Mostly, no. The grievance underneath Hidden Colors deserves a serious hearing. Black Americans have real reasons to distrust the history they were taught. The specific claims the series makes about Christianity, though, do not hold up when you check them one at a time. Damon Richardson, who was born and raised in the Nation of Islam and became a Christian at sixteen, takes the series’ major claims in turn: that the Council of Nicaea invented the Bible, that Christianity is a white man’s religion, and that Jesus is a copy of sixteen earlier crucified saviors. Each fails for a different reason, and the reasons are worth knowing.
If a friend has told you the real answers about Black people and faith are all in those films, you can take their distrust seriously and still tell them the truth. Their distrust is the best reason to check the claims.
Is the distrust behind the series fair?
Yes, and the Jude 3 conversation starts there. Lisa Fields describes the series as popular among Black millennials and online, with people treating it as a scholarly work and building arguments on it. She explains why it gains traction. Many people do not trust the history they were handed, and with good reason. She points to textbooks and school systems that softened or misrepresented what slavery was. When the official account has been dishonest, people go looking for another one.
Fields also names where that reasoning has to stop. Distorted history gets corrected by accurate history. As she puts it, “You combat revisionist history with the accurate depiction of history.” Distrust gives a person a reason to investigate. It does not certify whatever contradicts the textbook.
Richardson describes the series’ goal in plain terms. In his account, it sets out to reconstruct a history of Black greatness, and along the way it tries to rebuild a spiritual and theological history too. It presents Christianity as something introduced to Black people within oppression and slavery, and so as something they should reject. His verdict is that it “is historically disingenuous” and that the scholarship “is very, very poor.” Those are strong words, so the fair thing is to test them against the claims themselves.
Did the Council of Nicaea invent the Bible?
Start with what would have to be true if the claim were right. If Emperor Constantine manufactured Christianity and its Bible at Nicaea, you would expect the council to show it. The existence of Jesus would be up for debate. A list of approved books would be among its decisions. And the emperor’s own preferences would shape the outcome.
Richardson argues that none of these signs is present. When he watched the series’ presenters describe the council, he says, “none of that matches what actually happened.” One presenter claimed that Constantine ordered the Arians killed when they arrived, that they fled into Europe, and that Hitler would have been shocked to learn the real Aryans were Black. Richardson’s response: “That’s not even close to what happened.” The story seems to rest on two words that sound alike. The Arians were followers of Arius, a church leader whose teaching about Christ was under dispute. The Aryans belong to the racial myths of a much later era. The two share a sound and nothing else.
In Richardson’s account, the dispute was about who Jesus is. Arius taught that the Son was a created being, while Athanasius held that the Son is of the same substance as the Father. Richardson draws out what that argument assumes. “Both sides were aware of Jesus’ existence, or else the debate would’ve been moot,” he says. “There was already agreement about the historicity of Jesus.” Two parties arguing over the nature of a person they both already worship cannot be evidence that the person was invented at their meeting.
Richardson says the council ended by rejecting Arius’s position as heresy, and the Nicene Creed came out of that ruling. He also says the council was not Constantine’s idea. He credits Eusebius of Caesarea with pressing for it and describes the emperor’s interest as peace across the empire. Those last two points are his reading of the events, and a reader can test them.
What a reader can check
The documents connected to Nicaea are available in English translation. The creed itself is short. It is a statement about the Father, the Son and the Spirit, and it says nothing about which books belong in the Bible. The council’s other surviving decisions are a set of rules about church discipline and order, and they contain no list of Scripture either. Eusebius of Caesarea attended the council and wrote about Constantine, and Athanasius wrote about the controversy he lived through. Anyone who believes Nicaea assembled the Bible can look for the decision that did it in these records. It is not there.
Richardson also offers a detail that cuts against the conspiracy. He says Constantine was drawn to Arius’s popular view and was later baptized by a bishop sympathetic to Arius. Fields adds that Constantine tried to bring Arius back into fellowship and that Athanasius refused. If Constantine had designed the faith, it should have followed him. In Richardson’s telling, the emperor leaned toward the rejected position and the church held to the creed anyway. His conclusion is that Constantine’s leanings “did not mislead or have any bearing on the church’s focus on Orthodox Christology.”
The objection about the canon
Richardson also says the books of the Bible were already agreed to be inspired before the council. The core of that holds. The Gospels and Paul’s letters were read and quoted as Scripture long before 325. A careful friend can still push back, and fairly. The edges of the New Testament were discussed after Nicaea. Some books, such as Hebrews, Revelation and a few of the shorter letters, were questioned in some regions for a time, and Athanasius himself circulated a list of New Testament books decades after the council. So the church’s recognition of the full list was gradual.
That counterevidence answers a different question from the one the series raises. Gradual recognition over generations, by churches in many places, is the opposite of a single emperor inventing a book in one meeting. Replace one oversimplification with the more accurate story. Nicaea did not produce the Bible, and the canon has a longer history of its own.
Was Christianity ever African before the slave ships?
The white man’s religion claim makes a prediction. If it were true, Christianity’s early history would be European, and Africans would first meet it through enslavers. Richardson’s case is that the record shows the reverse. He says Christianity’s main geographical center in its first thousand years was Asia and Africa. A person making the white man’s religion argument, he says, “has to discount your first 1000 years of Christian history.”
