The Abolition of Slavery and the NT

Well, what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t be ruthlessly self-promoting. So I’m now going to be ruthlessly self-promoting.

Just out is a little booklet based on my now rather ancient thesis – condensed, edited and hopefully improved. It touches some controversial areas, but i hope fairly. Certainly not meant to be definitive or anything, but is aimed at putting the battles over slavery inthe bible into some sort of context and thereby extricate them from some of the more extreme things people use abolition to justify in contemporary debates. This is what the blurb on the back says:

Evangelical Christians in the nineteenth century led the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade, and then of slavery, throughout the British Empire. Yet their opponents argued that the Bible itself supports the institution of slavery. How can one book be used to uphold two contradictory positions? In this Latimer Study, Mark Meynell examines the conundrum. Why did the apostle Paul not campaign for the abolition of slavery in his day? What did he really teach on the subject? Was slavery in the ancient world different from modern slavery, like the horrors of the American Deep South?

You can get it direct from Latimer Trust (by clicking on the image) or through Amazon if that’s easier. It’s only £2.50 – but then of course, it is only 40 pages. But just think of all the hard work that went into it…