Why Should You Trust the Old Testament?

This guide takes up a charge many Black Christians have heard, sometimes from friends and sometimes from their own doubts. The Old Testament, the charge goes, is a colonial book. It arrived with the people who enslaved and colonized Africans, so trusting it means trusting them. The sources behind this guide answer that charge with chronology. African peoples appear inside the Old Testament’s own pages. Israelites and the first Jewish followers of Jesus received these books as God’s word. African Christians read them as divine. The theories most often offered as the liberating alternative arrived much later, and by Dr. Eric Redmond’s account they came largely from European scholars.

The guide draws on a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Eric Redmond, a professor in the Bible department at Moody Bible Institute. Its main work is a timeline you build yourself. You will read a handful of passages, sort claims by period, and mark which items are text, which are dates a speaker gave, and which are interpretation. You can do it alone in an evening or two. A group can split it across two meetings: the Scripture reading and timeline in the first, the limits and discussion in the second.

The charge, stated fairly

Before answering the objection, get it right. In the conversation, Lisa Fields describes a claim she hears: that trusting the Old Testament is a white construct, and that a more liberating reading would adopt source criticism, the scholarly approach that treats the first five books as a late, human patchwork. Then she asks whether those theories were themselves built by white men.

Notice that this objection actually combines three separate claims. One is about origin: Europeans shaped or edited the book. One is about use: slaveholders and colonizers used the book to oppress. One is about remedy: a critical, desacralized reading frees Black readers from that history. Each claim makes a different historical assertion, and each needs its own evidence. A good discussion keeps them apart.

For groups: before reading further, ask each person to restate the objection in a form its strongest advocate would accept. If the restatement sounds like a strawman, try again. People who hold this view are often responding to real harm, and the conversation goes better when that is acknowledged at the start.

What the text itself contains

Start with the origin claim, because the text can test it directly. Redmond’s reply is that the Old Testament is full of African peoples and often speaks well of them. He points to the Nubians, to repeated references to Cush and Egypt, and to Egypt pictured not only as an enemy but as a great power that will one day turn to God. He finds it strange to imagine “a bunch of slanted Europeans, people against African exaltation” adding that material. His conclusion is that “God, in speaking, spoke well of people of African origin.”

Read these passages slowly. Write down what each one actually says before you decide what it proves.

• Psalm 68:31. “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” This is the psalm Redmond cites. Where the KJV reads Ethiopia, the Hebrew names Cush, the land south of Egypt. The verse is poetry looking ahead. It describes a hope, not a past event.
• Numbers 12:1. “And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman.” Again, the KJV’s word Ethiopian renders the Hebrew word for a Cushite. Read the rest of the chapter and note whose side God takes in the dispute that follows. Interpreters disagree about who this woman was, so mark that as an open question, not a settled fact.
• Exodus 12:37-38. When Israel leaves Egypt, the text says a mixed multitude went up with them. Redmond says people of African descent traveled with the Israelites. Ask what this passage states outright and what a reader has to infer.
• Isaiah 19:23-25. The prophet pictures a highway from Egypt to Assyria and ends: “Whom the LORD of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance” (Isaiah 19:25).
• Jeremiah 38:7-13. An Ethiopian official in the royal household named Ebedmelech pleads for the prophet and pulls him out of the dungeon. Then read Jeremiah 39:15-18 to see what God says about him.

One honest note belongs here. Egypt is also the house of bondage in Exodus. The Old Testament does not flatter any nation, Israel included. The point is not that Africa always appears in a good light. The point is that the book treats African peoples as real participants in its history and its hopes, which is hard to square with the claim that it was shaped to erase them.

A timeline of readers

The use and remedy claims are historical, so put the history in order. What follows is the sequence the speakers lay out. Dates appear only where a speaker gave them, and those dates are that speaker’s.

Inside the Old Testament

Redmond traces how the books were received from within. Moses is described as writing. Later figures act according to the book of the law. In Daniel, Jeremiah’s prophecy is read as being fulfilled. From evidence like this he concludes that “the Israelites collected these things as the very words of God.” On his view, the Pentateuch was finished by 1406 BC. That date is his position, and it is one of the items the documentary hypothesis disputes.

The first century

Redmond reads the New Testament as a historical witness to Jewish belief in that period. Jesus and the Jewish writers speak of the law and the prophets, sometimes adding the Psalms, as a known body of Scripture. The earliest believers, most of them Jewish, followed those books before they had any written account of Jesus.

The early African church

Redmond says Scripture was understood as a divine document across the church, and he connects that understanding to the African fathers. Lisa Fields adds that early African church fathers would not have read the Old Testament through modern source theories. One of those fathers appears directly in the conversation. Redmond calls Augustine “our African church father” and gives his summary of how the Old Testament and the New Testament fit together: “in the Old Testament, the New Testament is concealed. In the New Testament, the Old Testament is revealed.”

This matches the approved Jude 3 Project position that Christianity is not foreign to Africa and has deep, ancient African roots.

