Nubia’s Collapse
22
Anticipating Ancient African Christianity
Because this volume lacks any extended treatments of reception history or history of effects, I adapt here material from an article I originally published in the A.M.E. Church Review . Although it does not address the reception of Acts 8 : 27–40 per se, it does trace some of the early expansion of Christianity in Africa in ways that Luke may have appreciated.
In a heavily documented essay, James M. Scott argues at length that ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman writers employed the phrase “ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8) in various manners, and that the Book of Acts may apply the phrase to multiple directions. Ancient Jewish hearers portrayed “ends of the earth” in terms of the distant settlements of both Ham and Japheth, and the first gentile Christian may introduce the African mission while Luke goes on to the Japhetic mission more fully fleshed out in his day.¹⁸¹⁰ (Luke’s focus on the mission to Rome makes sense in view of the fact that both Luke and his first audience inhabited the Roman Empire and would find the spread of the gospel there central to their own situation.)
Although Scott’s thesis regarding Ham, Shem, and Japheth has been debated, Luke likely does foreshadow a subsequent flourishing of Christianity to the south. Luke presents the African court official (8:27) as a forerunner of gentile Christianity, more of which he will narrate, and of African Christianity, which he anticipates outside his narration. In this case, this official invites us to consider the spread of African Christianity in subsequent centuries, a spread that he anticipated and that has in fact happened. In this brief chapter I consider two examples of African Christianity from the earliest centuries of Christianity, after briefly surveying the case of the Nubian official himself.¹⁸¹¹
Nubia
The first examples here come from various kingdoms often surveyed today under the title of Nubia.¹⁸¹²
The Identity of the Nubian Official
As is usually recognized today, the first gentile Christian was an “Ethiopian,” a Black African official of Queen Candace (kan-dak’ê—Acts 8:27). If he was a eunuch in the literal sense, this would have made his full conversion to Judaism impossible (Deut 23:1), so unlike some earlier converts to the Christian faith, he is not simply a Jewish proselyte (Acts 6:5), but the first fully gentile Christian. As a “eunuch,” he probably would have recalled for the Bible’s first readers an earlier Ethiopian eunuch in the Old Testament—a foreign official in the royal court of Judah, who was one of the prophet Jeremiah’s only two faithful allies.¹⁸¹³ His conversion might also recall for Acts’ first audience God’s promise of favor for both gentiles and eunuchs who would follow him (Isa 56:3–7).
This first non-Jewish Christian is clearly from Africa and is black in complexion. In ancient Greek and Roman usage, “Ethiopia” did not mean only what we mean today by modern Ethiopia.¹⁸¹⁴ In ancient Mediterranean literature, “Ethiopians” designated all Africans south of Egypt, and other texts highlight a particular African kingdom whose queen was titled the Candace.¹⁸¹⁵ Although various Nubian kingdoms are known as early as 3000 B.C., this kingdom was a particular, powerful Nubian civilization with its capital in Meroë and had continued since around 750 B.C.¹⁸¹⁶ Its people were so dark-skinned that they became the standard by which the Mediterranean world defined blackness.¹⁸¹⁷ Archaeology attests both this kingdom’s magnificent splendor as an empire in its own right and its relations with Rome.¹⁸¹⁸ Meroë’s art betrays Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and African influences.¹⁸¹⁹
Luke presumably expects this court official to share Christ among his own people, as other believers did (cf. 11:19); Luke devotes nearly the amount of space to this single, strategic conversion as to the conversion of the Samaritans led by Philip in previous paragraphs. Yet we have little reliable tradition concerning this court official’s evangelistic impact in Nubia, probably because Meroë was by this period in decline. This ancient empire was finally weakening by the mid-first century CE, “almost certainly” because of “the rise of a rival trading empire, with its centre at Axum” in East Africa.¹⁸²⁰ I turn to Axum later in the essay.
