Eric Mason
He can name the three people who invented the claim that Christianity copied Egypt, give you their birth years, and point out that all three were white Europeans. Then he turns around and tells his own side to stop making bad arguments.
Dr. Eric Mason. Founder of Epiphany Fellowship in Philadelphia and founder of Thriving. BS in psychology, Bowie State University; ThM, Dallas Theological Seminary; doctorate, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Author of Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice (Moody, 2018), Manhood Restored, Beat God to the Punch, and Unleashed; editor of Urban Apologetics: Restoring Black Dignity with the Gospel (Zondervan Reflective, 2021), the volume several other scholars in this archive contributed to.
Also anchors session 2.3 of the learning path
Who he is
Eric Mason is the reason several other people in this archive are in print. He edited Urban Apologetics: Restoring Black Dignity with the Gospel, the volume Damon Richardson, Adam Coleman, Vince Bantu, and others contributed to. He wrote Woke Church. He founded Epiphany Fellowship in Philadelphia, holds a ThM from Dallas Theological Seminary and a doctorate from Gordon-Conwell, and started out with a psychology degree from Bowie State.
He is also, by his own account, a convert from the position. He gives the date: November 15, 1992. Before that, he says, "I believed that Christianity was a white man's religion."
That combination is what makes his forty-seven minutes unusual. He knows the argument from the inside, he has done the source work, and he is more willing than anyone else here to tell his own side when a favourite argument is bad.
What you are getting in this dossier
The genealogy of the copycat theory, with names and birth years, which is the single most useful thing anyone in this archive supplies. The Horus parallel list checked claim by claim. Why the biblical writers knew the other creation stories and were arguing with them rather than copying them. What actually happened at Nicaea, including the date that undoes the whole political theory. The roster of Black figures in Scripture, with one correction aimed at a popular Hebrew Israelite reading. The pro-Black argument he refuses to use. And a theological argument about depravity that indicts some of the most respected names in American church history.
"Why does color even matter?"
The question is usually deployed to end the discussion. Mason turns it around.
"Why does color even matter?' Well, the problem with that question is this, is color matters because White people have made color matter. And because Whites and Western culture has made color matter through pictures and depictions that exclude either reality or other ethnicities, it has caused, particularly in the Black community, a challenge in what we call apologetics in our missiology and in our evangelism."
The rest of this dossier is part of Unspoken
3,311 more words and 13 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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