While he had some bangers he also had some pretty bad takes too: slaves obey your masters/not changing the Exodus rules for slavery, faith healer bs, substitutionary atonement, etc.
Not to undermine the ickiness of the slavery thing - because it is still very much fucked up - but it was a very different paradigm than chattel slavery. Slaves were considered a member of a household rather than property*, and were not generally born into slavery or trapped in slavery. So “slaves obey your masters” is almost literally meant the same way as “children obey your parents”… that is, “be loyal to the head of the household.”
And the “substitutionary atonement” thing is totally not scriptural at all. That’s one of those things that Catholics just added because they felt like it… along with the heaven/hell afterlife and a whole slew of other stuff. Jesus was very clear about how people are expected to behave and the consequences/rewards of being shitty or righteous, respectively.
* Except when buying a wife or concubine. They were absolutely property… albeit it property with special rights and privileges.
Exodus 21 20-21: 20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, 21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.”
Sounds like property you can beat as long as they don’t die within a day or two, nobody should treat anyone that way that’s horrific.
Substitutionary atonement is the whole gospel story. Jesus sacrifices his life to atone for Adam’s original sin of eating the apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil that somehow infected the rest of humanity. Even if you believed it were true you shouldn’t place the punishment for crimes of ancestors or parents on their children, that’s fucked up.
The problem here is that the words you see in english translations of scripture are frequently connotatively incorrect… often on purpose (see: the word “hell”, a word and concept that does not exist whatsoever anywhere in scripture).
In this case, the word property is problematic, because it carries certain connotations for us, as modern, english-speaking readers. The root word is keseph, which literally means “money” or “monetary value”. So a more accurate translation to english is “…because the slave is valuable.” But even that is somewhat misleading because there is an overt implication of a household relationship, and this same rule would hold true for a head-of-household’s own children.
Again, I am not trying to diminish the many horrific acts portrayed in scripture, but in many (if not most) cases, the context is radically different than what our universally horrible english translations infer. Now, WHY they are all so bad a whole ‘nother can of worms.