The 18th century

Redmond dates the scientific challenge to Scripture to this period. He says “the earliest critics in the 18th century, largely were German.” He argues that their project weakened the claim that God had chosen the Hebrew people and had spoken in history.

Enslaved African Americans

Redmond says “Our forefathers in the African American community understood this.” When slaveholders used Scripture to oppress, he says, enslaved readers went to the Exodus and other passages and answered, in his summary, “Those guys are reading that incorrectly, and that certainly is not the intent of the scripture.” Lisa Fields names the slave Bible as the other side of that history, a version built by removing passages that pointed toward liberation.

The present

Lisa Fields describes meeting New Testament criticism through an undergraduate textbook by Bart Ehrman, and she points out that he is also white. Her larger observation is that Black scholars arguing either side of these debates mostly build on white sources, because too few Black scholars have written in these fields yet. Both speakers call for that to change. In her words, “we need Black people in Old Testament studying ancient Near East.”

Practice: build and test your own timeline

Now make the timeline yours. Use a large sheet of paper or a shared document, laid out in four columns.

1. Period. List the six periods above in order. Add any you know from other reliable reading, and write next to each addition where it came from.
2. What the source says. For each period, record the text or the speaker’s statement in your own words. For the Old Testament period, use the passages you read earlier.
3. Who is making the claim. Mark each entry: the biblical text itself, Redmond, or Fields. A date Redmond gives belongs to Redmond until you check it.
4. Interpretation. Separately, write what the entry might mean. Keep this column apart from the second one. A note that Moses married a Cushite woman belongs in the second column. A note that this shows the text honors Africans belongs in the fourth.

When you finish, draw an arrow from the remedy claim to the period where source criticism appears. Then look at everything that sits to the left of that arrow. Ask one question: did the people in those earlier periods need that theory in order to read the book as their own? Write a one-sentence answer, and note which entries support it.

For groups: give pairs one period each, then rebuild the timeline together on a wall. When someone presents an interpretation as if it were a fact, the group’s job is to move it to the right column, gently, and without turning it into a contest.

Where this argument has limits

The timeline answers the origin claim well and the remedy claim fairly well. It does not settle everything, and the speakers themselves say so.

First, origins do not decide truth in either direction. Redmond says plainly that “the issue is not who wrote this” in terms of ethnicity. The real question is whether the arguments hold. That cuts both ways. A theory built by 18th-century Germans could still be correct, and a book honored by Augustine could still be wrong. History removes the claim that critical theories are the natively Black option. It does not replace the work of weighing evidence, which the paired article takes up.

Second, the use claim is true. Slaveholders did use this book, and Redmond does not deny it. His distinction is between the text and a reading of the text, and he points to enslaved readers who made that same distinction under far worse conditions. A Christian who wants to keep the Old Testament has to face that history, not leave it out of the timeline.

Third, Redmond adds a reading order that protects the Old Testament’s own voice: “So we first have to interpret the Old Testament in light of itself before we interpret it in light of the New.” His example is Psalm 23. David’s confidence in the Lord’s care meant something on its own, and then Jesus’ words in John 10 about the good shepherd fill it out. This is an interpretive step, and it should be marked as one. It also explains why Augustine’s way of reading did not need to erase the Old Testament’s people to see Christ in it.

Lisa Fields names a final limit, which concerns the reader rather than the evidence: “when bitterness takes root in your heart, truth gets distorted in your mind.” She warns that someone who leaves the Bible behind before they have healed “will just trade one supremacist view of scripture for another.” She is not saying that doubters are bitter. She is saying that pain shapes what any reader is able to see, and that honesty requires noticing it. If this subject touches real harm done to you in a church, that harm deserves care from people you trust. It should not be pushed aside to finish an argument.

Questions for discussion

1. Of the three claims inside the colonial objection (origin, use and remedy), which one carries the most weight for you or for people you know? Does the timeline speak to that claim, or to a different one?
2. Look at your interpretation column. Which entry depends most on inference rather than on what the text says? How confident should you be in it?
3. Redmond holds that enslaved readers rejected their masters’ reading of Exodus. What would someone have needed to know about a passage to argue that its users were misreading it?
4. Lisa Fields observes that Black scholars on both sides draw mostly on white sources. Does that weaken the argument that critical theories are a European import, or does it strengthen it? Explain your reasoning.
5. Egypt appears in the Old Testament as an oppressor and also as a future worshiper of God. How does a book that holds both pictures change the way you think about its view of Africa?
6. What evidence, if you found it, would change your answer to the question of whether the Old Testament belongs to the Black church?

Reading it as your own

The chronology does not make anyone trust the Old Testament. It removes one specific reason for distrust: the idea that the book belongs to colonizers and that its African readers came late or under pressure. Cushites stand in its narratives and its songs. African Christians read it as God’s word. Enslaved people turned its Exodus against the people who held them.

Before you put the timeline away, add one more row at the far right, under the present. Write the passage you will read next. Choose one you have avoided, and read it as someone whose spiritual ancestors read it before you.