Yes. African people are in the Bible from its opening chapters, and the text names them by people and by place. The land of Cush, which the King James Version usually calls Ethiopia, appears in the description of Eden, recurs throughout Israel’s history, and returns in Acts, where an Ethiopian official becomes one of the first people outside Israel to be baptized into Christ. In Acts 13, one of the leaders who sends Paul out on mission carries the Latin nickname for “black.” Many readers picture a European cast because of the paintings and films they absorbed, not because of anything on the page.
Marcus Jerkins, whose doctoral research in biblical studies focuses on the presence of Black people in Luke and Acts, argues that this presence is not incidental. His argument rests on reading these passages in their own setting, so the rest of this article does the same: it looks at what the ancient words meant, where the stories sit, and what they can and cannot prove.
What did “Ethiopia” mean when the Bible used it?
Begin with a word. The Hebrew Scriptures speak of Kush, the region south of Egypt along the upper Nile. When those Scriptures were translated into Greek, Kush was rendered almost everywhere as Ethiopia, and the King James Version follows that Greek tradition. When an English reader meets “Ethiopia” in Genesis, Isaiah, or Acts, the text is pointing to the land of Kush, not to the borders of the modern nation.
That land is on the Bible’s first map. 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.” Jerkins points to this river when he describes how ancient interpreters read Eden. Even before Israel exists, the biblical author locates the garden in a geography that includes Africa.
The word also carried an image. Jerkins explains that the Greek term behind “Ethiopian” combines a word for burning with a word for face, so that the name described people seen as burned by the sun. A word’s origin does not settle its meaning, though. Usage settles meaning, and here the usage fits the origin. Jerkins puts it plainly: 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.”
Scripture itself confirms the association. 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’s point concerns Judah’s ingrained sin, not ethnicity. His illustration still works only if his hearers take it for granted that Ethiopians are known by dark skin. Nobody has to read color into the text. The text assumes it.
That assumption shapes other passages too. 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.” The narrative that follows has God rebuke Miriam and Aaron, not Moses. Interpreters debate exactly what drove their complaint, because the next verse also has them questioning whether God speaks only through Moses. Either way, the text does not treat the marriage as the problem. This fits Jerkins’s broader reading of Israel’s story: “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.”
Why does Luke place the Ethiopian’s story where he does?
Acts 8 has to be read inside the plan Luke gives at the start of the book. In Acts 1:8, Jesus tells the disciples they will be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judaea, in Samaria, “and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” Acts follows that outward movement. Chapter 8 opens with the church scattered beyond Jerusalem and Philip preaching in Samaria. Then an angel sends Philip to a desert road, and in Acts 8:27 the reader meets this man:
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
Luke gives this man three identifying details: his homeland, his office, and his queen. Ethiopia comes first and is repeated. For ancient readers, as Jerkins notes, the name already carried a picture of a dark-skinned African from the far south, a land many Greeks and Romans treated as the edge of the known world. Within Luke’s plan from Acts 1:8, this is what “the uttermost part of the earth” looks like as a person.
Jerkins says he first came to the passage looking for something relevant to his own people, and then found that the text had made the point before he did. Luke, he argues, did not have to make this figure an Ethiopian; it could have been an Egyptian or anyone else. By naming the man’s origin so deliberately, Luke shows that when God set out to claim the nations, God reached out “to black skinned people first, a black skinned person first.” Jerkins goes further and reads the emphasis as intentional: “God claims this man because he’s black, not in spite of the fact that he’s black.”
That final claim is Jerkins’s interpretation, and readers should hold it as one. What the text plainly shows is narrower and still significant. Luke deliberately identifies this convert as an African from the far south, and he places the story at the point where the gospel begins moving past Jerusalem and Samaria.
What was the Ethiopian reading, and why does it matter?
Here Jerkins makes his most original argument. Luke does not leave the official’s scroll vague. He quotes it in Acts 8:32-33:
The place of the scripture which he read was this, He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth: In his humiliation his judgment was taken away: and who shall declare his generation? for his life is taken from the earth.
