The claim does not survive a reading of the sources. Its parallels fall apart in the Egyptian texts themselves. The Christian dates were worked out on Christian grounds. And the theory, by Dr. Eric Mason’s account, was written by nineteenth-century European mystics, not recovered from African archives. What circulates as reclaimed Black memory turns out to be, in large part, a white invention.
Correcting the facts is the easy part. The harder part is seeing why the meme lands with such force. For many Black readers, it was never really a question about Egyptology. It is a question about ownership: whether this faith was handed to their people by the same hands that held the chains, and whether something older and truer lies beneath it. Six voices take up different layers of that question: a historian of early African Christianity, a church historian of North Africa, a New Testament scholar, a theology professor, a pastor who has traced the theory’s sources, and a Nigerian priest who works where traditional religion is still lived. Together they show that the honest answer does not have to be defensive. It is a fuller account of where Black Christian faith comes from.