Does the Bible promote Slavery? Lee Strobell
Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 166–69: Jesus and Slavery There was one other issue I wanted to raise with Carson. I glanced at my watch. “Do you have a few more minutes?” I asked. When he indicated he did, I began to address one more controversial topic. To be God, Jesus must be ethically perfect. But some critics of Christianity have charged that he fell short because, they say, he tacitly approved of the morally abhorrent practice of slavery. As Morton Smith wrote, There were innumerable slaves of the emperor and of the Roman state; the Jerusalem Temple owned slaves; the High Priest owned slaves (one of them lost an ear in Jesus’ arrest); all of the rich and almost all of the middle class owned slaves. So far as we are told, Jesus never attacked this practice. . . . There seem to have been slave revolts in Palestine and Jordan in Jesus’ youth; a miracle-working leader of