Where does Africa stand in Scripture, and what did the early African church give everyone else? The record answers more plainly than many readers expect. Africans appear in the opening chapters of the church’s story. African churches built lasting traditions of their own in Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia. And at least one leading scholar argues that African writers shaped how the wider church reads the Bible. For believers, that makes the faith an inheritance, not a loan.
You can work through this alone in about an hour, then spend a week on the practice near the end. A group can split it into two meetings: the first on the Scripture and the distinctions, the second after everyone has done the week’s practice. The teaching draws on a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Michael Glerup, executive director of the Center for Early African Christianity.
Four distinctions to hold before you start
Most confusion on this subject comes from mixing up claims that sound alike.
- Presence and centrality. A faith can exist in a region and still depend entirely on outsiders. Centrality means the region gave something back that others relied on.
- Textbooks and history. A gap in what you were taught tells you about the teaching. It does not tell you what happened.
- Manuscript dates and tradition dates. A 14th-century copy can preserve something much older. Saying it does is an argument, not a reading of the page.
- Later influence and origin. A place can rise to great influence centuries after a movement began without being where it began.
The third is the hardest to hold. When an old tradition matters to us, it is tempting to quote the earliest date anyone has proposed as if it were printed on the page.
Step one: Africa in the text
Read Scripture as what it is. Acts is narrative. It describes what happened. It does not hand down a mission strategy. A Psalm is poetry. It speaks in images and hopes, not in a timeline. Reading each by its genre keeps us from claiming more than the text says.
Read Acts 2:1-11. Luke lists the places the Pentecost crowd came from, among them people from “in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene” (Acts 2:10). The list places Africans in Jerusalem on the day the church’s preaching began.
Read Acts 8:26-39. Philip meets “a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians” (Acts 8:27). He is reading Isaiah, asks for help understanding it, is baptized, and goes home. A common mistake is to picture modern Ethiopia here. Most interpreters understand the Ethiopia of Acts as the kingdom south of Egypt along the Nile. Either way, an African official carries the gospel home in the church’s first generation.
Read Acts 13:1-3. Among the leaders at Antioch are “Simeon that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene” (Acts 13:1). Cyrene lay in North Africa, so Lucius is clearly African. Simeon’s nickname is a Latin word meaning black, and many readers take it as a sign of African origin, but the text does not say where he came from. Then notice what this group does next. It sends out Barnabas and Saul.
Read Psalm 68:31: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” In Hebrew the second name is Cush, the land south of Egypt. This is a poetic picture of distant nations turning to Israel’s God. Christians have long read it as fulfilled in African conversion. That is a reasonable reading, but it is an interpretation of poetry, not a prediction with a date attached.
Observation prompt: On paper, sort these four passages into two columns: what the text plainly says, and what readers have drawn from it. Which column turned out longer than you expected?
Step two: three traditions on one continent
Scripture shows Africans at the beginning. The next question is whether African churches grew into traditions of their own. Glerup’s work points to three you should be able to name.
The Coptic tradition
This is the Christianity of Egypt. Glerup notes that the church most people call Coptic is the Egyptian Orthodox tradition. His center runs a certificate program in early African Christian studies in Cairo, and about half its students come from that church. You are studying a living church, not a museum piece.
The Nubian tradition
Nubia was the land along the Nile south of Egypt, and it is the tradition most often left out. Glerup says the church history book he read in seminary had “no mention of Ethiopian Christianity,” and none of Nubian Christianity either. A trained seminary graduate could finish his degree without meeting these churches. That says something about the curriculum, not about the past.
The Ethiopian tradition
Glerup’s most detailed evidence is Ethiopian. His center is studying 14th-century manuscripts of the Psalter, which includes the Psalms, biblical canticles, the Song of Songs, the Praises of Mary and an Ethiopian writing called the Gate of Light. He counts these among the oldest written, notated songs known in Sub-Saharan Africa. He argues they reflect an oral tradition reaching back to the fourth to sixth century, but he is plain about the gap: “We just don’t have earlier copies.” The older date is his inference from the shape of the tradition. It may be right, and it is still an inference.
He dates the churches carved into rock with similar care, saying “you can trace ’em back until probably the eighth century.” A careful learner repeats a scholar’s hedges along with his conclusions.
These songs are the concrete case behind a broader claim Glerup makes, that Africans have prayed in African languages since the fourth century, both in Egypt and North Africa and farther south. On its own that claim is a summary. The Ethiopian Psalter is where you can see it: Scripture and hymns gathered, copied and sung within one African church’s own worship.
Step three: what Africa gave the whole church
Presence is established. Centrality needs evidence that others depended on Africa. Glerup offers two kinds.
