While the ongoing Confederate States convention is the talk of the Deep South, related issues are also on the mind of Southern Baptists. Baptist newspapers in Tennessee and Georgia this month call attention to a recently released (1860) revised translation of the Epistle of Philemon, published by the American Bible Union, headquartered in New York.
The problem with the the new translation of Philemon, as expressed in the pages of Georgia Baptists’ Christian Index, is that it treats the concept of slavery improperly:
“The present edition of Philemon should at once be suppressed, and the epistle be re-submitted to a College of Revisers, in which the South shall be equally represented—and if no agreement can be had, submit the proper definition of the term DOULOS, to the Universities of England, Germany and America. This will settle the slavery question forever.”
Blaming northern Christians on the despised translation, the Christian Index proposes a meeting on February 22 to explore ways that southerners might legally remove the Bible translation from the market or produce a correctly-interpreted edition.
Source: “Revision Association,” Christian Index, February 6, 1861
