The earliest copy of the Negro or Slave Bible was published in 1807 ( the same year the Slave Trade Act prohibited slave trade in the British Empire).
This strange Bible contained only parts of 14 books!
The publication happened three years after the Haitian Revolution ended.
That revolution was the only slave revolt in history in which enslaved people successfully drove out their European oppressors to formed a new nation, and it increased American and European paranoia that the people they oppressed would one day rise up against them.
Sections that were removed included the Exodus story, which showed God instructing Moses to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt.
The account of Joseph’s enslavement, however, remains because his story exemplifies how well-behaved submission is rewarded by God.
“The Lord was with Joseph, and he was a successful man; and he was in the house of his master the Egyptian” (Genesis 39:2).
Editors of the Slave Bible highlighted themes of being submissive; the same thing goes on with the New Testament as well.
A copy is available for public viewing at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.
That is the ONLY copy in the United States of America.
Two other copies are known to exist in the United Kingdom.
It was only after many failed attempts that, in 1807, the slave trade in the British Empire was abolished.
However, slaves in the colonies (excluding areas ruled by the East India Company) were not freed until 1838 – and only after slave-owners, rather than the slaves themselves, received compensation.
During the Great Awakening (religious revival) of the late eighteenth century, Methodist and Baptist preachers toured in the South (of US), trying to persuade planters to free their slaves on the basis of equality in God’s eyes.
They also accepted slaves as members and preachers of new chapels and churches.
The first black churches (all Baptist) in the New World (what became the United States) were founded by slaves and free blacks in Aiken County, South Carolina, in 1773; Petersburg, Virginia, in 1774; and Savannah, Georgia, in 1778, before the end of the Revolutionary War in US.
Slavery was officially recognized as a serious offense in 1776 by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
The Yearly Meeting had been against slavery since the 1750s.
When slavery was legal (from 1526 to 1776 in the US) those who dabbled in its trade often justified it with the Bible; specifically, a verse that tells servants to obey their masters.
There were also a lot of verses that abolitionists (those who hated slavery) used to argue against slavery, which were picked from the Real Complete Bible.
But you wouldn’t find those in the heavily-redacted “Slave Bible.”
In the Slave Bible, Most of the Old Testament is missing, and only about half of the New Testament remains.
Why?
So that the enslaved Africans in the Caribbean islands of Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua couldn’t read or be read anything that might incite them to rebel.
The Slave Bible was actually titled Parts of the Holy Bible, selected for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands.
British planters in the Caribbean had long been weary of missionaries, and could’ve demanded that they only teach enslaved people certain parts of the Bible.
But some missionaries may have also believed that it was only appropriate to teach enslaved people excerpts that reinforced their enslaved status.
Passages that emphasized equality between groups of people were also taken out.
This included:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).
The Slave Bible also doesn’t contain the Book of Revelation, which tells of a new heaven and Earth in which evil will be punished.
In contrast, one of the passages that remained was one that proponents of slavery loved to cite:
“Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ” (Ephesians 6:5).
About 90 percent of the Old Testament is missing and 50 percent of the New Testament is missing from this Bible of Enslavement.
Put in another way, there are 1,189 chapters in a standard protestant Bible.
This Bible contains only 232.
There are several theories behind the editing and omitting of so much of the standard Bible, but the main thought stems from the fact that farmers in the West Indies were opposed to missionaries who worked with enslaved Africans on their land.
This can be seen as an attempt to appease the planter class saying, ‘Look, we’re coming here.
We want to help uplift materially these Africans here but we’re not going to be teaching them anything that could incite rebellion.’
“Coming in and being able to educate African slaves would prepare them one day for freedom, but at the same time would not cause them to seek it more aggressively.”
Imagine a Bible that starts with creation but then jumps right to Joseph being sold into slavery and makes a point of how imprisonment benefited him!
An edited Bible, where the Exodus story of God rescuing his people from slavery in Egypt is removed, together with every reference to freedom, such as the above passage from Galatians.
A Bible that is manipulated to emphasize themes of submission and subservience.
Does this sound like the Bible you know?
In the early 1800s, Rev. Beilby Porteus, bishop of London, instructed a group of missionaries to create such a book.
“Prepare a short form of public prayers . . . together with the select portions of Scripture . . . particularly those which relate to the duties of slaves towards their masters.”
It is a morality tale that most are likely to support in this day and age. But, unfortunately, it’s not a true story.
It seems that no one actually gave the “Slave Bible” a closer look.
It’s not a Bible!
One might wonder, then, what rhetorical work is being done by interpreters and curators who have deemed the book a Bible—the “Slave Bible.” If it is not actually a Bible, why call it so?
The missionaries who produced Select Parts of the Holy Bible were not manipulating a Bible with bad intent, rather, they were engaged in other activities that we are likely to find abhorrent today.
Reverend Porteus even commended Christian education for the enslaved.
In his letter, Porteus portrays converted slaves as feathers in the caps of their owners, calling them a “pleasing and interesting spectacle, of a new and most numerous race of Christians ‘plucked as a brand out of the fire,’ rescued from the horrors and superstitions of Paganism.”
Porteus reasons that Christian slaves work harder and are more compliant than those who do not convert.
He argues that plantation owners should allow their slaves to receive Christian religious education so that their sexual activity can be controlled with the hope of producing more offspring.
More enslaved babies, more slaves, more labor, more profit!
With the abolition of the Slave trade, all books that championed slavery were also abolished!
