How Did Enslaved People Read the Bible

Enslavers preached the Bible to the people they held in bondage, and they preached it selectively. The record left by people who escaped shows what many of those listeners did with it. They argued with it, read past the edited sermons, sang about it in secret, and drew a line between the faith of Jesus and the faith that kept them enslaved. Some walked away from it entirely. Almost none of them simply absorbed it.

This guide traces that history through the work of Dr. Emerson Powery, who teaches at Messiah College and co-wrote The Genesis of Liberation with Rodney Sadler. You will build a timeline from the evidence, read three passages the way enslaved interpreters read them, and then turn the same questions on your own Bible reading. It works for one person with a notebook, or for a group over one long session or two shorter ones. If you split it, stop after the Scripture readings.

What kind of record is this?

Before reading what enslaved people concluded, it helps to know where the evidence comes from. Lisa Fields put the popular assumption plainly in her conversation with Powery: “people think slaves were kind of just taking scripture and weren’t critically thinking through that.” Testing that assumption means looking at the documents, and the documents have a particular shape.

Powery’s main sources are the narratives written by formerly enslaved people. He prefers to call them freedom narratives, because “none of the narratives actually come from anyone who was enslaved at the time they wrote.” Every author had escaped or been freed, and every author had gained some literacy. Powery reports a historian’s estimate that only a small percentage of the enslaved could read. So these writers were unusual. Powery is direct about it: “they’re from this small group, but they are representative.” They tell stories about many others who never wrote anything down.

The record also changed over time. Powery explains that when the abolitionist Theodore Weld published Slavery As It Is and called for more firsthand accounts, the narratives found a northern white Christian audience. After that, he says, their themes narrowed and became more Christian. Authors needed income and wanted readers. Earlier narratives had more freedom, and a few tell their story largely without God.

That is the first historical skill this guide asks of you. A source can be honest and still be shaped by who was expected to read it. Keep that in mind through everything that follows.

Build the timeline

Get a long sheet of paper or a whiteboard. Draw a line. Mark the Civil War, 1861 to 1865, near the right end. Then place the following items, all drawn from what Powery describes. Some have dates he gives; some do not. Put undated items below the line, in the rough period where they belong.

• Olaudah Equiano’s narrative, which Powery dates to 1789. As a boy on a ship, Equiano watched his master’s lips move over a book, assumed the book was talking, and later put his ear to it. It said nothing to him.
• Gatherings in the brush arbors, hidden outdoor meetings where Scripture was sung and people encouraged one another.
• Harriet Jacobs’s account of guest preachers brought to address the enslaved. Powery summarizes her memory this way: “we all knew the sermon that they were gonna preach.” They listened, then got up and walked out.
• Jacobs’s story of a traveling minister who began urging decent food and treatment, then started questioning slavery itself. When the enslaved listeners warmed to him, he was never invited back.
• Randolph’s narrative, which Powery dates to 1839, containing the image of Jesus himself on the auction block.
• Weld’s call for more narratives, which Powery places in the late 1830s.
• Samuel Ward’s narrative, which Powery says was published in London in 1856.
• William Anderson’s narrative, which Powery dates to 1859.
• Frederick Douglass’s account, told more fully in his later autobiographies, of hearing his master object to teaching a slave to read, and of finding damp, scattered pages of Scripture and drying them out.
• Henry Bibb, who escaped to Canada and was caught repeatedly while returning for his family, found once with a tiny pocket Bible.
• After emancipation: a rise in Exodus and resurrection themes.

Now step back. On the timeline itself, write only dates and events. On sticky notes or in a separate color, write what each event might mean. Keep the two apart. The walk-out Jacobs describes is an event. Calling it theological judgment is an interpretation. Both may be right, but they are different kinds of claims, and a careful reader knows which is which.

For a group, assign each person one or two items and have them place their own. Then ask whoever placed the Weld entry to explain how it might affect every narrative to its right. That one conversation usually does more than a lecture on sources.

Read three passages the way they did

Literacy mattered because it gave people direct access to the text. Powery says of Douglass’s discovery, “There was something about getting access to literacy that was very important.” But access was only the first step. The enslaved readers Powery studied also wanted to know, in his words, “How to read it well.” These three passages show what that looked like. Read each one aloud before discussing it.

Ephesians 6:5-9

Slaveholding preachers favored verse 5: “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). Powery describes one narrator who said he had heard many sermons on that verse and never one on what Paul says next: “And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him” (Ephesians 6:9).

Observe before you interpret. Who is addressed in verse 5? Who in verse 9? Whose Master is in heaven? What does “respect of persons” mean? (It is older English for favoritism or partiality.) Then notice that enslaved readers did not all respond the same way. Powery says William Anderson mostly left the command alone and drew close to Paul as a man who was beaten and abused on his travels. Faithful readers today still discuss how far this passage speaks to slavery as an institution. The narrator’s complaint stands either way: preaching verse 5 alone is not reading the passage.

