The verse came first and alone: "Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ" (Ephesians 6:5). Sermons preached to enslaved people in the Americas often began and ended there. The reading problem is plain. If slaveholders could quote this verse, and some printed Bibles with the freedom passages removed, how did the people in bondage come to treat the book as their own?
The answer the sources support is that enslaved people largely read more of the Bible than they were given. They read past verse 5 to verse 9. They tested a missionary's application against the saying it claimed to explain. They followed Paul's argument through whole letters, and they placed at the center the Christ the Gospels place at the center. Their reading toward liberation usually worked by restoring the context the preaching had removed, not by inventing new meanings.
The historians and biblical scholars Jude 3 Project has interviewed give that answer real weight, and they refuse to tidy it up. Some enslaved people heard the preaching and walked away from the faith. Most surviving records were written by missionaries or shaped for abolitionist readers. Not every reading the enslaved offered holds up under close study. What follows works through a small set of passages in order, building four reading skills: keeping a verse inside its paragraph, testing an application against its text, following an argument across a letter, and asking why a community leans on some texts more than others. Each passage is read before any conclusion is drawn from it.