The same letter that tells servants to obey their masters also tells husbands to love their wives and parents to raise their children. Enslaved African Americans noticed. They did not, as a group, throw Paul away because slaveholders preached him. From freedom petitions in the 1770s onward, they read his letters more completely than their owners did and turned them against slavery. Dr. Lisa Bowens, who teaches New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, traces that tradition from the 1700s to the middle of the twentieth century. What she found was not avoidance. It was argument.
That answer runs against a story many people treat as settled. So it helps to see where that story comes from, and then to look closely at the passages Black readers actually used and how they used them.
Where did the idea that Black readers rejected Paul come from?
It comes from a real and painful memory. Howard Thurman, in Jesus and the Disinherited, recalled that his grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, would not let him read Paul to her. The slaveholder’s minister had preached to the enslaved that they should obey their masters, and after freedom Ambrose wanted nothing else from Paul except 1 Corinthians 13. Bowens counts that story among the reasons she wrote African American Readings of Paul.
Her concern was what happened to the story afterward. She kept hearing it at academic conferences, where it had become the assumed account of how African Americans approached Paul in general: an aversion born of a history in which his words were used to sanction slavery. That prompted a historical question. In Bowens’s words, “I started wondering, is this really the case?”
She answered it by reading the documents: slave petitions, essays, autobiographies, sermons. The writers were quoting Paul, echoing him, and arguing from him. One grandmother’s refusal is part of the record. It is not the whole record, and it was never meant to speak for everyone.
What did the 1774 petitioners see in the household instructions?
Start with the text that caused the trouble. Paul’s household instructions, found in Ephesians 5-6 and Colossians 3, address the members of a first-century household one pair at a time: wives and husbands, children and parents, servants and masters. Slaveholders lifted one line out of that unit. Ephesians 6:5 reads, “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.”
The petitioners stayed inside the same unit and read the lines around it. Bowens points to a 1774 petition sent by enslaved Africans to the government of Massachusetts, which cited Paul’s words about the family: husbands loving their wives, children obeying their parents. A few verses before the instruction to servants, Ephesians 5:25 says, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.” A few verses after it come instructions for fathers raising children.
Bowens summarizes the petition’s logic this way: “if you’re saying this is a Christian nation, and we’re supposed to abide by the words of scripture, then how can we as husbands love our wives when part of slavery is separating the family?” The argument is exegetical as much as moral. Paul’s instructions assume a household that stays together. A husband cannot give himself for a wife who can be sold away from him. A father cannot raise a child who can be taken from him.
That made the argument hard to answer. A slaveholder could not dismiss it without dismissing the very chapter he had been preaching. The petitioners did not deny that the passage addressed servants. They held a nation that called itself Christian to all of it, and the institution could not obey most of it.
Why did Acts 17:26 carry so much weight?
A second petition, written in 1779 to the government of Connecticut, cited Acts 17:26. According to Bowens, the petitioners used it against the idea that the white race was superior to the Black race.
The verse sits inside Luke’s account of Paul’s speech to philosophers in Athens. Paul is not addressing a church. He is speaking to Gentiles who do not share Israel’s Scriptures, and he begins with creation: the God who made the world does not live in temples built by hands and does not need anything from people. Then comes the line the petitioners used. In the KJV, Acts 17:26 says God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.”
The surrounding argument matters. Paul’s point is that every people owes its existence to one Creator and that every people is called to seek him. Common origin is part of his case that no nation stands outside God’s claim or above another before him. Many modern translations render the opening phrase “from one man” instead of “of one blood,” reflecting differences among the manuscripts. Either way, the claim is the same: humanity has a single source.
The petitioners followed the verse’s own logic one step further. If all nations come from one, then a hierarchy that ranks one race as made for rule and another as made for service has no footing in this text. The reading is strong because it does not ask Acts 17 to say more than it says. It only refuses to let anyone ignore what it does say.
Bowens adds a historical observation that sharpens the point: “these petitions are before the abolitionist movement.” By her account, enslaved people were making careful biblical arguments for freedom before an organized movement existed to make them on their behalf.
What did “new creature” mean to people whose bodies were treated as property?
Paul also appears in conversion narratives. Enslaved converts described profound encounters with God, including visions and trances, and they often told those stories in Paul’s words. Some reached for 2 Corinthians 12 and Paul’s account of being caught up to the third heaven. Many reached for the language of new creation.
