Yes. Your skin and your people matter to Jesus, and not as a footnote. New Testament scholar Marcus Jerkins argues that Luke and Acts are built to show it: across both books, God keeps choosing the people his culture looked down on, and when the gospel first reaches toward the ends of the earth, the person at the center of the scene is a dark-skinned African. That is a reading of the text, so it has to be tested against the text. Here is how it holds up.
Jerkins chose these two books because he found in them what he calls some of the most potent evidence for the case. He prefers “Luke and Acts” to treating them as one composite work: the second is a sequel to the first, but one is a gospel and the other a history of the church. That matters for reading. Luke’s gospel sets a pattern in the ministry of Jesus. Acts shows the same pattern at work as the message travels. A theme that runs through both is part of Luke’s argument about who salvation is for.
One family, traced to one father
Matthew traces Jesus back to Abraham. Luke runs the line all the way back and ends it this way: “Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God” (Luke 3:38).
Most readers take this as a signal that Jesus belongs to all humanity, beyond Israel. Luke has just recorded the voice from heaven calling Jesus God’s Son, and now he calls Adam the son of God. Jerkins reads the echo as deliberate: “Luke wants us to think of Jesus as another kind of Adam, as an Adam that comes to bring on the new age.” Paul makes the idea explicit: “The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45). Jerkins admits this emphasis gets him in trouble with a lot of scholars. The universal scope of the genealogy is widely accepted. The specific new-Adam reading in Luke is his proposal, a reasonable one that a reader should weigh as such.
Either way, the genealogy answers part of the reader’s question. If every line runs back to one father, no people has a separate or lesser origin. In Jerkins’s words, “every color comes from Adam.” The history of racism has often claimed that some peoples came from somewhere else. Luke’s list closes that door, and Paul says the same in Athens: God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26).
Does faithfulness mean ignoring color?
Many Christians were taught that the faithful move is to be colorblind. Jerkins disagrees. His claim is that “God made black people black,” and that color belongs to a person’s identity: “blackness is that color that God gave black people, and God ordained that color.” He adds the guard rail that keeps this from becoming a new hierarchy: “but that color never in any way makes them less than another color.”
The verse usually raised against this is Galatians 3:28, where Paul says there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, in Christ. Lisa Fields points out that readers who use it to flatten ethnic difference rarely use it to erase the difference between men and women. Paul is describing equal standing before God. Revelation 7:9 confirms that distinctions survive: the redeemed multitude is still recognizable as coming from every nation, kindred, people and tongue. Difference remains. What ends is its use as a ladder.
Is it anachronistic to find race in the first century?
This is the strongest objection to the whole reading. Modern racism, built on biological theories, came into full force after the Enlightenment, and Jerkins grants that he is not finding that system in Luke.
What he finds is an older pattern he calls proto-racism: linking a people’s color to their nation and treating that appearance as a sign of shameful character. Scholars call the broader habit physiognomy, the belief that physical appearance reveals what kind of person you are. Jerkins says a form of it aimed at Ethiopians and other dark-skinned peoples runs through a lot of Greek literature. He names Philo of Alexandria and Pseudo-Aristotle, and he describes ancient art that painted Ethiopians to scare away demons on the theory that they were too ugly for demons to bear.
These are Jerkins’s historical claims, and a reader should hold them as his scholarly assertions until checking them. If he is right about the backdrop, the New Testament sounds different. His conclusion: “God saw that problem, and God used black people to say that their skin is not a problem to me.” And: “I made them black, and I loved them as black people.”
Luke’s gospel of reversal
The case for Acts 8 depends on a pattern that Luke builds long before Acts 8. Jerkins puts it memorably: “God is a consummate script flipper,” and “Luke goes out of his way to show how God flips the script and chooses people that others would not choose.” The gospel bears that out from the first sermon.
In Nazareth, Jesus reads from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor” (Luke 4:18). The hometown crowd approves until he explains who has received God’s favor before. In a famine, Elijah was sent to a widow in Sarepta of Sidon, and of all the lepers in Israel only Naaman the Syrian was cleansed (Luke 4:25-27). Both are foreigners. The crowd tries to throw him off a cliff. From his first public words, the scandal of Jesus in Luke is the people God chooses.
The pattern keeps going. In Luke 7, a Roman centurion sends for Jesus, and Jesus says of this Gentile, “I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel” (Luke 7:9). Later in the same chapter, a woman known as a sinner washes his feet in a Pharisee’s house, and Jesus holds her up as the one who understood him. In Luke 10, a lawyer asks who his neighbor is, and Jesus makes a Samaritan, a member of a despised group, the hero of the story. In the same chapter Jesus thanks the Father that “thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes” (Luke 10:21).
