So last week I talked about how the idea of White Jesus is utter foolishness because the modern categories of race were not invented. Even if we did go with the modern categories of race Jesus would not be identified with the “white race” unless he was from Europe which he wasn’t.
So Come on and say it with me: White Jesus does not exist. White Jesus does not exist. White Jesus does not exist.
Now that we got that out of the way. Can we talk about the spread of the gospel and the movement of the early church. Was this a white movement? Was it begun and established in Europe? Did it thrive in Caucasian soil? I think not.
In Acts 1:8 Jesus tells the apostles that they will be empowered by the Holy Spirit to be witnesses in Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth.
The early church was super diverse. When you talk of the early church you can’t even talk about it as Christianity. It was more like “christianities” shaped by the different cultures the gospel found itself in. During the first three centuries of the church Christianity could be found in places like Persia (modern day Iran) and Numidia (modern day Tunisia and Algeria).
Some of the greatest theologians and pastors hailed from Africa: Tertullian, Cyprian, Athanasius, Origen, and Moses of Ethiopia. Some of the greatest martyrs who gave their lives in devotion to Christ and they did this on African soil! They didn’t do this to support some lie about White Jesus because for them Jesus wasn’t white and they had no concept of race as we now understand it.
The Hebrews thought of the world as composed of two types of people or races: Jews and Gentiles. These two groups were separated by a distinct culture and heritage. They fought over a claim to land that is still today the most hotly contested piece of property in the whole world. Then come the Christians. In Antioch one of the most diverse cities in the 1st century Roman empire the people were divided according to ethnicity and culture. Then came the followers of Jesus who consisted of people from different cultures and tribes and it totally baffles those on the outside. They don’t know whether to call them Jews, Syrians, Libyans, or Ethiopians. They just knew that these different people came together to worship Christ and decided they should be called Christians. Christians came to be known as a third race.
Here’s what the Epistle to Diognetus says about these people called Christians:
“For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity….But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners…Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.”
Christianity is the white man’s religion? Man please. Jesus is for everybody!
For more info check out:
History of the World Christian Movement Volume I: Earliest Christianity to 1453 by Dale T. Irvin and Scott Sunquist
How Africa Shaped The Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity by Thomas C. Oden
photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrickwilken/27771234/”>patrick wilken</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>cc</a>
