Well, is that scripter? That's the question which looms large. Can you find an endorsement of enslavement in the holy book of the Abrahamic faiths?

For all its immediacy in 12 Years a Slave, the question is not a new one. It provoked a civil war for one thing, as the American historian Mark Noll argues in The Civil War As A Theological Crisis. That is, aspiring emancipators did not simply concede to Epps and his ilk that scripture sanctioned slavery, promptly discarding it for Enlightenment principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. Not at all. Rather, as Abraham Lincoln put it in the second inaugural, "both sides read the same Bible". The forces which opposed slavery, wherever they were on the spectrum, also held to the authority of scripture. They simply argued the slavers' interpretation of it was illicit. But who was right?

In the Hebrew Bible slaveholding in ancient Israel was qualified and curtailed in a way it never was in 18th- and 19th-century slavery. More like indentured servitude, rules governing the practice commanded automatic manumission after six years and prohibited any physical violence against slaves. According to Exodus 21, if a master even so much as touches a slave's tooth he is to be freed. 

By the time we reach the New Testament, and Jesus and Paul coming up against Graeco-Roman slavery, we find them clearly constrained by context. So, Jesus heals the centurion's slave but does not demand his emancipation. Paul, though commending a runaway to his former master as "no longer a slave, but better than a slave . . . a dear brother", can only hint at, rather than insist upon, that man being granted his freedom. In a world which was not their own, but occupied by foreign powers with foreign power-systems, the mission of the messiah, and the aims of the apostles to make this known, required some capitulation to — or, better, patience with — injustice. 

That said, traceable across the New Testament are definite trajectories, certain arguments the implications of which are left unstated, as African Americans themselves highlighted throughout the 19th century. The Sermon on the Mount's golden rule, "do as you would be done by", led Daniel Coker to declare in 1810: "It is very evidence, that slavery is contrary to the spirit and nature of the Christian religion." 

Trajectories? Implications? Lest this seem wild retrojection, reading back modern egalitarian values into ancient texts, admit one more consideration. The reason we can talk about trajectories and implications is because the Bible is fundamentally dynamic. It is a sweeping drama, an immense movement driving towards God's ultimate redemption of the world in Christ. And the social consequences which flowed from this — "there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male nor female" — could not but lead to the questioning of, in the words of Solomon Northup, "the idea of a man holding his brother man in servitude".