Then come the plain statements. In the sermon on the plain: “Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20), with woe pronounced on the rich a few verses later. To the Pharisees who mock him about money: “for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God” (Luke 16:15). At the end, a man from Cyrene in North Africa carries the cross (Luke 23:26), and women are the first witnesses at the empty tomb.
None of these passages mentions skin color, and they should not be made to. Their combined weight is a portrait of a God whose favor repeatedly lands on the outsider the respectable people had ruled out. That portrait is what makes the next step readable. If God in Luke honors foreigners, the poor and the dismissed as a habit, a reader of Acts should expect the same treatment for a people the Greek world mocked. Jerkins draws the line straight through: because God likes to flip the script, “black people are central in the mind of God when it comes to the mission of salvation.”
The Ethiopian and the humiliated servant
Acts has a map. Jesus tells his disciples, “ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The book follows it. In Acts 8 Philip preaches in Samaria, and immediately afterward an angel and the Spirit send him to one traveler on a desert road.
Luke’s introduction of that traveler is full of honor: “a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship” (Acts 8:27). He runs a royal treasury, rides in a chariot and reads Scripture. Jerkins adds that for an ancient reader an Ethiopian was understood to be dark-skinned, and he faults later scholarship for being reluctant to say so. He also suggests the man had probably not been able to worship fully in Jerusalem, since he was most likely a Gentile and a eunuch, and Deuteronomy 23:1 restricted eunuchs from the assembly. He came a long way and went home still outside. God sends a messenger after him.
Luke could have said only that the man was reading Isaiah. He quotes the lines instead: “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth: In his humiliation his judgment was taken away: and who shall declare his generation? for his life is taken from the earth” (Acts 8:32-33). The plain meaning comes first. The eunuch asks whom the prophet means, and Philip “began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus” (Acts 8:35). The humiliated servant is Christ.
Jerkins proposes a second layer. In the ancient view he describes, Ethiopia was associated with humiliation, and he cites Philo, commenting on the rivers of Eden in Genesis, as saying that Ethiopia in Scripture means humiliation. A dark-skinned man is reading about humiliation, and the humiliation in the passage belongs to Jesus, who took it on. Jerkins concludes that “God through Christ identifies with this man in his blackness, not in spite of it.” Luke never states this layer outright, and it rests on Jerkins’s reading of the background. It does fit the passage: it explains why Luke quotes these exact lines, and it matches the reversal pattern of the gospel. Without it, the main point still stands. An outsider reads about a suffering servant and learns the servant came for him.
The baptism is told with unusual detail. Most baptisms in Acts are reported in a clause. Here Luke says “they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him” (Acts 8:38), and Jerkins treats this as the only scene in Acts that shows the baptizer going into the water with the one baptized. Then Philip is caught away by the Spirit, and the man “went on his way rejoicing” (Acts 8:39). An angel, the Spirit’s direction and a miraculous departure, all arranged for one person: Jerkins notes that outside the accounts of Paul, Acts rarely shows God doing this much to reach a single soul.
Is Ethiopia the ends of the earth?
Jerkins says that in the ancient world Ethiopia was understood as the ends of the earth, so the conversion in Acts 8 signals the last term of the map in Acts 1:8. Many interpreters read the map differently and take Rome, where Acts ends with Paul preaching, as the book’s fulfillment of that phrase. The two readings can sit together: Rome is where the narrative arrives, while the Ethiopian is an early sign of how far the message will go. Right after this scene, Paul is converted in Acts 9 and Cornelius in Acts 10, and the mission to the Gentiles opens wide.
Jerkins argues that “God centered a black life to signify the salvation of the nations.” The reasoning follows from the reversal pattern: if God would reach a man from a people the world called distant and shameful, nobody is out of reach. He is careful about the limit of the claim. “God honors this man and his blackness as God honors every person’s color.” The Ethiopian’s place in the story shows the reach of the gospel, and that reach includes everyone.
What follows for a Black reader
The historical meaning comes first: Luke tells the story of salvation in a way that deliberately honors people his culture dismissed, and he places a dark-skinned African at a turning point in it. Application has to grow from that.
Some young people look at the violence and loss around them and conclude, as one young man told Lisa Fields on a college campus, that their people must be cursed. That conclusion feels like reading the evidence. Luke and Acts read the evidence differently. Their God identifies with the humiliated, blesses the poor, praises a foreigner’s faith and sends an angel after a single Ethiopian on a desert road. Suffering in this world is real, and these texts promise no exemption from it. Suffering is still no proof of rejection. The one Isaiah describes as humiliated is the Son of God.
Jerkins names what Jesus restores: “we are God’s children, but we have lost our sense of being God’s children.” The Ethiopian came to Jerusalem to worship and left without full access. The gospel did not wait for him to come back. It followed him down the road, read his own Scripture back to him and sent him home rejoicing, a child of God who knew it.