Around AD 330, by Damon Richardson’s dating, a stone monument went up in the Aksumite kingdom, in the region we now call Ethiopia and Eritrea. Its inscription is in Ge’ez and Sabaean, languages native to Aksum. Speaking at a Jude 3 Project question-and-answer session at Morehouse College, Richardson explained why it matters: on that stela, “King Ezana is literally describing not only his conquest but he’s also describing on this stela his actual conversion to Christianity.” An African king, writing in African languages, set his faith down in stone.
Richardson added a detail that changes how to read the stone: “Christianity had already been in Africa for three hundred years up to this point.” So the monument is not where the story begins. It sits in the middle. The sections below follow the record in order, from the first century to the brush arbors of the American South, so you can learn it well enough to tell it without notes. Along the way you will sort each piece of evidence by kind. A carved inscription, a church tradition, a single medieval report and the testimony of enslaved believers do not carry the same weight, and knowing which is which is what lets you stand on the record when someone pushes back. If you are working alone, take one era per sitting and spread the practice at the end across a week. If you are leading a group, plan about ninety minutes, read each era aloud, and stop at each prompt before moving on.
Israel’s psalms and the first century: Africans inside the text
Start earlier than any monument. Psalm 68:31 says, “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” This is poetry, and it should be read as poetry: a hope voiced in worship, not a schedule of events. Still, it tells you something about Israel’s imagination. Africa was not outside the picture of who would one day turn to God. The expectation was there in the hymnal long before there was a church.
Now open Acts. On the day of Pentecost, Luke lists the crowds gathered in Jerusalem, including people from “in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene” (Acts 2:10). Africans are in the audience on the church’s first public day.
A few chapters later, Philip meets “a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians” (Acts 8:27). He is reading Isaiah in his chariot. He asks for help, he is baptized, and Luke says “he went on his way rejoicing” (Acts 8:39). Richardson’s emphasis falls on what happened next. By his account, the official returned home to the region around Meroë and shared the faith there. Acts itself does not narrate that return, so treat it as Richardson’s reading of where the story leads, grounded in the plain fact that the man was going home.
The Gospels and Acts place other Africans near the center. The man compelled to carry the cross was “Simon a Cyrenian” (Mark 15:21). Among the prophets and teachers who led the church at Antioch were “Simeon that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene” (Acts 13:1). Cyrene sat on the coast of what is now Libya.
Richardson also points to something outside the Bible. He identifies Mark, the Gospel writer, as from Libya, and says “African memory puts him in North Africa essentially five years after the resurrection” planting churches there and in Egypt. He describes this kind of memory as tradition carried through oral stories and through archaeology. That is a different kind of evidence from a verse in Acts or an inscription in stone, and it should be labeled that way. It may be true. It is still tradition.
Observation prompt: On a sheet of paper, list every African person or place in the four passages above. Next to each, write whether the information comes from the biblical text or from later tradition.
The second and third centuries: Carthage and Alexandria
Richardson moves next to the church’s early leaders. He names “Tertullian, you have Athanasius, you’ve got Bishop Alexander, you’ve got Bishop Peter, all of them are either from Carthage, North Africa, or from Alexandria, and these people led churches as early as the second and third century.” Carthage stood near modern Tunis. Alexandria was the great city of Egypt.
He makes a second claim about scale. Christians moved toward North Africa’s growing cities, he says, and “when you look at the persecutions going on in Christianity, most of them were centered in North Africa because that is where the greatest populace of Christians actually lived.” That is a historical judgment, and it is the kind a reader can check against a reliable church history.
Here is a good place to practice separating a date from an interpretation. Richardson groups these four leaders together as evidence of an early African church. That interpretation holds. But a list spoken aloud is not the same as a timeline. Each man lived at a specific time, and some of their lives may fall later than the two centuries in the sentence. Part of the work below is to look up each name and write his dates beside it. If one belongs to the fourth century instead, the argument does not collapse. It just becomes more accurate.
For groups: Some people in the room will never have heard these names. Let the surprise be useful. Nobody should be embarrassed for not knowing history they were never taught.
Around AD 330: the king and the stone
With three centuries behind it, the Aksum stela reads differently. It records a ruler’s conversion in a land where the faith already had a long history on the continent. Richardson draws a strong conclusion from it: that Ezana’s conversion would mark “the Axum Empire as the first Christian nation in the world.”
Notice the two layers. The stone, as Richardson presents it, records a date, a king, his conquests and his conversion. The title “first Christian nation” is an interpretation built on top of that record, and it is the kind of claim historians debate. You can hold the record firmly and the title loosely. The point that matters for your question does not depend on the title at all. A fourth-century African king embraced Christianity on his own terms and said so in his own languages, and he did it long before any European ship reached his coast.
The fourteenth century: the West African coast
Richardson carries the line west. He describes a letter connected to Mansa Musa, the ruler of Mali, about Christians living in a coastal area he calls Takkar. In his telling, an Arabic historian recounts that Mali’s rulers tried to take the land, found that it stopped producing gold, and gave it back, and the account identifies the people there as Christians. Richardson then places it in time: “we’re talking about two hundred years before the French or the Portuguese colonized West Africa.” His conclusion: “Christianity is in the continent of Africa on the West Coast by choice.”
