The first and most immediate observation is that, indeed, we have an impressive number of texts attested in these very early manuscripts. Though nearly all are only portions, and in many cases mere fragments, of the full manuscripts, enough survives to tell us that collectively early Christians produced, copied, and read a noteworthy range of writings. With all due allowances for the limitation sin the likely extent of literacy in this period, the impression given is that early Christianity represented a religious movement in which texts played a large role. But we may be able to probe a bit farther. Even if we must be somewhat cautious in drawing our inferences, these data invite intriguing questions. It is a further reason for caution, that only about 1% of the estimated 500,000 manuscripts from this period have been published [underline added] (Larry W. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins, 24-25).

With all due appreciation for the richness and diversity of the current state of New Testament studies, however, in one respect we are in what I regard as quite a regrettable situation for a field that is traditionally characterized by textual scholarship. Though texts are central to our work in the field, we too often engage them at considerable remove from their historical and physical manifestation as manuscripts. Indeed, even the variant readings of early manuscripts of the New Testament are often inadequately considered. Instead, scholars, including those who avowedly pursue historical questions about early Christianity, often treat the text of a printed edition of the Greek New Testament as all they need to consider. Further, if the truth be admitted, many New Testament specialists today and, still more worrying for the future of the field, many or most of those of recent vintage, can barely navigate the critical apparatus of a modern printed edition of the Greek New Testament, such as Nestle-Aland. So scholars sometimes do not adequately engage questions of textual variation in doing their exegesis of the New Testament.

In part, this also reflects the decline in the fortunes of New Testament textual criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly in English-speaking countries. Indeed, in the late 1970s a leading scholar in the discipline, Eldon Epp, went so far as to warn starkly that new Testament textual criticism was perhaps at the point of its demise in English-speaking settings, especially in North America, styling his essay as a putative “requiem” for the discipline.

Since Epp’s somber jeremiad appeared in 1979, however, in some respects things have started looking a bit better. (Larry W. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins, 8-9).

Because we be blind, God hath appointed in the scripture how we should serve him and please him. As pertaining to his own person he is abundantly pleased when we believe his promises and holy testament which he hath made unto us in Christ, and for mercy which he there showed us, love his commandments (William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, 181).

[T]he church’s identity is tied directly to Jesus’s identity. Confuse the one and you confuse the other (Barry J. York, Hitting the Marks, 5).

The leaders of the Protestant Reformation consistently taught that the marks of the church are:

* the faithful preaching and hearing of God’s Word,

* the rightful administration of the sacraments, and

* the proper exercise of church discipline.

Why did they identify these marks as necessary? Because, as we are going to see, these identifications are what the Founder of the church himself stated were the marks of the church, showing that she belongs to him. Since Christ built the church, he alone can tell us how we are to recognize it. He has the right to tell us how false forms of the church are to be distinguished. We have marks for the church because we have a Marker. Christ has stamped the church in his image and with his own unique identity (Barry J. York, Hitting the Marks, 3).

The first and best stream which issues out of this fountain of love is faithful and fervent prayer. This extends itself to all things, at all times, throughout the whole course of the child’s life. It is the first and last duty which parents ought to perform to their children, even that which they must do without intermission: “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). Though prayer is a general duty which all Christians owe to one another, it is the special obligation of parents above all others (William Gouge, Building a Godly Home: A Holy Vision for Raising Children, 87).

In Genesis 3:15, God promised another son who would come and crush the serpent, and, by implication, restore — and perfect– the worship to which he had first called Adam in the beginning. . . . There, seated at his Father’s right hand [cf., Heb. 8:1-2], Jesus conducts the worship of heaven; and from there he purifies the worship of his church on earth. . . . The story of human history, from beginning to end, is the story of worship (Reformation Worship, eds., Jonathan Gibson & Mark Earngey, 5, 13, 20).

