The Bible is the slave master's book. They used it to keep us in chains, so why would we still carry it? Black skeptics say this, and many Black Christians hear it in their own heads. The charge points at something real. Israel's law and the apostles' letters do regulate slavery, and preachers did read those verses over enslaved people as God's will. But the proslavery sermon depended on leaving verses out and on adding a premise Scripture never supplies: that Black people were less than fully human. The Bible those preachers used was trimmed and supplemented.
Once that is clear, the problem looks different. The reckoning is not between Black Christians and Scripture. It is between two ways of reading Scripture, and enslaved people were among the first to tell them apart. Many heard those sermons, rejected them, and read the book for themselves. Others concluded that a faith preached at them that way could not be theirs, and they walked away. Both responses belong to the history, and both deserve a fair hearing.
The course that follows builds one skill at a time. First it traces where the claim comes from: the plantation sermon and what it changed. Then it reads what Israel's law actually permitted and forbade, without softening either. Next it locates the theological distinction the slaveholders erased, between counsel given to the powerless and a mandate claimed by the powerful. Last it turns to the historical record of enslaved readers, and to the conversation you may need to have with someone who has every reason to distrust the book.