Christian Nubia
The Nuba people invaded the territory of Meroë in several waves, until the Axumites finished Meroë off in the mid-300s, and the Nubians began to form new kingdoms in the region.¹⁸²¹ Yet Christianity spread southward into Nubia again in the 300s and 400s, this time from Egypt, till Nubia became predominantly Christian.¹⁸²² The Ballana rulers, practicing human sacrifice, were not Christian but tolerated the spread of Christianity until the kings themselves were converted in the 500s.¹⁸²³ One of the most renowned monks of the earliest centuries of Christianity was a tall Black African Christian from this region called Father Moses.¹⁸²⁴
The Christian era in Nubia was one of prosperity and, till the later part of the period, unity; in contrast to Nubia’s former practice of divine kings, the Christian period also introduced a separation between church and state.¹⁸²⁵ Christian Nubia was a brilliant civilization, largely forgotten by history until archaeologists in the second half of the twentieth century began to bring its remarkable accomplishments to light.¹⁸²⁶
Unlike many other peoples, Nubia adopted Christianity without coming under the sway of Roman law;¹⁸²⁷ further, having done so, Nubia clung to it tenaciously. Despite organizational weaknesses of Nubian Christianity, the church survived the Islamic Arab conquest of much of North Africa. Nubia’s skilled archers repelled Arab invaders twice at Dongola,¹⁸²⁸ and unable to conquer Nubia after taking Egypt in 641, the invaders made a treaty with them in 652.¹⁸²⁹ Notably, this was “the only treaty in which the Arabs recognized the independence of a non-Muslim state; Aswan was their only officially accepted frontier.”¹⁸³⁰ This treaty was “a compromise guaranteeing the Nubians independence and freedom in return for an annual tribute of 360 slaves and the obligation to maintain a mosque . . . .This agreement remained in force for six hundred years and enabled the Nubian states to prosper and develop unhindered.”¹⁸³¹
Relations were not, however, benign. Besides the slaves acquired under the treaty, the Arab rulers to the north also took other Nubian slaves by trade.¹⁸³²
Nubia and Egypt
Christianity initially spread in Egypt so strongly that it remained majority Christian into the tenth century,¹⁸³³ and to this day a significant proportion of its population remains Christian.¹⁸³⁴ But Islamic restrictions did eventually reduce Christian numbers in Egypt. Initially, tired of Byzantine rule,¹⁸³⁵ Egypt’s Christians welcomed the Arabs in 641 CE; the initial treaty promised the Christians religious freedom provided they would pay a poll tax.¹⁸³⁶ But in the intermittent persecutions of the eighth and ninth centuries, Muslims destroyed centuries of Coptic art; heavy financial pressures also made life difficult for the Copts.¹⁸³⁷ From 1250 the white Muslim Mameluks repressed the Copts even more harshly, till by the fourteenth century they had become a much smaller portion of Egypt’s population.¹⁸³⁸ Egyptian Christians were forced to wear identifying clothing that set them apart, “were required by state policy to pay tribute, offer hospitality to Muslims,” and “were forbidden to erect new churches or monasteries or to display any aspect of Christian practice.”¹⁸³⁹
Whereas Egypt’s Christians virtually invited their Arab conquerors in to liberate them from the Eastern Roman Empire, Nubians refused submission and even tried to help free eventually-oppressed Egyptian Copts from the new empire.¹⁸⁴⁰ Thus one writer recounts the intervention of the Nubian kingdom of Makuria on behalf of the now-persecuted Christians of Egypt in 745, when Omar, initiating a de facto holy war, imprisoned the patriarch and began “destroying churches or converting them into mosques.” The Nubian invasion compelled Egypt’s governor to back down, freeing the patriarch and ending the persecution.¹⁸⁴¹
Sometimes Arab rulers grew suspicious of the Egyptian church’s Nubian ties. Al-Yazuri (1047–1058) increased the economic burden on the Copts and imprisoned Christodulus, the Patriarch, when he was “falsely accused of inciting the Nubian king to withhold” tribute.¹⁸⁴² In 1074 Christodulus was again arrested, accused “of having ordered Buqtar, the archbishop of Nubia, to destroy the mosques there”; he was, however, found innocent, and his accuser was executed.¹⁸⁴³ From reading Arab reports from the seventh through the fifteenth centuries about the black civilizations to the South,¹⁸⁴⁴ one might suppose that they largely identified Christianity and Africa.
