When someone tells you the Bible is about other people, you need more than a feeling that they are wrong. You need a few texts you can name from memory, in order, with a sentence about what each one shows. This study builds that list. There are five, and they follow the Bible’s own storyline: a place, a word, a household, a road, and a room. Learn those five words and the texts attached to them, and you can answer calmly and accurately without a phone in your hand.
You can work through this alone with a Bible and a notebook, or with a group over one long session or two shorter ones. If you lead a group, ask everyone to read the passages from an open Bible. The whole point is that these facts are on the page, where anyone can check them.
One image before the list. These texts work like receipts: a receipt is useful because someone else can check it against the record. The comparison has a limit. A receipt usually ends an argument. These texts do not end every conversation about race and faith, but they show that the idea of a white Bible is not what the text says.
The one thing to know first
Nothing on the list makes sense until you understand one word. The Hebrew Scriptures often name a land called Cush, south of Egypt along the upper Nile. Most English readers miss it because the King James Version usually translates Cush as Ethiopia. Marcus Jerkins, who was completing a PhD in New Testament studies when he joined Lisa Fields on the Jude 3 Project podcast, explains that the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible rendered Cush as Ethiopia almost everywhere, and English followed.
So when you read “Ethiopia” in Genesis, Numbers, or Acts, think of ancient Cush, not the borders of the modern nation. Once you see that, the list opens up.
Observation prompt: Before going on, write down what you pictured when you used to read the word “Ethiopia” in the Bible, if you pictured anything at all.
Five receipts, in the order the Bible gives them
1. A place: Genesis 2:13
The first receipt comes before Israel exists. In the description of Eden, Genesis 2:13 reads: “And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.” The Bible’s first map already reaches into Africa.
What this shows: African land is part of the Bible’s opening geography. What it does not show: anything about the skin color of Adam and Eve. Keep the claim at the size of the text.
2. A word: Jeremiah 13:23
The second receipt explains why the first one matters for identity. Jerkins says the Greek word behind “Ethiopian” combines a word for burning with a word for face. “So Ethiopian means burnt face.” He adds that in the ancient world, “to speak of Ethiopia, or to speak of Ethiopian, is to automatically mean that you’re speaking of a black skinned person.”
A word’s origin alone does not prove its meaning, so look for how the word is used. Scripture supplies that. Jeremiah 13:23 asks, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.” The prophet is talking about Judah’s sin, not ethnicity. His comparison only works if his hearers already know Ethiopians by their dark skin. The text assumes it, so nobody has to read it in.
3. A household: Numbers 12:1
The third receipt sits inside the family of Israel’s greatest prophet. Numbers 12:1 records: “And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman.” In the verses that follow, God rebukes Miriam and Aaron, not Moses.
Be careful here. Interpreters debate what drove the complaint, because verse 2 also has the siblings questioning whether God speaks only through Moses. The safe claim is the one the text plainly supports: a Cushite woman is part of Moses’s household, and the narrative does not treat the marriage as the wrong. Jerkins puts the larger pattern this way: “you can’t read the Old Testament and not see that God has always loved and desired and had a relationship with Israel and Ethiopia and Egypt in some way.”
4. A road: Acts 8:27
The fourth receipt is the one most people half remember. To place it, start with Acts 1:8, where Jesus says his disciples will be witnesses “both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” Acts follows that order. In chapter 8 the gospel has reached Samaria, and then Philip is sent to a desert road.
And he arose and went: and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship,
Notice that Luke names Ethiopia twice in one verse. Jerkins says he came to this passage hoping to find something relevant to his own people and found that “the text itself spoke to my situation even before I saw it.” His point is that Luke could have made this convert someone from anywhere, and he chose to name an African from the far south at the moment the gospel moves toward the ends of the earth.
Jerkins also notices what the man was reading. Acts 8:33 quotes Isaiah’s servant song: “In his humiliation his judgment was taken away: and who shall declare his generation? for his life is taken from the earth.” Jerkins argues that some ancient writers treated dark skin as a mark of humiliation, so an ancient reader would see an Ethiopian reading about a humiliated servant. He reads the scene this way: “But the point of the text is to say that you are not humiliated because of how you look, that your blackness is not at all a sign of humiliation, because the servant of the Lord, the one who was crucified, he himself was humiliated.”
That reading is Jerkins’s interpretation, and you should carry it as his. The receipt itself is simpler and needs no interpretation: Acts records an African official from the far south believing and being baptized right where the gospel starts moving past Israel’s land.
5. A room: Acts 13:1
The fifth receipt puts African believers in leadership. Acts 13:1 reads: “Now there were in the church that was at Antioch certain prophets and teachers; as Barnabas, and Simeon that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen, which had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul.” This is the group that fasts, prays, and sends Barnabas and Saul on the mission that fills the rest of Acts.
