Question

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How did slave holders use the Bible to justify slavery?

a. Slavery is mentioned in both the Old and New Testaments, and expressly condemned in neither location.

b. It was not man’s place to free someone that God had willed should be born into slavery.

c. According to a “lost book” of the New Testament, Jesus himself owned slaves.

d. The responsibility of a slave to obey his or her master is implied by the commandment to “Obey your mother and father.”

e. Slave-owning tribes mentioned in the Bible, such as that of Abraham, were far more holy than those that did not own slaves.

Answer 1

During the period of American slavery, how did slaveholders manage to balance their religious beliefs with the cruel facts of the “peculiar institution“? As shown by the following passages — adapted from Noel Rae’s new book The Great Stain, which uses firsthand accounts to tell the story of slavery in America — for some of them that rationalization was right there in the Bible.

Out of the more than three quarters of a million words in the Bible, Christian slaveholders—and, if asked, most slaveholders would have defined themselves as Christian—had two favorites texts, one from the beginning of the Old Testament and the other from the end of the New Testament. In the words of the King James Bible, which was the version then current, these were, first, Genesis IX, 18–27:

Step-by-step explanation: