{"id":55264,"date":"2022-04-18T13:03:25","date_gmt":"2022-04-18T17:03:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=55264"},"modified":"2022-04-18T13:18:15","modified_gmt":"2022-04-18T17:18:15","slug":"the-slave-bible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=55264","title":{"rendered":"The Slave Bible"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
\nApril 18, 2022<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>In 1970 while I was a faculty member at Fordham University, New York, I taught a course on the development of Afro-American literature. One of the books I used was William Wells Brown, Clotel or the President\u2019s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, published in England in 1853.<\/p>\n

The novel told the story of Clotel, a daughter of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, who fathered three children by his slave, Sally Hemmings. Although the white power structure denied this incident for two centuries, in November 1998 the truth of this claim was authenticated by DNA evidence.
\n
\nApart from Clotel being sold into slavery, the novel was concerned with challenging the Biblical justification of slavery and that enslaved people should be obedient to their masters. One such exchange occurs when Pastor Hontz Snyder at The Poplar Farm took the enslaved through a recital of the following question-answer session:<\/p>\n

Q: \u201cWhat command has God given to servants concerning obedience to their masters?\u201d<\/p>\n

A: \u201cServants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with eyeservice as men-pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing God.\u201d<\/p>\n

Q: \u201cWhat does God mean by masters according to the flesh?\u201d<\/p>\n

A: \u201cMasters of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Q: \u201cWhat are servants to count their masters worthy of?\u201d<\/p>\n

A: \u201cAll honour.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the British missionaries came to the Caribbean, particularly in Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua, \u201cto convert and educate\u201d the enslaved, they brought with them their own version of the Bible tailored to their activities. Entitled Select Parts of the Holy Bible for the Use of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India Islands, this Bible was a \u201cshockingly bowdlerised version of the New- and Old Testaments\u201d that was printed in England in 1807\u2014the same year the British slave trade ended in the West Indies.<\/p>\n

Anthony Schmidt, associate curator of Bible and Religion, in the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, says that about 90 per cent of the Old Testament and 50 per cent of the New Testament is missing. He adds: \u201cPut in another way, there are 1,189 chapters in a standard Protestant Bible. This Bible contains only 232.\u201d<\/p>\n

Charlotte McKillop-\u00adMash, project archivist, Bodleian Collections at Oxford University, notes: \u201cThis Bible has been carefully edited to remove any mention of people freeing themselves from bondage. In just one instance, it skips directly from Genesis 45:28 to \u00adExodus 19, so it includes the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20) but \u2018disappears\u2019 the first eighteen books of Exodus, in which the Israelites escape slavery in Egypt.\u201d<\/p>\n

This Bible was published by the Society for the Conversion and Religious Education of Negro Slaves\u2014an organisation founded by Bishop Beilby Porteus, the son of a Virginian tobacco planter and a slave owner who was born and raised in England. Brigit Katz argues this Bible also sought \u201cto teach enslaved Africans to read, with the ultimate goal of introducing them to Christianity\u201d. (Smithsonian Magazine, January 4, 2019.)<\/p>\n

Paradoxically, Porteus, who later became the Anglican Bishop of London, \u201ccriticised the Church\u2019s position on slavery, preached and campaigned against the slave trade, and voted numerous times to ban it\u201d. He believed the abridged Bible would be more acceptable to the planters.<\/p>\n

The verses that were placed in the Slave Bible reinforced the institution of slavery. One such edict, \u201cServants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ\u201d (Ephesians 6:5) was replicated by Pastor Snyder in his question-and-answer session with the slaves that I reproduce above. Incidentally, Pastor Snyder was referred to as \u201ca missionary\u201d in the novel.<\/p>\n

Sharon Brous, the founding rabbi of IKAR in Los Angeles, noted that the Slave Bible was designed to introduce enslaved people to Christianity and to preserve the system of slavery. \u201cThe slaveholders,\u201d she says, \u201cwere surely concerned that the enslaved people would see themselves in the Israelite struggle for liberation, that they would find strength in God\u2019s identification with the oppressed and be inspired by the triumph of faith over even one of the strongest regimes in the ancient world\u201d. (New York Times, April 14.)<\/p>\n

Physical suffering, as Esau McCaulley observes, is \u201cat the core of the Christian story\u201d. (New York Times, April 15.) Easter Sunday, according to the canonical texts of the Holy Bible, promises the triumph of our spiritual dimension over the death of the physical body. The Apocryphal gospels of the early Christians (such as the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Thomas) offer other events or sayings in Jesus\u2019 life.<\/p>\n

As we celebrate Easter, the holiest day of the Christian calendar, we should remember that many of our ancestors did not have the comfort of Jesus\u2019 promise. Fr Martin Sirju, however, links Jesus \u201cto the kingdom to truth\u201d and suggests that Holy Week \u201cbegins with a politically subversive act\u2014a peasant, apocalyptic preacher entering Jerusalem on a donkey\u201d. (Express, April 13.)<\/p>\n

The Holy Bible also tells us that the meek shall inherit the earth, which suggests that everything presented in the Slave Bible was meant to prevent the meek, the oppressed, the overused Africans from realising the possibility of knowing the comfort of Jesus\u2019 message.<\/p>\n

It is noteworthy also that the Slave Bible left out Jeremiah 22:13 from its abridged version of the Bible. The offending passage reads: \u201cWoe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbour\u2019s services without wages and giveth to him not for his work.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is something our business people should ponder as they reflect upon the blessing that Easter brings to Christians throughout the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe April 18, 2022 In 1970 while I was a faculty member at Fordham University, New York, I taught a course on the development of Afro-American literature. One of the books I used was William Wells Brown, Clotel or the President\u2019s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, … Continue reading The Slave Bible<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,1407,1,12],"tags":[85,1491,171,711],"class_list":["post-55264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-christianity","category-general-tt","category-religion","tag-abuse","tag-africans","tag-selwyn-r-cudjoe","tag-slavery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55264"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55266,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55264\/revisions\/55266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}