The textbook version says the gospel began in Jerusalem, became a European religion, and reached Africa much later as an export. The early church’s own record points the other way. Christianity put down roots in Africa in its first centuries. Africans prayed and sang in their own languages. African writers shaped how the wider church reads the Bible. Dr. Michael Glerup, executive director of the Center for Early African Christianity, also argues that the first Christian case for religious freedom came from the continent. That is a claim about centrality, and it can be tested.
What would it take to show Africa was central, not just present?
Showing that some Christians lived in Africa early is not enough. A faith can be present in a region and still depend entirely on teachers from somewhere else. For Africa to count as a center, three kinds of evidence should turn up. The faith should appear early. It should take local forms, such as worship in local languages, local writings and local traditions. Christians outside Africa should also depend on African thinkers in ways that last.
If the textbook version were right, the record would look different. African Christianity would appear late. It would use borrowed forms. Its theology would come from Europe and flow toward Africa, never the reverse. So the useful question is not whether Africa had Christians. It is which way the influence ran.
How early does the African evidence go?
The first layer is Scripture. Luke’s account of Pentecost lists the places the pilgrims in Jerusalem came from, including people from “in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene” (Acts 2:10). Six chapters later, Philip meets “a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians” (Acts 8:27), who leaves baptized and returns home. Luke is writing narrative, so these passages describe events rather than set out a mission plan. As description, they place Africans inside the story from its first chapters. The “Ethiopia” of Acts is generally understood as the kingdom south of Egypt on the upper Nile, not the later Ethiopian kingdom. Either way, it is Africa, and it comes before the gospel reached most of Europe.
The next layer is the one Glerup stresses. He tells congregations that “Africans have been praying in their native languages, African languages, since the fourth century.” He means both halves of the continent. He names the local languages and dialects of Egypt and North Africa, and he adds that this prayer reaches “in Sub-Saharan Africa and in deeper parts of Africa.” The point is narrower and stronger than “there were African Christians.” Prayer in a people’s own tongue is a sign of a faith that has become theirs.
Glerup also admits a gap in his own education. Nubian and Ethiopian Christianity were missing from the church history book he studied in seminary. “There was no mention of Ethiopian Christianity,” he says, and Nubia was absent as well. That admission is evidence of a different kind. It shows that a trained seminary graduate could finish a degree without meeting whole African churches. The silence tells us what the textbooks left out. It says nothing about whether those churches existed.
Did African Christians build a worship life of their own?
Glerup’s best documentary example is Ethiopian. His center has been studying 14th-century Ethiopian manuscripts of what he calls the Psalter. These collections hold the Psalms of David, the biblical canticles, the Song of Songs, the Praises of Mary and an Ethiopian writing known as the Gate of Light. Some of the copies, he says, had never been studied before. He describes them as “some of the oldest written, notated songs that we know of in Sub-Saharan Africa.”
Here the investigation has to slow down, because Glerup makes two claims of different strength. The first is about the manuscripts themselves, which date to the 14th century. The second goes further back. He says the songs “also reflect an oral tradition of hymns and songs in Ethiopia that traces back to the fourth to sixth century.” He is open about how that second claim is reached. The written copies, he says, show signs of having been written down before, but “we just don’t have earlier copies.” The fourth-century date is therefore an inference from the shape of the tradition, not a reading of a fourth-century page. That inference may well be correct. It still rests on the scholar’s analysis rather than on a surviving early manuscript, and an honest account should say so.
He adds a physical witness: the Ethiopian churches carved straight into rock. He dates that tradition with care, saying it can be traced “until probably the eighth century.” The hedge in “probably” is his, and it deserves to be kept. Even on the cautious dates, the picture holds together: a church with its own songs, its own books and its own sacred buildings, carried through centuries before any modern missionary arrived.
Where does the claim about reading Scripture come from?
This is the claim that moves Africa from present to central, and its origin is what makes it credible. In the mid-1990s, Glerup was a graduate student working with Thomas Oden at Drew University on the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. The series gathers early church commentary on the whole Bible in 29 volumes. Glerup reports that it has sold more than 600,000 copies in English and circulates in eight other languages. The work took almost 15 years.
The aim was the history of interpretation: how the early church actually read the Bible, passage by passage. African Christianity was not the starting point. It became unavoidable. Over those years, Glerup says, the team realized that the early church fathers, “especially from the continent of Africa, really was how we read and do scripture.”
The way the conclusion was reached matters. A researcher who sets out to prove that Africa was important can be suspected of finding what he wanted. A team that set out to catalog early interpretation and kept running into African writers is in a different position. The conclusion came out of the data.
