By Prof. Protus Nathan Uzorma
The history of Christianity cannot be told honestly without Africa, this is an irrefutable, irresistible and axiomatic fact. There is a question that every Christian who has been taught that Christianity is essentially a European religion should be willing to confront: Where was Jesus Christ born? Bethlehem. And Bethlehem was not in Europe. It was in the ancient land of Judea, in the eastern Mediterranean world. Christianity emerged from the Jewish religious environment of the ancient Near East, not from Rome, London, Paris or Berlin.
The geographical origins of Christianity therefore cannot honestly be described as European. Before Christianity became deeply associated with European institutions, European empires and Western civilization, it already had a long and complicated history in the lands of the Bible and in Africa. The very story of Jesus connects Christianity with Africa at an extraordinarily early moment. According to Matthew 2:13–15, Joseph took Mary and the infant Jesus into Egypt to escape Herod. Egypt is Africa. Thus, Africa was not merely a later destination for Christianity brought by European missionaries; Africa appears in the Christian story at the very beginning of the Gospel narrative itself.
The second question is even more uncomfortable for the conventional story: When did Christianity actually reach Africa? The answer is that the history is considerably older than the nineteenth-century missionary story many Africans were taught in school. Acts 8:26–39 describes Philip meeting an Ethiopian official on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza, reading the prophet Isaiah. Philip explains the Scripture to him, and the Ethiopian is baptized. Whatever questions historians may have about the precise identity and geographical origin of this official, the biblical narrative unmistakably places an African associated with Ethiopia among the earliest recorded converts to Christianity.
Indeed, recent scholarship on Ethiopian Christian traditions has revisited the possibility that Christianity reached Ethiopia much earlier than the conventional fourth-century date associated with King Ezana and Frumentius, although that earlier reconstruction remains debated. What cannot reasonably be disputed is that Christianity became deeply rooted in Africa during antiquity. Africa was not standing outside Christianity waiting for Europe to bring it in; African communities were already participating in the development of the Christian movement.
And then comes Egypt—the great intellectual laboratory of early Christianity. Alexandria became one of the most important centres of Christian learning in the ancient world. Think of Clement of Alexandria and Origen, two enormously influential Christian intellectuals, and then think of Athanasius, one of the decisive defenders of Nicene Christianity. These were African Christian thinkers. North Africa produced Tertullian of Carthage, Cyprian of Carthage and Augustine of Hippo. François Decret’s Early Christianity in North Africa describes the church of Carthage as particularly significant in Christianity’s early centuries and identifies Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine among its outstanding African leaders.
The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies likewise treats Tertullian, Cyprian, Donatism and Augustine as central subjects in the history of North African Christianity. These men were not nineteenth-century African converts receiving Christianity from European missionaries. They belonged to the ancient Christian world. Their writings helped shape Christian theology, biblical interpretation, ecclesiology and the intellectual vocabulary through which Christianity was subsequently transmitted.
Consider Tertullian of Carthage. He lived approximately between the second and early third centuries and wrote extensively in Latin. His famous theological formulation concerning the Trinity and his extensive engagement with questions of doctrine, Scripture, morality and Christian identity made him one of the foundational Latin Christian writers. The significance of Tertullian is precisely that he demonstrates how misleading it is to equate Latin Christianity with European Christianity. Latin was a language of the Roman Empire, and Roman Africa was an integral part of that world.
Tertullian was African and worked in Carthage. Cyprian followed him, also in Carthage, while Augustine later emerged from Hippo Regius in North Africa. Their Christianity was already intellectually sophisticated centuries before the Christianization of many European peoples. As David Rankin’s study of Tertullian and the North African church emphasizes, Carthage was a major centre of the Roman world, while the North African church became an important source of Christian theological and institutional development.
Now travel eastward across the African continent to Ethiopia. Here we encounter one of Christianity’s oldest continuous traditions. The Ethiopian Christian story is associated particularly with Frumentius and King Ezana of Aksum in the fourth century. Archaeological and inscriptional evidence provides important evidence for the Christianization of the Aksumite kingdom. Stephanie L. Black’s study of fourth-century inscriptions identifies Ezana as Ethiopia’s first Christian king and discusses the relationship between Frumentius, Athanasius of Alexandria and the theological language appearing in Ezana’s inscriptions. This matters because Ethiopia was not simply receiving Christianity from medieval Europe. It was developing an indigenous Christian civilization in Africa while Christianity was still being shaped throughout the Mediterranean world. The Ethiopian church subsequently preserved its own liturgical, textual and theological traditions, creating a Christian heritage that remained distinct from the Western European traditions that later became dominant globally.
This brings us to the Ethiopian Bible, perhaps one of the most fascinating parts of the entire story. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church traditionally recognizes a biblical canon of 81 books, rather than the 66 books found in most Protestant Bibles. Daniel Assefa’s chapter in the Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Orthodox Christianity describes the Ethiopian Orthodox canon as the broadest biblical canon in the Christian world while cautioning that its history is more complicated than simply saying that Ethiopia possesses “the Bible before Europe removed books.”
Bruk A. Asale similarly notes that the Ethiopian tradition is traditionally associated with an 81-book canon, while emphasizing that the precise history and composition of the canon are complex and have not always been understood consistently. Therefore, we should be careful with sensational claims that Europeans simply “removed 22 books” from one universally agreed Bible. Biblical canons developed differently across Christian traditions. Nevertheless, the important fact remains: the Ethiopian Christian tradition preserved a substantially broader scriptural collection than the 66-book Protestant canon.
Among the most remarkable books preserved in the Ethiopian tradition is 1 Enoch. For centuries, many Christians in the West knew Enoch primarily through fragments, quotations and references rather than through a complete manuscript. The complete Ethiopic text survived in Ge’ez, the classical liturgical language of Ethiopia. Modern scholarship has also demonstrated that Enoch is much older than medieval Ethiopia: fragments of portions of the work were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, while Greek fragments had also survived. What Ethiopia uniquely preserved was the complete textual tradition. That distinction is important. It is not historically accurate to say that Enoch “never existed in Greek”; Greek fragments exist. It is accurate to say that the complete 108-chapter form of 1 Enoch survives in Ge’ez, while earlier Aramaic and Greek witnesses survive only partially. That is an extraordinary African contribution to the preservation of ancient Jewish and Christian-era literature.
And what does Enoch actually contain? It contains material that can radically expand a reader’s understanding of ancient Jewish ideas about angels, fallen heavenly beings, judgment and the spiritual world. In 1 Enoch 15, the giants produced through the union of the Watchers and human women are described as becoming evil spirits after their physical destruction. This is one reason Enoch has attracted enormous attention in discussions about the biblical origins of demonology. But we should distinguish between what Enoch says and what historians can prove about the supernatural world. Enoch is an ancient religious text; its account represents a theological worldview, not a scientifically demonstrated explanation of demons. Yet its importance to the history of ideas is undeniable. It gives us a window into the religious imagination of ancient Judaism and helps explain themes that later appear in Christian discussions of angels, demons and cosmic judgment.