Weigh this one honestly. It is a single medieval report, relayed through one speaker’s summary. That makes it thinner than the evidence for the North African churches. It points in the same direction, and it is worth tracking down. It should not be the first thing you lean on under pressure.
The era of enslavement: an edited book and a refused preacher
The Atlantic slave trade does come into the story, but late, and the record from that period does not show what the popular claim expects. Lisa Fields, founder and host of Jude 3 Project, points to the slave Bible, an edited volume given to enslaved people. Her reading of why slaveholders needed it: “Because they knew reading the Bible from cover to cover that it was a liberative book.” And so, she says, “to suppress the slaves’ voice, they gave them an edited volume of the book.”
Richardson turns to the testimony of the enslaved themselves. Their narratives, he says, describe being beaten or killed if they were caught praying, and worshiping in brush arbors in the woods, singing near a river or over a bucket of water to muffle the sound. His summary of those accounts: “But when you look at their narratives, they don’t talk about it being shoved down their throat.”
He then gives a case close to home. He attends Salem Missionary Baptist Church in Lilburn, Georgia, which he describes as 192 years old. “Our church was established by believing Christians who were enslaved.” When the slave owner learned of their worship in the woods, he offered to build them a building if they would accept his preacher. “And they rejected the slave preacher because they didn’t want to hear the word being preached that was truncated, such as from the slave bible.” Richardson calls the congregation a legacy of “believers who accepted Christianity on biblical terms rather than on terms of subjugation.”
Richardson places Frederick Douglass in the same line. In the appendix to his narrative, Douglass set the slaveholding religion of the land against the Christianity of the Bible and refused to call them the same thing. Justin Giboney, president of the AND Campaign and an attorney and political strategist, presses the point with a question: “How did people who couldn’t read have a better theology than the people who had all kind of seminaries and all that?”
Look at what this era adds to the timeline. It is not the faith’s arrival. It is a fight over which version of the faith would be heard: the cut-down book the masters handed out, or the whole one the enslaved went looking for at the risk of their lives.
For groups: If someone shares that a church has hurt them, stop the timeline. Pain is not answered by a date. Listen, and come back to the history later only if they want to.
Today: the question the record answers
Lay the eras side by side and the modern question changes shape. Do you have to give up your heritage as a Black person to follow Jesus? The claim behind that question usually assumes the story starts on a slave ship. The record starts much earlier, with Africans at Pentecost, an Ethiopian official on a desert road, teachers at Antioch, churches in Carthage and Alexandria, and a king in Aksum. Jude 3 Project teaches that Christianity is not foreign to Africa, and that African and African-descended believers do not have to choose between their heritage and their faith.
Giboney names the habit that keeps the short timeline in place: “don’t let one tradition that may get something wrong be your model of Christianity.” The tradition that edited the Bible was one chapter, and a late one. Fields draws the practical conclusion: “to protest white supremacy, you need to read it from Genesis to Revelation to see what they’re trying to hide from you.” Knowing your history and reading the whole book turn out to be the same act of refusal the Salem believers made.
Today: build the timeline yourself and test it
This practice is how the history becomes yours instead of borrowed. Take a long sheet of paper turned sideways and draw one line across it.
- Mark six points in order: Israel’s psalms, the first century, the second and third centuries, around AD 330, the fourteenth century, and the era of American enslavement.
- Under each point, write the people and places from that era in this guide. Add dates you confirm yourself from a reliable history, especially for Tertullian, Athanasius, Alexander and Peter of Alexandria.
- Above each item, write one label for the kind of evidence: biblical text, tradition, inscription, medieval report, or eyewitness testimony.
- Circle the three items you would stand on first in a hard conversation. Be ready to say why you chose them over the others.
- Tell the whole timeline out loud, start to finish, to one person this week. Groups can pair off and take turns, with the listener noting anything the speaker overstated.
Then work through these questions, alone in writing or together in conversation.
- Which item on your timeline would you be most comfortable defending to a skeptical friend, and which least? What makes the difference between them?
- Richardson calls Aksum the first Christian nation. What evidence would strengthen or weaken that title, and how much of your answer to a skeptic depends on it?
- Where did you first hear the story of Christianity and Black people? At what point in time did that version begin, and what did it leave out?
- The Salem believers turned down a building to keep the whole word. What did they have to understand about the faith to separate it from the master’s version of it?
- How would you answer Giboney’s question about people who could not read holding better theology than the seminaries? Use the record, not a slogan.
- The slaveholders’ strategy was to hand out part of the book. What parts of Scripture have you been handed, or chosen, and what might the rest change?
Keep the sheet. The next time someone tells you the faith arrived in chains, you will not have to argue about whether you belong in it. You can start where the record starts, more than a thousand years earlier, and walk them forward one era at a time.
Go deeper in the Jude 3 library
- Is Christianity a White Man’s Religion (Study guide)
- Is Christianity the White Mans Religion (Article)
- Is Christianity the White Man’s Religion? (Article)
- Is Christianity the White Man’s Religion? (Study guide)
This study guide draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields, Justin Giboney and Damon Richardson. Hear it in full on the Watch page.