Niger is Latin for black, and Luke presents it as a nickname. Lucius comes from Cyrene in North Africa. Jerkins reads Simeon’s placement beside Lucius as a sign that Simeon was African too. A nickname alone does not prove origin, but the name and the company together make the reading reasonable. Jerkins concludes, “from the very genesis of the Christian Church at its very foundation, we have black people involved. This was not a white man’s religion. It never was.”
A sixth name to hold loosely
Many lists include Simon of Cyrene, who carried Jesus’s cross in Mark 15:21. Treat him differently from the five. Jerkins says there is real debate. Many Jews lived across North Africa, and Simon may have been one of them. Jerkins leans toward reading Simon as Black but grants the other view some credibility. What he insists on is narrower: “He wasn’t European.”
This teaches a distinction worth practicing. Some claims are receipts. Others are probable readings. When you mix them, a skeptic can knock down the weakest claim and act as if the rest fell with it.
Where people overclaim
The most common mistake is not believing too little. It is saying more than the texts say, which hands the other person an easy win. Three overclaims come up often.
The first is saying everyone in the Bible was Black. The five receipts show presence at the founding moments of the story, not that every figure was African.
The second is stating that the Ethiopian was beyond dispute the first Gentile convert. Jerkins holds that Luke gives him the advantage of chronology, and he cites Craig Keener in support. Yet Acts 10 and 15 give Cornelius the fuller explanation, and Jerkins himself calls the Ethiopian a proselyte. Say what the text shows: he is the first convert in Acts from a far nation, and he comes before Cornelius in the story.
The third is confusing this case with the Hebrew Israelite claim that Black people are secretly the true Israel. Lisa Fields notes in the conversation that this reading undercuts that rhetoric. The difference is simple. In these texts Africans appear as Cushites, Ethiopians, and Cyrenians, named nations standing beside Israel and joining God’s people. The Bible does not need Africans to be hidden Israelites in order to include them.
Behind all three is a method. Jerkins says that if we read these texts historically, “we don’t have to put nothing in there.” He also gives a reason these debates go badly: “because we don’t know our history.” The fix is not a bigger claim. It is a well-learned list.
Why this is about identity, not trivia
Jude 3 Project holds that the claim Christianity is a white man’s religion is historically inaccurate, and that following Jesus is not a betrayal of Black identity. The receipts are part of the reason. They place African people in Eden’s geography, in Moses’s home, on the road where the gospel heads toward the ends of the earth, and in the room where the mission was launched.
Jerkins draws out what that means for everyone, not only for Black readers. In a world where people gave only to those who could repay them, he says, “God reaches those who can’t pay him back, which shows that he’s gonna get everybody.” If people the surrounding culture looked down on are near the front of the story, nobody is outside it.
Lisa Fields adds a point about the documents themselves. If the people who handled Scripture had wanted to erase dark-skinned people, she reasons, the Ethiopian’s story was an obvious thing to cut: “it would seem to me that that wouldn’t be included.” It survived with its African details intact.
Practice: say it back without the page
This exercise turns reading into recall. It takes about twenty minutes.
- Write the five words on a card: place, word, household, road, room.
- Next to each word, write the reference: Genesis 2:13, Jeremiah 13:23, Numbers 12:1, Acts 8:27, Acts 13:1.
- Close your Bible. For each word, say out loud one sentence about what the text shows and one sentence about what it does not prove.
- Open your Bible and check each sentence against the verse. Correct anything you stretched.
- Repeat the next day without the references on the card.
In a group, pair people up. One person gives the receipts while the other listens only for overclaiming, then they switch. The listener’s job is not to praise or correct tone, only to ask, Where does the text say that? If someone in the group carries pain from being told this faith was never theirs, give room for that before the drill. Recall can wait, and nobody should be pushed to share a story to take part.
Questions for discussion
- Before this study, where did your mental picture of biblical people come from: the text, art, film, or something else? How would you test that picture against the page?
- Jeremiah 13:23 is not about ethnicity, yet it tells us something about ethnicity. What is the difference between what a verse is about and what it assumes, and why does that difference matter in an argument?
- Jerkins reads the humiliation line in Acts 8:33 as Luke answering ancient contempt for dark skin. What in the passage supports that reading? What would make you more or less confident in it?
- Why might stating the Ethiopian as the undisputed first Gentile convert weaken your case rather than strengthen it?
- Restate the Hebrew Israelite claim in one fair sentence, then say in one sentence how the receipts differ from it. Was it hard to be fair?
- How does knowing that African believers helped send out Paul change how you think about who belongs in leadership in the church’s story?
Carrying it
Within the next week, explain the five receipts to one person who has not done this study, in under two minutes, from memory. Afterward, write down which receipt you stumbled on and read that passage again in its full chapter. The goal is not to win the next argument. It is to know the text well enough that when someone says the Bible belongs to other people, you can open it to five places and show them otherwise.