Second Corinthians 5:17 reads in the KJV, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” The word rendered “new creature” can also be translated “new creation,” which is how many modern versions put it. In its setting, Paul is talking about what union with Christ means. Those in Christ no longer belong to the old order, and a few verses earlier, in 2 Corinthians 5:1-4, he speaks about the present body as an earthly house that groans while awaiting what God will give.
Enslaved converts described their bodies as made new, and these were bodies that were beaten and tortured. For that reason Bowens concludes that “these conversion experiences were not just religious or spiritual experiences, but they were also political experiences.” Laws had been written to deny their humanity. An encounter with God that declared them new creations testified that they were made in God’s image and that God loved them, including their Black bodies.
Converts also used Ephesians 2:10, which in the KJV begins, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works.” The verse answered a specific lie. Some proponents of slavery told enslaved people creation stories in which God did not create them at all, or created them only for manual labor. Against that counterfeit account, the testimony that a convert was God’s workmanship was a direct contradiction.
An honest reading should mark where text ends and application begins. In context, Paul’s language in both passages concerns new life in Christ, not a political charter. But the converts’ application does not distort it. A God who makes people new in Christ is the same God who made them in the first place, and Paul’s new creation includes the body rather than escaping it. The converts drew out an implication their oppressors had every reason to hide.
Isn’t this just reading your own needs into Paul?
This is the strongest objection. If slaveholders found slavery in Paul and enslaved people found freedom in him, perhaps the letters simply return whatever each reader brings. Bowens herself calls the African American tradition a protest or resistance hermeneutic, a way of reading that pushes back against how many white interpreters handled Paul. Does that admit the reading was driven by need instead of by the text?
The answer is in how the arguments were built. The petitions read the household instructions as a unit and Acts 17 in light of Paul’s argument about creation. The slaveholding reading required isolating one sentence and keeping enslaved people from the rest of the letter. The petitioners’ reading required more of the text, not less. That difference can be checked by anyone who opens Ephesians. Bowens describes their stance as a claim about Scripture itself: “they were willing to stand up and use scripture and say, this is the way scripture is to be interpreted.”
The hard part should still be named. Paul does tell servants to obey. He addresses enslaved believers inside a social order he did not create, and his instructions describe how they should live faithfully there. Describing conduct within an institution is different from commanding that the institution exist. The same passage also turns to masters. Ephesians 6:9 tells them to give up threatening, “knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.” The household code places owner and enslaved under one Lord who does not rank them.
Galatians 3:28 states the same conviction in another setting: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Paul is arguing that Gentiles become heirs of Abraham’s promise through faith, not through the law, and the verse explains who belongs to that family. Everyone baptized into Christ belongs on the same terms. The categories still existed in Paul’s world, and he still wrote to slaves and masters. What changed was their weight before God. Colossians makes the link explicit: in Colossians 3:11, just before its own household instructions, Paul says that in the new humanity there is neither bond nor free, but Christ is all. So the household code is not a rival teaching that cancels Galatians. It is written to people Paul already regards as equal members of one family.
That is why many of these interpreters could adopt the distinction Frederick Douglass drew between slaveholding Christianity and the Christianity of Christ. The distinction was measured against the text: a Christianity that broke up the families Ephesians assumes, ranked the peoples Acts says came from one, and denied the standing Galatians gives every believer was failing the letters it quoted. Christians still discuss how far Paul expected these convictions to reshape the social structures of his day. What the text does not support is the institution the slaveholders built on it.
Why did slaveholders fear Black readers?
The false creation stories and the push to keep enslaved people from learning to read belong together. If an owner is giving you his own version of creation, he needs to limit your access to the book that would correct it. Bowens points to Jupiter Hammon, whom she calls a controversial figure for several reasons, who urged enslaved people to learn to read so they could read Scripture for themselves instead of relying on the slaveholder’s minister.
Bowens borrows a phrase from Brad Braxton to describe what happened next: “they seize hermeneutical control when they’re interpreting these scriptures for themselves.” This is the lasting point of the history. The slaveholders’ reading of Paul could only survive where they controlled who read him. Once enslaved people could open the letter themselves, the single verse lost its power, because the household code, the speech in Athens and the language of new creation were all sitting on the same pages.
The method those readers used is open to anyone. Read the whole passage the verse belongs to. Follow the argument the author is making. Let that argument, not a reader’s interest, set the verse’s limits. The petitioners of 1774 and 1779 did exactly that, and the Paul they found could not be made to defend slavery.