Nubia’s Collapse
Unfortunately, this prosperous, advanced civilization invited Arab conquest.¹⁸⁴⁵ Arab Egypt implemented policies designed to erode Nubia’s strength, hoping to make it a vassal kingdom.¹⁸⁴⁶ Far less united than Arab Egypt, Nubia’s centuries were numbered.¹⁸⁴⁷
The Nubian church perished only in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, its influence declining and that of hostile Islamic neighbors increasing.¹⁸⁴⁸ The Christian Nubian state ‘Alwa declined in part because it was unable to secure trained priests from Alexandria or Abyssinia to teach the people. Finally, its people no longer knowledgeable in the contents of their faith, it succumbed to invasion.¹⁸⁴⁹
As one scholar notes, “In the fifteenth century, the once powerful kingdoms broke up into a maze of warring principalities, and the coup de grace to medieval Nubian civilization was dealt by the invasion of hordes of Arab nomads.”¹⁸⁵⁰ Once the Arabs had finally subdued Nubia and placed a Muslim king on the throne, he immediately signaled Nubia’s new direction by turning a church in the capital into a mosque.¹⁸⁵¹ Christianity lingered, but eventually Islam prevailed, “sustained by the influx of marauding Arab tribesmen.”¹⁸⁵²
Axum (Abyssinia, Ethiopia)
Modern Ethiopia’s national history includes an African Christian empire older than the Nubian Christian kingdoms. Christianity became the religion of Axum in roughly the same period that it was achieving prominence in the Roman Empire. Its conversion was peaceful, without external conquest.
The Axumite king Ezana (also spelled Aezana) converted to Christianity sometime around 333 CE and made that the state religion. Many Christians already lived in Axum at the time, but Syrian Christians Frumentius and Edesius proved particularly effective in impacting the nation. The emperor Ezana appreciated Frumentius and supported his efforts even before Ezana’s conversion.¹⁸⁵³ This East African Church accepted the same doctrines (such as the Trinity)¹⁸⁵⁴ as the North African, Greek, and Roman churches, doctrines formally recognized at Nicea (325 CE), Constantinople (381) and Ephesus (431).¹⁸⁵⁵ These East African Christians maintained close relations with Egyptian and Syrian Christianity and functioned as part of the Eastern church.¹⁸⁵⁶
Axum’s rapid and solid conversion to the Christian faith contrasts with the slower and often bloodier and less enthusiastic conversions of the Roman Empire and northern European tribes. Axum was surely one of the most open and ready soils in which ancient Christianity took root.¹⁸⁵⁷
Inscriptions from Ezana’s time state that his empire stretched across much of central Africa into Arabia and on the Nile as well.¹⁸⁵⁸ When the same king reconquered Saba in South Arabia, c. 335–370, Christianity spread freely in South Arabia, though facing a period of deadly persecution. (It had already spread peacefully in much of Arabia, however.)¹⁸⁵⁹ After the rise of Islam, it was this East African empire in what is now Ethiopia that had to defend the rights of oppressed Christian minorities in Arab lands. William Leo Hansberry, the founding scholar of Howard University’s African history program, recounts that:
Between 1322 and 1327 the Byzantine emperor and Pope John XXII sent deputations to the sultan of Egypt to plead the cause of the Christians in that country. An appeal of the same character was also dispatched to Egypt by the Ethiopian king Amda Tseyon, warning the sultan that unless the repressive measures being imposed on the Egyptian Christians were revoked, he would institute a similar program of proscriptions against the Muslims in Ethiopia. In addition, the Ethiopian king threatened to divert the course of the Nile, which would have had the effect of transforming much of Egypt into a desert.¹⁸⁶⁰
Amda Tseyon’s threat worked, but in the reign of his successor (Newaya Krestos,
