One thing that struck me about the Bible when I first read it was that Jesus never flat-out said, “look guys, owning people is wrong, don’t do it”. Instead, he (as you pointed out) treats slavery as a basic fact of life, sort of like breathing or language or agriculture. There are a lot of parables in the New Testament which use slavery as a plot device, or as an analogy to illustrate a point, but none that imagine a world without it.
Contrast this to the modern world we live in. To most of us, slavery is almost unthinkable, and we condemn it whenever we see it. As imperfect as we are, we’ve come a long way in the past 2000 years—all of us, even Christians. That’s something to be proud of, IMO.
One thing that struck me about the Bible when I first read it was that Jesus never flat-out said, “look guys, owning people is wrong, don’t do it”. Instead, he (as you pointed out) treats slavery as a basic fact of life, sort of like breathing or language or agriculture. There are a lot of parables in the New Testament which use slavery as a plot device, or as an analogy to illustrate a point, but none that imagine a world without it.
Contrast this to the modern world we live in. To most of us, slavery is almost unthinkable, and we condemn it whenever we see it. As imperfect as we are, we’ve come a long way in the past 2000 years—all of us, even Christians. That’s something to be proud of, IMO.