The Lord willed the new Testament to be written in Greek, because he had determined to bring forth the gospel from the narrow bounds of Judaea into a broader field, and publish it to all people and nations. On this account the Lord selected the Greek language, than which no other was more commonly known by all men, wherein to communicate his gospel to as many countries and persons as possible. He willed also that the heavenly truth of the gospel should be written in Greek in order to provide a confutation of the Gentiles’ idolatry and of the philosophy and wisdom of the Grecians. And, although at that time the Romans had the widest empire, yet Cicero himself, in his oration for the poet Archias, bears witness that the language of the Greeks was more widely extended than that of the Romans. As, therefore, before Christ the holy doctrine was written in that language which was the peculiar and native tongue of the Church; so after Christ all was written in Greek, that they might more easily reach and be propagated to the Church now about to be gathered out of all nations (William Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, 127).

In both Scotland and Ireland, antislavery activism constituted another unmistakable aspect of the Presbyterian fringe. Opposition to slavery is generally viewed as a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century response to the growing horrors of the Atlantic slave trade and the unfair advantage the slave economy held against free white workers. But over a century before and for much different reasons, seventeenth-century Covenanters belied these paradigms. Covenanters of all stripes held unique and long-standing articulations of antislavery thought rooted in their logic and theories of Christian nationhood.

The earliest antislavery Covenanter was Scottish theorist Samuel Rutherford. In Lex, Rex, Rutherford taught that “Slavery of servants to Lords or Masters, such as were of old amongst the Jews, is not natural, but against nature.” Despite its presence in the biblical text, slavery for Rutherford was a malum natura that was only valid if it was a punishment for sin. The “buying and selling of men; which is a miserable consequence of sin,” created “a sort of death, when men are put to the toiling pains of the hireling,” to “hew wood, and draw water continually.” This was contrary to the nature of humanity. People were made in God’s image and therefore “can no more by nature’s law be sold and bought than a religious and sacred thing dedicated to God.” Tying slavery to the state tyranny he discussed in his critiques of Charles I, Rutherford claimed that “Every man by nature is a freeman born, that is, by nature no man comes out of the womb under any civil subjection to King, Prince, or Judge to master, captain, conqueror, teacher.” This was the heart of seventeenth-century Scottish radicalism. Both the individual and the state had the natural right to obey God. Neither the individual nor the state had the natural right to offend God. Both were free to do right. Neither was free to do wrong.

This early birth and long incubation of Covenanter antislavery thought sprang from a different front than that of later activists. Though Covenanters were not Lockean liberals, their articulations of Scottish radicalism’s antislavery were grounded in natural law. They were not biblically literalistic and needed not be. Seventeenth-century paradigms had not yet encountered the commonsense literalism used by nineteenth-century pro-slavery advocates. But Covenanters had long experience with the literalism of figures such as James VI/I. Such conservatives used biblical texts to support the autocratic rule of kings, and Whigs across the British Isles refused to concede this point. Rutherford, like those who followed him, was antislavery because of his distinctive approaches o antityranny and religious liberty. Covenanters perceived their greatest threats in Catholicism’s power over its members and the state’s attempt to make “perpetual Slaves” to “our English Pope.”

The early slavery Covenanters opposed, however, was no metaphorical flourish. It was real oppression tied to their own experiences. Bond slaves from Scotland and Ireland populated the American plantation labor force. Yet to encounter monolithic chattel race slavery, Covenanter notions of bondage arose out of a compilation of forms of coerced labor and man stealing. In the mid-seventeenth century, North African raiders stole people from English towns, city streets were swept to export vagrants, defeated Scottish Royalists and Irish Catholics were deported, and London “spirit rings” stole thousands and shipped them–without indenture contracts–to Barbados and Virginia. In 1660, there were more bond slaves in the British New World than chattel slaves. This number soon included those on the Presbyterian fringe. Many survivors of the 1679 Covenanter debacle at Bothwell Bridge were exiled to the plantations of Barbados. In 1685 [Covenanters] refusing to take the oath of Abjuration renouncing the covenants were shipped to New Jersey (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, 32-33).

This is not a book about the Founders and Christian America advocates per se, but, rather, about one particular group of their detractors. It places forgotten Covenanter voices back into the debate over America’s founding (Joseph S. Moore, Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution, 5).