, because there is none. They argued from general principles (the image of God, the golden rule, the Exodus) against opponents who could and did quote chapter and verse. Douglass, who knew both sides intimately, drew the distinction himself in 1845: between the Christianity of Christ and the Christianity of the land he lived in, which he called partial and hypocritical. Slaveholders were not misreading their Bibles. Abolitionists were reading them against the grain, and winning an argument that the text did not settle for them.

Which is precisely the chapter's point. A composite scripture with no clear prohibition functions as a mirror: power reads its own face in it. That is what makes it so useful to power.

Abolitionist woodcut of a kneeling enslaved man in chains with the motto Am I Not a Man and a Brother?
The abolitionist emblem, from the 1780s. Note the posture the campaign chose: kneeling, chained, appealing. Even the movement to end slavery framed the enslaved as supplicants rather than agents, a habit of mind that would survive abolition intact and reappear in the humanitarianism of chapters 18 and 28.American Anti-Slavery Society · Wikimedia Commons · public domain

Why the assembly matters

An incoherent text with no fixed prohibition on the central atrocity of the modern world, carried by an institution that had spent a millennium learning to work as an arm of the state: that is not a religion that failed to stop the Atlantic slave trade. It is a religion that had nothing in it to stop with, and an institutional history that made cooperation natural.

Chapter 8 shows what happened when the men doing the enslaving needed an argument. They did not have to fight scripture for it. They only had to invent one new idea, and get it blessed.

Footnotes

  1. On the Hebrew and Greek pictures of death and afterlife, N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), chs. 2–4: a conservative scholar making the same historical point. On Philo and the Logos, David T. Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1993). ↩
  2. Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus Homo (1098). On its feudal context, R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 197–227. ↩
  3. Alan E. Bernstein, The Formation of Hell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). On purgatory, Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). ↩
  4. Leviticus 25:39–46; Exodus 21:2–6, 20–21; Deuteronomy 15:12–17. For a scholarly treatment of biblical slave law in its ancient Near Eastern context, see Catherine Hezser, Jewish Slavery in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩
  5. On Philemon's reception history as a proslavery text, see John Byron, Recent Research on Paul and Slavery (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2008). On the wider record, Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966). ↩
Dramatis personae

Chi era coinvolto

  1. Figure

    Philo of Alexandria

    c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE Hellenistic Jewish philosopher

    Athens and Jerusalem, spliced

    He had been using Logos as a technical term for decades before the opening of John’s gospel identified Christ with it. That is the seam: an apocalyptic Judaean frame fitted to a Greek metaphysics that does not match it. Most Christians hold, simultaneously and without noticing, a Platonic immortal soul and a Jewish bodily resurrection, two different answers to the same question.

    Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature (1993)

  2. Figure

    Anselm of Canterbury

    c. 1033 – 1109 Archbishop; theologian of the atonement

    The cross as a debt of honour

    Cur Deus Homo explains the crucifixion as satisfaction of an infinite debt of honour owed to an offended lord. It reads exactly like what it is: a feudal transaction, written by an archbishop in a society organised around honour, vassalage and compensation. It is neither the oldest Christian theory of the atonement nor the only one, and it took over the West so completely that most Western Christians assume it is simply what the cross means.

    Southern, Saint Anselm (1990)

  3. Figure

    Desiderius Erasmus

    c. 1466 – 1536 Humanist; editor of the Greek New Testament

    The text, back to its sources

    He left the Johannine comma (the single clearest trinitarian sentence in the Bible) out of his first edition, because it was in no Greek manuscript he had. Under pressure he put it back. From his text it passed into the King James Version and from there into three centuries of doctrine. It appears in no Greek manuscript before the fourteenth century. It is a forgery, and it was the proof text.

  4. Fazioni

    The Holy Office

    the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition

    1542 – 1965 The Church’s doctrinal tribunal

    The teaching, as it stood

    On 20 June 1866, instructing a vicar apostolic dealing with the slave trade in Africa, it held that slavery considered in its essential nature is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law, and that a slave may lawfully be sold, bought, exchanged or given, provided the required conditions are observed. That was issued a year after Appomattox.

    Instruction of the Holy Office, 1866

  5. Fazioni

    The Germantown protesters

    1688 Four Quakers with a piece of paper

    Against the grain of the text

    The first known written protest against slavery in the English colonies of North America. It was forwarded up the Quaker hierarchy and quietly shelved. What the abolitionists who followed had to do is the point: they could not cite a prohibition, because there is none, so they argued from general principles against opponents who could quote chapter and verse.

  6. Figure

    Frederick Douglass

    c. 1818 – 1895 Abolitionist; formerly enslaved

    Reading scripture against the grain

    He knew both sides of the argument intimately, and in 1845 he drew the distinction himself: between the Christianity of Christ and the Christianity of the land he lived in, which he called partial and hypocritical. That is the honest description of the abolitionist position. Slaveholders were not misreading their Bibles; abolitionists were reading them against the grain, and winning an argument the text did not settle for them.

    Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)

  7. Figure

    Pius IX

    1792 – 1878 Pope, 1846–1878

    The deposit of faith, and papal authority

    He defined the Immaculate Conception as required belief in 1854 and presided over the definition of papal infallibility in 1870, the object still being assembled, eighteen centuries in. The 1866 instruction on slavery went out under his authority. What a religion adds and what it declines to add are both decisions, and both are dated.

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