Luke introduces the man Philip meets on the desert road to Gaza as “a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians” (Acts 8:27). That phrase answers much of the question before any scholar weighs in. Black and African people are in the Bible by name and by place, from the family lists of Genesis to the church at Antioch. The harder task is drawing a line around that answer, because some figures are African beyond doubt, some probably were, and some popular claims go further than any verse.
The line matters to real people. Quonekuia Day, who teaches at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, recalls walking into a seminary and seeing a painting of a white Jesus with blond hair. She asked a coworker what it would mean to hang a picture of Jesus with an afro instead. Her question names a feeling many readers carry: “Can we still see Jesus as our savior if he just has a little bit of a tan?” A reader who cannot tell evidence from overstatement will either undersell the Bible’s answer to that feeling or oversell it, and both mistakes do damage.
So the approach here is to read the passages themselves, one at a time, with scholars from the Jude 3 Project library serving as witnesses to the reading rather than substitutes for it: