David Daniels
A Kongolese king sent his sons to Europe in 1491 to check whether the missionaries were telling the truth. By 1517 his kingdom had a school system teaching a thousand boys and girls, a century before the first African was landed in Virginia.
The Rev. Dr. David D. Daniels III (1954-2024). Henry Winters Luce Professor of World Christianity at McCormick Theological Seminary, where he taught from 1987, and a bishop in the Church of God in Christ. BA, Bowdoin College; MDiv, Yale University; PhD in church history, Union Theological Seminary. Past president of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. His research tracked Africans through the early modern European record: pilgrims, teachers, and scholars, Ethiopians in Germany and Congolese in Rome. The Unspoken curriculum credits him for the research behind Luther's consultation with the Ethiopian church (Leader's Guide, p. 65). NOTE FOR DON: Dr. Daniels died on 10 October 2024, and you confirmed 2026-07-31 that this dossier should read in the past tense as a record of his scholarship.
Who he is
David D. Daniels III held the Henry Winters Luce chair in World Christianity at McCormick Theological Seminary, where he taught from 1987. He was a bishop in the Church of God in Christ, took his degrees at Bowdoin, Yale, and Union, and served as president of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. He died in October 2024.
His specialty was unusual and it is the reason this dossier exists. He followed Africans through the early modern European record: pilgrims, teachers, scholars in residence, Ethiopians turning up in Germany, Congolese in Rome. He read other people's archives looking for the Africans in them.
Forty-one minutes of his interview sit in this archive. Not one second of it is used anywhere else in the path. This is the only place you can hear it, and it is the densest hour of documented history in the whole collection.
What you are getting in this dossier
An African king who, in 1491, refused to take a missionary's word for anything and sent his own men to Europe to check. The school system he built, and what it was teaching a hundred years before 1619. A West African chief who made Islam and Christianity each present their case and then chose. The first African Protestant, who won a debate at the Sistine Chapel. An Anglican priest in 1710 with a problem that should not have been possible. And the place where Daniels stops and tells you the evidence runs out.
The wall that is not there
He opens by dismantling a map most people carry without noticing.
"So, one of the things to see is that Christianity begins within what some people call the northeast part of Africa. They see that this divide that we make between Asia and Africa is almost like creating a wall between two continents. But there was so much traffic going back and forth between Israel and other parts of what we would call West Asia and North Africa, that it's really, in a sense, one region and one place."
The rest of this dossier is part of Unspoken
3,194 more words and 14 more clips of him making the case, including the three objections he answers and the place he refuses to flatter his own argument.
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