The ‘Slave Bible’
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This redacted Bible was published in the same year that the British slave trade was abolished. It was made to teach a pro‑slavery version of Christianity to enslaved people and contained only about 10% of the Old Testament and 50% of the New Testament. It retains: ‘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 But the edition suppresses the first eighteen books of Exodus, in which the Israelites escape slavery in Egypt.
Credit: The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, 1410 e.14
And There Was Disquiet At God’s Table
Bunmi Ogunsiji
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In Bunmi Ogunsiji’s work, a proud Nigerian and devout Christian encounters the Rev. Beilby Porteus, founder and president of The Society for the Conversion and Religious instruction and Education of Negro Slaves in the British West India Island (the society responsible for the ‘Slave Bible’) and shares with him a few home truths regarding the inevitability of their meeting and the role of Christianity and colonialism in the construction of his neo-colonial African identity. This piece speaks to the alchemy of endurance and is a deeply personal reflection on how a religion imposed has been reshaped and renamed by the colonised and enslaved to honour those things that simply refuse to die.