You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God ordained podcast on the internet.

I'm Pete Ends. And I'm Jared Bias.

Welcome everyone to this episode of the Bible for Normal People. Today, we have with us Emerson

Power, who's a biblical studies professor at Messiah College. And it was a very interesting

conversation we brought him in because Pete, you had heard him before. Yeah, he came to Eastern

University a couple of years ago. He gave a talk on this topic, which we're going to talk about in a

second. And it was just very impressive and really awakening. And just, you know, listen,

do you hear people talk about things they know something about and you don't know much about it at

all. And I was just very impressive. And I felt like I was missing out on so much. I just knew I

wanted to keep talking to Emerson about this topic. And we want to be we want to be clear about

the topic. So we're putting it off because we want to talk about a little bit. It's biblical

interpretation in the antebellum narratives of the enslaved. Right. And that comes from the

subtitle of his book. And so let's just talk a little bit about what that means. We're talking

about biblical interpretation, how the Bible was interpreted in the antebellum narratives of

the enslaved. What's the antebellum narratives of the enslaved before the Civil War? Right. So

while they're enslaved, there's these narratives that historians like Emerson have been able to

recover and read and see how the Bible is being used in these letters. And he calls them narratives.

I think there's letters and other parts of texts. Well, they're telling their story. Right.

And from the point of view of those who were formerly enslaved. So this is these stories are really

being documented, let's say after the end of the Civil War. But it's just a wonderful

window into really the nature of biblical interpretation that we're all doing things like

appropriating texts in ways that are meaningful to us. And I just thought it was a fascinating

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