His evidence comes from different kinds of sources, and they carry different weight.
- Scripture. Acts 8 records Philip meeting “a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians” (Acts 8:27). The man was baptized and went on his way. Richardson reads this as the gospel traveling into Africa in the first generation of the church. Anyone can read the chapter.
- Church tradition. Richardson cites a Coptic tradition that Mark planted a church in Egypt in AD 48, less than fifteen years after the resurrection. That is a tradition rather than a document from the year itself, and he presents it as one.
- North African writers and martyrs. He points to the writings of Tertullian and the story of the martyr Perpetua. Both survive and can be read today, and both place a working church in North Africa long before Nicaea. Richardson adds that Roman persecution struck hardest in North Africa because Christianity was strongest there.
- African Christian kingdoms. Richardson names King Ezana of Aksum, in the region of present-day Ethiopia, as one of the first Black kings to lead a Christian nation, in the fourth century. He says Athanasius, as bishop of Alexandria, approved a church plant there.
Richardson also says a later Christian king of that region sheltered Muhammad’s early followers, a detail a reader can verify in histories of early Islam. The weight of the list is chronology. His summary is that this history comes “hundreds and hundreds of years before slave ships” arrived. Christianity took root in Africa centuries before it reached much of Europe, so the white man’s religion claim is historically inaccurate, and following Jesus is no betrayal of Black identity.
The strongest objection deserves a direct answer. A friend might reply that whatever happened in ancient Ethiopia, their own ancestors met Christianity through people who enslaved them. That experience is real, and nothing in Richardson’s timeline erases it. It answers a separate question. One question asks how a particular family first heard the faith. The other asks where the faith came from. The series runs them together, and the historical record pulls them apart.
What happens to the sixteen crucified saviors when you check the names?
The series also claims that Jesus is a recycled version of earlier savior figures who had mothers named Mary, died, and rose again. Richardson calls this “the worst kind of history” and traces it to a book titled The Sixteen Crucified Saviors, whose author he could not recall during the conversation. His case against it depends on how the comparisons were built.
First, he says, the author changed names to manufacture resemblance. Krishna is spelled with a “Ch” to suggest a link to “Christ.” But “Krishna actually means dark,” Richardson says, and has no connection to the Greek word Christos, which corresponds to the Hebrew word for messiah, meaning anointed one. He describes a similar move with a figure the book calls Hesus, given a pronunciation that sounds like Jesus. Richardson says that name has an unrelated meaning in its own language, while the Hebrew name behind Jesus is tied to salvation. Similar sounds in English tell you nothing about where a word came from.
Second, he says many of the sixteen have no historical record at all: “there’s no source documentation for the historicity of most of these so-called saviors.” For the ones that do appear in ancient writings, he says those writings describe nothing like the life of Jesus.
Third, specific parallels collapse when compared to their sources. Richardson’s example is Mithras, who he says “is not known to have died at all in Persian mythology,” much less risen three days later. A dying-and-rising savior who never dies fails as a parallel before the comparison starts. This is also the easiest kind of claim for a reader to test. Ask for the ancient text that tells the story, then read it.
Richardson’s closing judgment explains why the claim survives anyway. He says people “who want to believe that they need no evidence.” That applies to everyone, Christians included. A claim that confirms what we already want is the one we are least likely to check.
Why does the whole series feel convincing?
Richardson thinks the individual errors matter less than the assumption carrying them. He calls it an argument from antiquity: the idea that something must be right because it is old. In his reading, the series plants this idea in its first installments. Ancient Egyptian religion is older than Christianity, so it must be truer, and Egypt supposedly knew things before the Hebrews did.
He tests the premise by reversing it. Nobody accepts an argument from modernity, the claim that an idea must be right because it is new. Age works the same way. “The age of it has nothing to do with the truthfulness of it,” he says. His example is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which predates Genesis. He says most of it is fable. Being older did not make it true.
Once a viewer accepts that premise, Richardson says, “everything else starts making sense to you,” because each later claim borrows weight from the first. Without it, each claim has to stand on its own evidence. The same test applies in the other direction. Christianity is not true because it is old either. Its claims rise or fall on the evidence for them, above all the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.
Where to go from here
The series’ Nicaea story, as Richardson describes it, misstates what the council debated, and its records can show you as much. The white man’s religion claim has to get past Acts 8 and the African church that followed. The sixteen saviors parallel depends on altered spellings, figures with no records, and details the sources do not contain.
Several dates and details in this account are Richardson’s, given from memory in conversation: the Coptic tradition of AD 48, his account of who first proposed the council, the years of refuge in Aksum. They fit the broader record he describes, but a friend who has been burned by confident history is right to want them checked. Richardson points readers to Justo González’s The Story of Christianity and his three-volume History of Christian Thought. He describes them as rigorous scholarship that a general reader can follow, from the early church through the Reformation and beyond. Reading a source like that alongside your friend will do more than winning an argument with them.
Richardson ended the conversation with a verse that sets the terms for that kind of exchange. Peter told believers to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). An answer is something you give a person who asked, which means you listened to the question first. It also means your reasons are open to inspection. That is the standard to hold every claim to, the ones in Hidden Colors and your own.