1344–1372
), the sultan had Abba Mark, the Alexandrian Christian patriarch, imprisoned. Newaya Krestos again threatened the sultan, who “not only freed the patriarch but also abrogated his harsh measures against his Christian subjects.”¹⁸⁶¹
This African empire remained solidly Christian.¹⁸⁶² Medieval Europe remained aware of its existence,¹⁸⁶³ though Arab opposition ultimately did separate Ethiopia from its Christian siblings elsewhere in the world, isolating two streams of Christianity from each other to the impoverishment of both.¹⁸⁶⁴ The initial relations between Arab Muslims and African Christians had been positive; Axum’s ruler welcomed Muslims fleeing from Mecca, which was originally hostile to them. Ethiopians also allowed Muslims to settle on their coast.¹⁸⁶⁵
But Arab Muslims were exerting severe pressure on Axum in the tenth century,¹⁸⁶⁶ and in time the Arab regime in Egypt “blocked attempts by Christian Ethiopia to establish contacts with the outside world” because they feared that Ethiopia might join common cause with professedly Christian medieval Europe, where anti-Arab sentiments were building toward the tragic era of the Crusades.¹⁸⁶⁷ Ethiopian “pilgrims in Jerusalem in 1345–7 complained that the Sultan of Egypt had imposed a ban on Ethiopian travelers through his country to prevent them” from contacting Europeans.¹⁸⁶⁸ In the sixteenth century Arab forces stepped up their imperialistic advances southward. Ahmed ibn Ibrahim el Ghazi, the Amir of Harrar, invaded Ethiopia and persecuted its church; Lebna-Dengel, Ethiopia’s emperor (1508–40) fought valiantly against the invaders, and finally sought Portugal’s help, but the Ethiopian scholar Ephraim Isaac mourns that the help came too late. By the time it arrived,
the Ethiopian Church lost not only many of its great teachers, writers and leaders but also many of its treasures of literature and art. It was this second phase of Moslem onslaught that brought the golden age of monastic life in Ethiopia to a close. Once again, as after Islamic pressure of the seventh century, the Ethiopian Church sank into eclipse . . . ¹⁸⁶⁹
But the Ethiopian Church “regained internal stability” in the mid-seventeenth century, establishing itself against both Arab and Portuguese influences; from this point Ethiopia remained strong.¹⁸⁷⁰ Isaac points out that the three largest monotheistic religions dominate the traditions of three major Semitic groups in that region: Judaism is central to Jewish tradition, Islam to a majority of Arab tradition, and Christianity to a majority of Ethiopian/East African tradition.¹⁸⁷¹
While Ethiopian Christianity prevailed, however, it historically exerted little missionary vision to expand elsewhere in Africa or beyond.¹⁸⁷² Nubia had likewise exerted little missionary vision beyond its borders, and in time, dependent on Alexandria for trained clergy, lacked teachers to continue instructing its own people in the Christian faith.¹⁸⁷³ If many later European missionaries stirred the gospel anew in some other regions of Africa, it was not because no African Christians existed before their arrival. It was because only the European Christians in that period had begun to emphasize the biblical commission to evangelize all nations (Matt 24:14; 28:18–20), highlighted in Acts 1:8.
Conclusion
The first gentile Christian was an African. African Christians played a leading role in the early centuries of church history (we could have made this even clearer had we devoted the space to discuss also North African Christians). If, as James Scott argued, the Ethiopian eunuch of Acts 8 functions as a proleptic announcement of African Christianity to come, early and medieval church history confirm Luke’s insight. In the past century, however, Christian growth in Africa has been particularly unprecedented.