Genesis 9:20-27

The so-called curse of Ham was used to claim that Africans were destined for slavery. Read the passage and find the curse. Genesis 9:25 says, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” Powery describes Samuel Ward pressing two points: Noah had been drinking when he spoke, so why build a slave system on those words? And the curse falls on Canaan, not Ham. Ward was asking what the text actually says before accepting what was claimed from it.

2 Kings 5:20-27

This one is stranger. Gehazi, Elisha’s servant, secretly takes payment from the healed Syrian commander Naaman, and Naaman’s leprosy passes to him. The KJV ends, “And he went out from his presence a leper as white as snow” (2 Kings 5:27). Powery says William Anderson argued that this was the origin of whiteness, a curse tied to greed, as a direct answer to those who claimed blackness was the curse.

Powery adds a detail worth noticing: “the Hebrew text actually doesn’t have white,” and “that’s the way the King James has it translated.” That cuts against Anderson’s argument as exegesis. So ask the harder question. Was Anderson reading this passage carefully, or turning his opponents’ method back on them? What does his move reveal about how the racial theology around him was built?

What they sang before freedom, and after

Many people assume the Exodus was the central story of enslaved Christians. Powery found otherwise in the narratives: “there is very little within the slave narrative tradition prior to the Civil War that draws on the exodus motif.” He says people still talked about Moses, but “the exodus motif becomes more important in the slave narrative tradition post civil War.” Before that, the weight fell on the cross. Powery points to studies of the spirituals showing many songs about Jesus’s suffering and crucifixion with comparatively few about resurrection, because the singers were still in the middle of their own suffering.

Look back at your timeline. Where does the Exodus emphasis appear? What changed in people’s circumstances at that point? This is the historical storyteller’s warning in its simplest form: do not read a later emphasis back into an earlier period. The story a community tells itself shifts as its conditions shift.

Alongside the suffering ran a steady hope. Powery describes a shared sense that “trouble will not last always,” and he stresses that community made endurance possible: “this collectiveness, this being together was really important.”

The ones who walked away

This history is not a tidy success story, and a guide that pretends it is would distort it. Powery notes that some narrators describe family members, often grandparents, who abandoned Christianity because of how it was lived in America. One narrator, worn down by sermons on obedience, said he would keep to the God of his African ancestors instead. Randolph recorded a tradition among some enslaved people that Jesus, because he suffered, was not quite the same as God, though Powery says this kind of reflection is rare in the narratives.

Powery does not treat the people who left as failures. “It’s easier for me to understand the people who walked away than it is those who held up,” he says. Then he turns the question around: “we need to try to understand what they tapped into.” The point is not to shame anyone who leaves. It is to ask what those who stayed found in Scripture that held under that weight.

Facilitators should give this section room. Some people in the group may carry real anger at how the Bible has been used against them or their families. Let that be said. Nobody needs to resolve it before the session ends.

Questions for discussion

1. Look at your timeline. Which item, if it turned out to be inaccurate, would most change your picture of how enslaved people read Scripture? Why that one?
2. The later narratives were written partly for a northern white Christian audience. How should that affect the way you weigh their religious content? Does it make them less reliable, or only reliable in a different way?
3. In Ephesians 6, the narrator objected to what was left out. Where have you heard a passage preached or quoted with its surrounding verses quietly removed? What did the missing verses change?
4. Compare Samuel Ward’s reading of Genesis 9 with William Anderson’s reading of 2 Kings 5. Which one is closer to careful exegesis, and which one is closer to argument by counterattack? Can both be useful in different ways?
5. Before freedom, the cross carried more weight than the Exodus. What might a community in suffering see in the crucifixion that a comfortable community could miss?
6. Powery finds the people who walked away easier to understand than those who held on. Do you agree? What do you think the ones who held on found?
7. Powery says “the connection between critical investigation of scriptures, humanization, collective identity, these things go together.” Where do you see those three things together in your own church or community, and where do you see them pulled apart?

Carry it into your own reading

Enslaved readers tested what they heard against the text itself. You can practice the same discipline this week with far less at stake.

Choose one verse you know mainly from sermons, social media or a well-worn quotation. Before looking up any commentary, read the whole chapter it comes from. Write down three things: who is speaking, who is being addressed, and what comes immediately before and after the verse. Then write one sentence on whether the usage you have heard fits the passage, stretches it, or edits it. If you are in a group, bring your sentence back next time and let someone else check your reading against the chapter.

Powery says of these interpreters, “their story is our story.” That is a claim about inheritance, and inheritance carries a responsibility. People who were punished for learning to read still found a way to ask what the book actually said. The question for anyone holding a Bible freely today is whether we ask it as carefully.