The charge that the Bible supports slavery points to real passages. Israel’s law sets terms for holding slaves, and the apostles tell enslaved believers to obey their masters, harsh ones included. The scholars gathered here grant all of that. Their answer is that the Bible regulates and tolerates a slavery that already existed, and that regulating a practice is a different act from approving it. The charge succeeds only if those two acts are treated as one, and that equation is rarely stated, let alone defended.
The stakes are not academic. For many Black readers, these verses were read over their ancestors to keep them in bondage. That history belongs in the test as evidence, because the people who heard those verses preached at them mostly concluded that the slaveholders had misread the book.
Set out plainly, the argument behind the charge has four premises and a conclusion: