Sometime in the second century, someone in Egypt copied the Gospel of John onto papyrus. A scrap of that copy survives. It is known as the John Rylands papyrus, and Dr. Vince Bantu, a scholar of early Christianity outside the Western world, describes it as the earliest biblical fragment we have. The oldest physical witness to the New Testament text, on his account, was made and kept in Africa.
That fragment is the first entry in a record that answers a common assumption: that defending the faith is a white, academic enterprise the Black church would have to borrow. The record shows something else. The faith that apologetics defends had African writers, bishops and monks before it had many European ones. Black Christians in America were giving reasons for that faith under slavery, long before most of them heard the word apologetics. The name is newer than the work, and what the Black church is doing now is taking up an inheritance.
The voices who have taken up this history with Jude 3 Project each cover a different stretch of it. Bantu works on the ancient evidence and on how it was later buried. Lisa Fields, Elder Ansen Goyens and Dr. Charles Goodman speak to what enslaved people and their descendants did with the Bible. Pastor Chris Brooks and Dr. Eric Mason, who each wrote a book titled Urban Apologetics, describe the modern waves of challenge and the movement that rose to meet them. Followed in order, their accounts let the evidence speak before the modern argument does. Along the way, two things have to stay apart: what the sources establish, and what a speaker asserts with confidence.