The passage comes from Isaiah’s song of the suffering servant, and Luke’s quotation in Acts 8:33 includes the line “In his humiliation his judgment was taken away.” Jerkins asks why commentators have rarely connected that word, humiliation, to the reader holding the scroll.
His answer draws on how some ancient writers talked about dark skin. According to Jerkins, Diodorus of Sicily described Ethiopians as beneath civilized society and tied their appearance to their supposed behavior, the practice of judging character from appearance that scholars call physiognomy. Jerkins also notes that Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish writer and near contemporary of Jesus, followed a strand of thought that treated extreme darkness as a sign of defect. In his commentary on Genesis, Jerkins says, Philo interprets the river flowing into Ethiopia by claiming that Ethiopia means humiliation. These are Jerkins’s descriptions of the ancient writers, and readers who want to examine the primary texts can do so. If his account is accurate, an ancient reader of Acts 8 would see an Ethiopian, a man some in his world considered humiliated by his appearance, reading about a humiliated servant.
Jerkins explains how he thinks the scene resolves that tension. The text, he says, might seem to indict the man, “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.” Philip begins at that same scripture and preaches Jesus. Read this way, the passage does more than include an African convert. It undoes a contempt attached to his appearance by joining him to a Messiah who carried humiliation himself.
This is an interpretive proposal, not something the passage says directly. Luke never mentions Philo or skin-color prejudice. Still, the proposal has real strengths. It explains why Luke quotes the scroll at such length, it connects details already in the text, and it depends on attitudes that, as Jerkins presents them, existed in the period. A careful reader can find it persuasive while keeping the distinction between what Luke wrote and why Luke may have written it.
Wasn’t Cornelius the first Gentile convert?
This is the strongest objection, and Jerkins expects it. Acts 10 gives the conversion of Cornelius, a Roman centurion, an extended and dramatic telling, and in Acts 15 Peter appeals to it as the moment God opened the door to the Gentiles. On that reading, Cornelius is the decisive first case.
Jerkins responds by citing Craig Keener, who, he says, argues that Luke gives the Ethiopian narrative the advantage of chronology: it comes first in the sequence even if the Cornelius episode carries more of Luke’s explanation. Jerkins also notes that Luke shows the official heading home to the far south, and he links this to Ethiopia’s very old Christian tradition.
The question is not fully settled. The official had traveled to Jerusalem to worship and was reading Israel’s Scriptures, and Jerkins himself describes him as a proselyte. Interpreters disagree about whether Luke means him as a convert to Judaism, a God-fearing outsider, or a symbol of the nations who stands somewhere in between. What no reading removes is his position in the story: the first person baptized in Acts who comes from beyond Israel’s land is an African from the far south.
Jerkins also connects the scene to the meaning of grace. In a world built on reciprocity, he observes, you did not give to people who could not repay you. “God reaches those who can’t pay him back, which shows that he’s gonna get everybody.” If people whom some of the culture dismissed are among the first reached, then nobody is outside the gospel’s reach.
Who were Simeon called Niger and Simon of Cyrene?
Acts 13:1 lists the leaders of the church at Antioch: “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.” These are the people who fast, pray, and send Barnabas and Saul out on the mission that fills the rest of Acts.
Look at the second and third names. Niger is a Latin word meaning black, and Luke presents it as a nickname: Simeon “that was called” Niger. Lucius comes from Cyrene, a city in North Africa in the region Luke elsewhere calls Libya. Jerkins reads the placement of the two names together as a sign that Simeon was also African. A nickname alone cannot prove someone’s origin, but the combination of the name and the company Luke places him in makes Jerkins’s reading reasonable. The result, as Jerkins puts it, is that two Black men were probably among the leaders who commissioned Paul.