Even so, this is the thinnest thread in Glerup’s case as he presents it here. He does not walk through particular verses or name the specific habits of reading that African writers passed on. What he gives is a direction to look. He recommends a special edition of Christian History magazine on early African Christianity, which he says the magazine offers free as a PDF, along with its editions on Augustine, on the Desert Fathers and on the Trinitarian controversies. Those names carry weight a reader can check. Augustine was bishop of Hippo in North Africa, and his writings, including his guidance on how to interpret Scripture, are widely recognized as some of the most read works in the Western church for centuries. The Desert Fathers were the monks of the Egyptian wilderness, whose example is generally regarded as a root of Christian monasticism. Tertullian, whom Glerup cites below, wrote from Carthage. None of this proves the full scope of his claim. It does show that several of the figures he has in mind were Africans by birth and ministry, and that the rest of the church kept reading them.
He also corrects the idea that his team discovered any of this. When he presents the material to African American pastors, a common response is “well, what took you so long?” He takes the point. He credits African American scholars who had been researching and self-publishing in this area for years before his center turned to it, work he says his own team benefited from. The evidence was available. The mainstream curriculum had not caught up.
Did the case for religious freedom really begin in Africa?
Glerup’s most surprising claim is that “the first people really that argued for religious freedom came from the continent of Africa.” He identifies the earliest voice as Tertullian of Carthage and reads from him. Worship, in Glerup’s rendering, is a natural right: “every man should worship according to his own convictions.” He goes on: “One man’s religion neither harms nor helps another man.” Then comes 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.”
The logic of that last sentence is worth noticing. It is not only a plea for tolerance. It is a claim about what religion is. If faith has to be freely given, then forced faith fails as faith, and compelling it defeats the purpose it claims to serve. Glerup also explains why the argument arose where it did. Christians were a vulnerable minority in the Roman world, and their position pushed them to think about freedom. He adds that a later North African teacher, Lactantius, who tutored Constantine’s son, developed the idea further around the turn of the fourth century.
Some care is needed about what this shows. Glerup’s phrasing is about the first people “we really kind of have” making the argument, which is a claim about the surviving record. It does not prove that no one anywhere had the idea earlier, and it does not mean that modern legal systems of religious liberty descend directly from Carthage. It does establish something significant: one of the oldest written Christian arguments that conscience cannot be coerced came from an African, writing under pressure, and he grounded it in the nature of faith itself.
Glerup connects this old argument to the present through a forecast. He cites researchers in the field who project that half of the world’s Christians will live in Africa by 2050. That figure looks forward, and he passes it on secondhand, so it should be weighed as a projection. His point is that a church growing that fast will have to work out what religious freedom is and how it benefits society.
Wasn’t Christianity a European religion at its core?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight answer. For much of the medieval and modern period, Europe was where Christianity held institutional and political power. A skeptic could reasonably say that whatever happened early on, the faith that spread around the world in the colonial era came from Europe.
Glerup answers with geography and sequence. His center published the Historical Atlas of Ancient Christianity, a book of more than 400 pages that traces how the faith spread out of Jerusalem along the Roman world’s roads and transport networks. By the seventh century, he says, the map shows Christianity “from Ireland to China,” translated into cultures well beyond the Roman Empire. His conclusion is that Christianity “has been shaped by Africa, but it’s also early on from its beginning, it’s been a world religion.” Then he adds: “It’s just not been a European religion.”
That answer accepts the objection’s premise and rejects its conclusion. Europe did become a major center. Becoming a center later does not make a place the source. Glerup calls the old missionary idea, that Africans had to become European before they could become Christian, what it is: “that’s nonsense.” The atlas shows why. The faith was crossing cultural lines from its first generations, and African churches were among the earliest and most lasting results.
Lisa Fields puts the same evidence against the version of this objection people bring to her, that Christianity is the white man’s religion. “Africans were Christians before slavery,” she says. Glerup’s prayer in African languages from the fourth century, his Ethiopian hymn tradition and his African writers all sit on her side of that timeline.
What the evidence does not settle
The early African presence and the African origin of key Christian writers are matters of record that readers can check against the writers themselves. Glerup’s judgment that African fathers shaped how the church reads Scripture is a scholar’s conclusion, drawn from long work on the commentary tradition. It is well grounded, but it remains his assessment until a reader looks at the texts. He invites exactly that. He urges people to begin reading the early Christian writers directly. He warns that their language differs from ours and that they “do digress quite a bit,” so a beginner can get lost. That warning argues for starting with good guides and then going to the sources.
The fourth-to-sixth-century date for Ethiopian hymnody is an inference from later manuscripts. The eighth-century date for the rock churches is offered as probable. The 2050 figure is a forecast.
What follows from the firm evidence is enough. The usual map of church history underrepresents Africa, and it also gets the direction of influence wrong. The clearest example is the one Glerup ends on. Long before any European state wrote religious liberty into law, a Christian in Carthage argued that it is “no part of religion to compel religion,” because faith is something a person must come to by free will. If Glerup is right about where the church is growing, Africa will face that question again, with one of its own early writers already holding the answer.