Open a King James Bible to Acts 13:1 and read the list of leaders in the church at Antioch: "Now there were in the church that was at Antioch certain prophets and teachers; as Barnabas, and Simeon that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen, which had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul." Put a finger on two names. Niger is a Latin word for black. Cyrene was a city on the North African coast. Before Paul's first missionary journey, a man known by a nickname meaning black and a man from Africa were among the teachers who sent him out. Black and African people are in the biblical story, and you have just found two of them yourself.
Look again at what the verse gives you. It states where Lucius came from. It gives Simeon a nickname but no birthplace. Everything that follows builds on keeping those two facts apart. Some people insist the Bible has nothing to do with Africa. Others claim more than any verse says. Both habits fail the same test, because neither one reads the passage closely.
Quonekuia Day, who teaches at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, names one reason the first habit spreads. Speaking in the Unspoken documentary, she says, "We don't teach where we originally come from all the time." When nobody teaches it, the paintings on the wall teach instead. Over four sessions you will learn to read the Bible's own map of the nations and to weigh what a single word can prove. You will test a famous tradition against the passage it claims as its source. Then you will practice saying what you found at the strength the evidence allows, including when someone pushes back. By the end you will have a stack of verification cards you built yourself.