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Colossians 4 – Skeptic's Annotated Bible answered

A response and reply to the notes on Colossians 4 in the Skeptic's Annotated Bible (SAB).

King James Version

SAB comment

My comment


It's OK to own slaves as long as you treat them well.
Does God approve of slavery?
The word servant here doesn't necessarily mean slave, see Luke 12:46.
But in some cases they were slaves. What advice should Paul have given to masters in a society with a 10 to 1 slave population? There was no capitalism, so there was no job market. Would these slaves have the ability to support themselves? At the moment they received food, housing and clothing. If everyone who receives that, is a slave, lots of people in our society are slaves of their respective governments. Which they are in a sense, but we have to come back to the word slave: it simply does not mean someone who is worked to death in a mine in a few years. That is not treating them well. And sending your slaves away to certain death, with the excuse that at least they're not slaves anymore, is also not treating them well.






May this defence be such a thing when answering the author of the SAB.











"Read the epistle from Laodicea."
Apparently God intended to include the epistle from Laodicea in the Bible, but it was lost somewhere along the way. There were several letters that claimed to be the lost epistle (and one of these was often included in Latin medieval bibles), but they are considered forgeries today.
As John Gill explains:


This is as the Dutch Statenvertaling translates this verse: “letter written from Laodecia.” John Gill offers a translation of the forgery that claimed to be the letter to the Laodiceans. He continues with:


It is unclear what letter this was. God did not intend this to be in the Bible, else it would be in the Bible. Not every book or author mentioned in the Bible has to be in the Bible as the logic of the author of the SAB demands.