The first concerns reading the Bible. He spent almost 15 years on the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, a 29-volume collection of early church commentary. The project set out to trace how the early church interpreted Scripture, not to highlight Africa. Over those years, Glerup says, the team realized that the early church fathers, especially those from Africa, shaped how Christians read Scripture. A conclusion that turns up in research not aimed at it carries extra weight.
He also refuses credit for discovering it. When he brings this material to African American pastors, he says, the response is often “what took you so long?” He agrees, and he credits African American scholars who were researching and self-publishing in this area before his center took it up.
The second kind of evidence is an argument for religious freedom. Glerup says the first people who argued for it came from Africa, and he reads from the North African writer Tertullian: “One man’s religion neither harms nor helps another man.” Then he reads the line that carries the argument: “It is surely no part of religion to compel religion to which free will and not force should lead us.”
That last sentence does not only ask rulers to be tolerant. It makes a claim about what faith is. If faith has to be freely given, then forced faith is not faith. Glerup ties the argument to the position of Christians as a pressured minority in the Roman world.
A skeptical historian would press on both points. Much of the influence Glerup describes centers on Alexandria and Carthage, Greek- and Latin-speaking cities of the Roman Mediterranean, so how much of it reaches beyond them into Nubia and Ethiopia? And was Tertullian stating a principle for everyone, or pleading for his own persecuted community? Glerup’s judgment rests on long work in the sources, but these questions are settled by reading those sources: how often commentators across the centuries cite African writers, and what Tertullian argues in the full passage around those lines.
Step four: the identity this gives
Now the predictable misconception. Some readers finish this history and conclude that Christianity is really an African religion, which simply reverses the old claim that it is a European one. Glerup closes off both. He says the faith “has been shaped by Africa,” and adds that from its beginning it has been a world religion. “It’s just not been a European religion,” he says. His center’s atlas traces Christianity from Ireland to China by the seventh century. He calls the old missionary demand that Africans become European before becoming Christian what it is: “that’s nonsense.”
So the identity this history gives is belonging, not ownership. Lisa Fields answers the claim that Christianity is the white man’s religion with the core fact: “Africans were Christians before slavery.” Jude 3 Project holds the same ground, that the faith took root in Africa centuries before it reached much of Europe, so following Jesus is no betrayal of Black identity.
That does not erase a harder fact. For many Black families, the faith arrived through people who enslaved them and twisted it. Both things can be true at once. The faith was misused by those who forced it, and it is far older than they were. Group leaders should leave room for this and not hurry anyone past it.
A week with one tradition
Choose one tradition: Coptic, Nubian or Ethiopian. Spend a week learning it from good sources rather than summaries. Glerup recommends the Center for Early African Christianity’s website, which offers a study guide, and Christian History magazine’s special edition on early African Christianity, available free as a PDF. He notes that “you don’t have to go to seminary to understand it.”
- Day one. Find your tradition on a map. Mark where it sits along the Nile or the Horn of Africa, and note what lies to its north and south.
- Day two. Read one overview article. List three claims it makes, each in a single sentence.
- Day three. Sort those claims as established record, scholarly inference, or later tradition. Note any claim that does not say which it is.
- Day four. Read a short piece by an early African Christian writer, or a reliable selection of one. Glerup warns that these writers “do digress quite a bit,” so read slowly and write one sentence on the main point.
- Day five. Return to Acts 8 or Psalm 68:31. Write how your reading of the passage has changed, if it has, and what in your week caused the change.
- Days six and seven. Explain your tradition aloud, in two minutes, to one person. Write down the question they asked that you could not answer. That is where your learning goes next.
Questions for discussion
For groups: begin the second meeting by having each person name their tradition and read their day-three sorting aloud. Let disagreements about which category a claim belongs in run for a while. That conversation is the skill this guide is trying to build.
- Which of the four distinctions did you find yourself breaking during the week, and how did you catch it?
- Glerup’s seminary textbook left out Nubia and Ethiopia. What do you think decides which churches make it into a standard history?
- Luke names the leaders at Antioch, including a man from Cyrene, just before they send out Barnabas and Saul. What, if anything, does that list imply about who led the early church, and what would be reading too much into it?
- Tertullian argued that compelled religion is not religion. Does that argument depend on Christian convictions, or could someone outside the faith accept it?
- Compare two statements: Christianity is an African religion; Christianity was shaped by Africa but belongs to no single people. Which does the evidence in this guide support better, and what evidence would change your answer?
- When someone says Christianity is the white man’s religion, what is the most accurate thing you can say in two sentences, and what would you avoid overstating?
Carry the question your listener asked on day six. Answering it well, with the record and its limits both intact, is how this history becomes your own.