Simon of Cyrene appears in Mark 15:21: “And they compel one Simon a Cyrenian, who passed by, coming out of the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to bear his cross.” Jerkins is careful here. He acknowledges real debate and says some arguments that Simon was not Black have credibility, since many Jews lived across North Africa and Simon may have been one of them. Jerkins himself leans toward reading Simon as Black, but he presents that as his position, not as a certainty. The minimum holds either way: “He wasn’t European.” Mark’s mention of Simon’s sons suggests that Mark’s first readers knew the family. Paul greets a Rufus in Romans 16:13, and some readers connect the two, though Jerkins says he cannot recall the details, and the identification remains uncertain.
Jerkins adds a historical observation that explains why none of this should surprise anyone: in the ancient Mediterranean, “black folk were everywhere.” He points to images of Ethiopians in Pompeii, far from Africa, as evidence of how connected those societies were through trade. A Black teacher in Antioch was not unusual. It was ordinary life in the Roman world.
Isn’t this reading modern race back into an ancient text?
The concern is legitimate, and a careful reader should raise it. Modern racial systems, including chattel slavery organized by skin color, did not exist in the first century. Jerkins agrees on the difference. He mentions Rodney Sadler’s argument that the ancient world shows racialism, meaning attention to physical difference, rather than racism in the modern sense. Jerkins accepts much of that distinction while arguing that some ancient writers did cross into outright contempt based on appearance.
The important point is that the evidence works against reading race in. The connection between “Ethiopian” and dark skin comes from the ancient sources and from Scripture itself, as Jeremiah 13:23 shows. The nickname Niger is Latin, not modern. The North African locations are stated in the text. Jerkins frames it as a matter of method: if we read the text historically, “we don’t have to put nothing in there.” The distortion runs the other way. The European cast so many readers imagine is what someone added later.
Lisa Fields raises a related point about the reliability of the documents. If the people who handled the text had wanted to erase dark-skinned people from it, she reasons, the Ethiopian’s story is an obvious thing to remove: “it would seem to me that that wouldn’t be included.” The story survived, with its African details intact.
Fields also notes that this reading undercuts the Hebrew Israelite claim that Black people are secretly the true Israel. The two arguments are easy to confuse, so the difference is worth stating. The texts discussed here present African people as Kushites, Cyrenians, and Ethiopians: nations with their own names, standing beside Israel and joining God’s people. The Bible does not need Africans to be hidden Israelites in order to include them. It includes them under their own names.
What follows from reading these texts carefully
The conclusion has to match the evidence. These passages do not show that everyone in the Bible was Black, and they do not make Africa the center of every story. They show something more solid, because anyone can check it against the text: African people are present at the founding moments. They appear in Eden’s geography, in Moses’s household, at the first crossing of the gospel beyond Israel, and among the leaders who launched the mission to the nations.
Jerkins draws the historical conclusion directly: “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.” Jude 3 Project holds, as an approved position, 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 passages above are some of the textual reasons. A reader who thought of the Bible as someone else’s book was not reading too much into it. That reader had been taught to read too little.
Quick answers
Where does the Bible first mention Africa?
In Genesis 2:13, the river Gihon in the Eden account flows around “the whole land of Ethiopia,” which is the Hebrew Kush, the region south of Egypt.
Did “Ethiopian” refer to skin color?
In ancient usage, yes. Jeremiah 13:23 assumes Ethiopians are known by their skin, and Marcus Jerkins notes that the Greek word was commonly understood as “burnt face.”
Was the Ethiopian eunuch the first Gentile convert?
He comes first in Luke’s sequence. Cornelius in Acts 10 receives the fuller theological treatment, and interpreters disagree about whether Luke presents the Ethiopian as a full Gentile or a proselyte.
What does “Simeon called Niger” mean?
Niger is Latin for black. Luke lists Simeon next to Lucius of Cyrene among the Antioch leaders in Acts 13:1, which supports reading him as African.
Was Simon of Cyrene Black?
That is debated. He may have been a North African Jew or a Black African, but Cyrene was in North Africa, so he was not European.