The Slave Bible of 1807

At the heart of the Demerara slave rebellion of 1823 is the story of the Congregationalist missionary John Smith.  Smith arrived at Le Resouvenir Estate in what  is now Guyana in 1817, and was warmly welcomed there. The authorities, however, warned him not to teach the local people, i.e. the slaves, to read. Otherwise, he would be banished. In the event, his preaching of the freedom that comes from knowing Christ was taken rather more literally than he perhaps intended, leading to an insurrection in August of 1823. The story of Smith’s arrest and trial, and his death in prison are well known, and caused outrage in the British Parliament. Some might think that the outrage was caused not so much by a new high moral ground as the Colonial Office’s increasing attempts to tame local legislatures! Two things are notable here.

The first is that the Christian gospel (and the Biblical narrative) is a revolutionary text, which governments have sought unsuccessfully to tame over the centuries. Three hundred years before, Martin Luther had written The Freedom of a Christian, which led disaffected German peasants in economic difficulty to rise up in the so-called Peasants’ War of 1524. Luther, strikingly, then retaliated by telling the peasants that they didn't really count, in his virulent treatise ‘Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants.’ The text may be revolutionary, but even its prime interpreters regularly spiritualize what is a holistic message of release from all forms of bondage, physical and spiritual.

The second notable fact is that teaching people to read (which Christian missionaries have done for centuries) is a subversive act, and the authorities in slave-owning territories understood this well. At first, the Bible was controlled in the West by being kept in the increasingly academic medium of Latin. Translation was forbidden, and when John Wycliffe and others illegally produced an English text, the proof of the pudding was the rise of popular Christianity that despised the authorities (ecclesiastical and political). They quickly applied the message of Jesus to their own straitened circumstances. Paulo Freire’s conscientization programme applied the same liberative principle in Brazil in the 20^th century to great effect. There is a sense in which it doesn't much matter what people read as long as they can read for themselves. But when those who learn to read are given the most revolutionary text of all, trouble tends to break out.

This brings us to the headline document , the so-called Slave Bible of 1807. It is worth noting first of all that it is not presented as a Bible but as a compendium of Bible texts, and we need to be careful how we describe it. The actual title is Parts of the Holy Bible, selected for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands. It does not attempt to present a truncated Bible in the way that Marcion did in the 2^nd century CE, adapting it to his theological views. That said, it does give us a ‘canon within a canon’, a selection of the parts of the Bible that are deemed fitting for the audience. All Christians do this (as do all people of the Book). It is instructive to ask why certain parts of the Bible never get preached on in our churches. The editor of this volume is giving us a lectionary. So far, so good.

I can’t tell from the article who made the selection, but I would imagine that it comes out of the Church of England stable, the stable that was always most in cahoots with the slave-owning classes, and so perpetuated the status quo. It is not an innocent text! And here we can continue the story with the foundation of the Anglican diocese of Jamaica with Honduras in 1824 and its first bishop, Christopher Lipscomb. We are told that he did not think that he could encourage the education of slaves until public opinion paved the way, the classic case of the Christian trapped in his own cultural convenience. One cannot imagine that Lipscomb was blind the significance of his opinions.

One of the chief aims of the foundation of the Diocese was to prepare the slaves for eventual emancipation, and the Jamaican Legislative Council could not be counted on to do this. The Nonconformists were suspect and their missionary societies financially limited. And here’s the real point. The Church of England was more acceptable to the planters because it taught the principles of ‘obedience’ alongside the gospel message of ‘freedom’. In other words, your soul may be free but your body is still in hock to your owner. And even though education was being grudgingly promoted, the Jamaican slave code of 12/1826 prohibited dissenting preachers from holding meetings from sunset to sunrise, or receive pay from slaves for religious instruction.

In sum, this extraordinary text on display in the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC highlights the power of the biblical narrative, when read by oppressed people, to create a new redeemed imagination in which freedom is a divinely offered right. Recognizing this, those who seek to oppress tend to tame the Biblical text by the withdrawal of the rights of education, though it was no longer possible  by the 19^th century to put the Biblical cat back in the bag. The 16^th Reformations had put paid to that possibility. My final observation is that at stake here is who holds the right of interpretation: the theologians, the church authorities, or the readers. The Bible is not in and of itself an oppressive text, but it is up to us to ensure that it is read as a message of freedom, not of continued abuse and servitude.

Adrian Chatfield

16^th December 2018