May 10, 2002

2 Books Examine Scriptural Justifications for Slavery

By SCOTT MCLEMEE

EXEGESIS AS ALIBI: Writing to an early pocket of Christian believers, St. Paul declared that social distinctions were meaningless. Among adherents of the faith, there was "neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female" -- but, rather, a new kind of spiritual equality. It was just the sort of belief that made otherwise broad-minded Roman citizens regard the Jesus movement as a bunch of countercultural weirdos. (The symbolic cannibalism of communion must have seemed pretty