Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Map
- Timeline
- Introduction
- 1 Ethiopia, Egypt and the Matter of Africa
- 2 Who were the Egyptians?
- 3 The Egypt of Africa African Resonances in Predynastic Egypt
- 4 The Egypt of the Rock Artists
- 5 Africa in Egypt Proto- and Early-Dynastic Manifestations
- 6 Africa in Egypt Dynastic Responses
- 7 Africa in Egypt Later Dynastic Encounters
- 8 The First Ethiopians
- 9 Ethiopians in the Greek and Ptolemaic World
- 10 Ethiopians in the Roman World
- 11 The ‘Ethiopia’ of the Early Christian World
- 12 The ‘Real’ Ethiopians
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plat Section
11 - The ‘Ethiopia’ of the Early Christian World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Map
- Timeline
- Introduction
- 1 Ethiopia, Egypt and the Matter of Africa
- 2 Who were the Egyptians?
- 3 The Egypt of Africa African Resonances in Predynastic Egypt
- 4 The Egypt of the Rock Artists
- 5 Africa in Egypt Proto- and Early-Dynastic Manifestations
- 6 Africa in Egypt Dynastic Responses
- 7 Africa in Egypt Later Dynastic Encounters
- 8 The First Ethiopians
- 9 Ethiopians in the Greek and Ptolemaic World
- 10 Ethiopians in the Roman World
- 11 The ‘Ethiopia’ of the Early Christian World
- 12 The ‘Real’ Ethiopians
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plat Section
Summary
No longer is it acceptable to dismiss the possibility that ethnic and colour difference played a significant role in the Graeco-Roman world in general, and in early Christianity in particular.
—Gay Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature, 2002, 124Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date…. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as necessary.
—George Orwell, 1984, 1934The brief duration and history of early Christianity in north Africa is an excellent example of George Orwell's sardonic strictures in 1984. It has become politically attractive and virtually a truism to claim, as W.H.C. Frend does, that Mediterranean Africa, centred on Alexandria and Carthage, ‘was the scene of a prosperous and brilliant Christian civilization’ from the time of Constantine to the Islamic conquest, from the fourth to the mid-seventh centuries (1978, 410), and that ‘the Christian leaders, Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) and Cyril of Alexandria (d. AD 444), moulded the teaching of the Latin and Greek Churches respectively in a way that has survived for centuries’ (ibid.) Such views have been echoed by every revisionist historian of Africa since the 1960s. Thus, J.D. Fage charges in the Cambridge History of Africa that ‘the idea that Christianity is more a religion of Europeans than of Africans would in fact have been totally impossible prior to the rise of Islam’ (1978, 7), while John Iliffe, in his equally influential Africans: The History of a Continent, claims: ‘Perhaps only in pharaonic times had [north Africa] been more central to human progress than in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, when it was the intellectual spearhead of Christianity’ (1995, 37).
In more bizarre formats, such claims also emerge in North American black interpretations of the Bible, from the nineteenth century onward. So, for instance, Henry Highland Garnet insisted that Moses had married a black Ethiopian and that figures such as Cyprian, Origen and Augustine had been black (Kidd, 2006, 252). Robert Benjamin Lewis made similar claims, including also Tertullian on the list, and maintaining ‘that Christian theology was a product of the Black intellect’ (ibid., 253), while W.L. Hunter was convinced that ‘Jesus Christ had Negro Blood in his veins’ (op. cit.).
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- The First EthiopiansThe image of Africa and Africans in the early Mediterranean world, pp. 379 - 426Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2009