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For much of its life in America, the Bible was not conceived of as just a “good book” but as the “Good Book,” as scripture and therefore vested with sacred authority and divine intentionality. In his introduction to Theorizing Scriptures, Vincent Wimbush proposes a reconsideration of the term scripture that places the primary focus “not upon texts per se (that is, upon their content meanings), but upon textures, gestures, and power—namely the signs, material products, ritual practices and performances, expressivities, orientations , ethics and politics associated with the phenomenon of the invention and use of ‘scriptures’” (3). Wimbush thus advocates an approach to scripture that involves “naming loudly (or critically analyzing) the nature and consequences of interpretive practices, their strategies, and play, especially in terms of power relations” (5). It is in this spirit that I began an exploration of the proslavery Bible defense, in order to uncover the hermeneutic principles that underwrote its claims. The question of what constitutes scripture is the necessary starting point, as Wimbush suggests. In the postscript to An American Bible, Paul Gutjahr takes a “history of the book” approach to defining scripture, suggesting that attention to material textual history forces us to reconsider the Protestant notion of sola scriptura. For Gutjahr, the “scripturalness” of the Protestant Bible is both reflected in, and in turn constituted by, certain material markers of difference —leather binding, size, elaborate illustration, and so forth. Stephen J. Stein connects the concept of scripture with definitions and delineations of readerly communities and draws attention to three “canons within the canon” that are important for my analysis here: Three different scriptures—Jefferson’s personal bible, the African American conjurational canon, and The Woman’s Bible—are each defined by a particular religious, social, or political agenda of an interactive community. The mode of c h a p T e r ฀ T W o private interpretations T h e ฀ B i B l e ฀ d e f e n s e ฀ o f ฀ s l a v e ry ฀ a n d฀ ฀ n i n e T e e n T h - c e n T u ry ฀ r a c i a l ฀ h e r m e n e u T i c s 2 6 ฀ c h a p T e r ฀ T Wo expression in each varies—a private document, oral performances by singers and preachers, and a political manifesto. Yet in each case the essential elements of the scripturalizing process are present—canon, commentary, and community. (“America’s Bibles,” 182, my emphasis) Using Theophus Smith’s term of an African American “conjurational canon,” Stein collapses all African American hermeneutics into one framework, as if a “black Bible” exists that derives from a unitary individual consciousness, like Jefferson’s or Stanton’s. However, from their earliest contact with the Christian Bible, African American readers exhibited a range of approaches to biblical material and the question of the Bible’s authority, from orthodox Christian readings to radical revisionist appropriations. It is helpful, therefore, to frame our discussion of nineteenth-century African American biblical interpretation(s) by exploring the two documents known as Jefferson’s “Bible” (The Philosophy of Jesus [1804] and The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth [1819–20]) from the beginning of the nineteenth century and Stanton’s Woman’s Bible (1895) from the century’s end.1 Jefferson’s extracts from the Gospels did not come to public attention until the mid-nineteenth century—the period when, according to Gutjahr, Bible publishing was at its peak. Jefferson’s belief in a purely privatized religion made him reluctant to speak publicly about his own religious views. While Jefferson’s views were personal, they were far from purely private, shaped, as they were, by Enlightenment demands for rationality and utility in religious institutions. Thus, ironically, Jefferson’s very private biblical readings were shaped by larger public debates about rationalism and biblical accuracy posed by the German Higher Criticism, which began to infiltrate American religion via liberal movements like Unitarianism. By all accounts, Jefferson experienced a “religious crisis” during the 1760s, stumbling over the doctrine of the Trinity, which he could not reconcile with the Bible’s insistence on monotheism. Out of that crisis , Jefferson began in the 1760s and 1770s to piece together a “commonplace book consisting of extracts from the writings of various ancient and modern dramatists, philosophers, poets,” a “literary Bible” (Adams 11). Important for my purposes here, Jefferson’s highly privatized, even secretive, “commonplace book...

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