SPECIAL FEATURE The African H e r i t a g e in the N e w T e s t a m e n t As with the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament may be divided into three parts, namely the Gospels (including the Acts of the Apostle as Luke's second volume), the Epistles, and unique apocalyptic book, the Revelation, that closes the New Testament canon. Romans and Greeks are certainly part of the New Testament, which frequently mentions them by name, military rank, or political title. Yet, Africans and persons of African decent are fully represented as well. For years, persons of African descent have taken heart upon reading the celebrated passage in Psalm 68:31—"Let princes come out of Egypt and let Ethiopia hasten to stretch forth her hand to God!" But today there is a much greater basis upon which blacks may celebrate and otherwise take seriously their rich ancient heritage with sacred Scripture, showing that long ago their outstretched hand was fully accepted by God, despite what has happened to them in the intervening centuries. The substantial African presence in Scripture is by no means limited to an isolated verse here and there. Regardless of the evidence that indicates a manifest black presence in the Bible, Eurocentric church officials and translators have tended to overlook or minimized the fact that black people are significantly part of the Old Testament. We too easily and uncritically consider today's European Jews and American Jews as typical of the Jews during the ancient biblical period, without factoring in over two thousand years of assimilation and ethnic blending on the part of such Diaspora Jews who moved north and settled among the Caucasians. The standard misconception about the color or racial type of the modern Jew in relation to their ancient forebears has popularized the tendency to align Western scholarship with a bias against acknowledging a major black presence in the Old Testament and this has had grave consequences on the image of blacks as somehow cursed or persons with a heritage limited to being "hewers of wood and drawers of water." As astonishing as it is, most prestigious academies and universities of the world today have in a most sophisticated manner conspired to ridicule the idea that black people have any substantive history of which the Bible speaks. In America, it is ironic that such distortion has been vigorously championed in the so-called "Bible Belt" where obviously the "belt" of biblical interpretation has been much too tight for years. While such ultra-conservative regions champion biblical inerrancy, they have subscribed too often to gross errors in their racialist reading of Scripture. In gradual steps since the fourth century A.D., Europe and then North America began recasting the entire Bible into a religio-historical saga of so many Europeantype people. Such recasting of ancient ethnographic realities took on the unquestioned status as certain fact presented by persons who claimed to be well educated in Western civilization. Worse yet, others throughout the world followed their academic lead and in like manner stereotyped and demonized black people. The process of interpreting the Bible in terms distinctly favorable to whites and
Asians has had another effect. Blacks themselves have tended to accept a view of the biblical world as an ancient setting of people who had no racial resemblance to them. The African heritage had been expunged from the biblical record and black self-esteem plummeted. Even today, far too many still think that it is a terrible thing to demonstrate the black presence in sacred Scripture. The African presence in the Bible is by no means limited to the Old Testament. Indeed, many Jews of the first century lived in regions where Africans intermingled freely with other racial and ethnic types. We too easily forget today that miscegenation or interracial marriage was an explicit part of Alexander the Great's policy; he wanted all subjects to have Greek blood flowing through their veins! Of course, there was no notion of the modern idea of "race" during that time, but suffice it to say that the ancients had no problem with black people nor did the Greeks and Romans consider them to be inferior. (On the contrary, persons like Aristotle thought that the northern barbarians were of inferior intelligence!) If the truth be insisted upon, the family stock of Jesus himself was none other than Afroasiatic. His parents probably resembled the typical darker Palestinian, Egyptian or Yemenite of today; many African-Americans would have similar features. Consider a few inescapable factors that challenge the traditional Western perception of the Madonna and Child. In the Gospel of Matthew, we find the quotation from Hosea 11:1 which reads "Out of Egypt, I have called my son." The passage is part of the notorious "Flight into Egypt" which describes the way in which Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt to hide the One that King Herod feared would displace him. Assuming that we can lend some historical credence to this report, it is difficult imagining, if the holy family were indeed persons who looked like typical "Europeans," that they could effectively "hide" in Africa. One must remember and take most seriously the fact that Egypt has always been and remains part of Africa. Her indigenous people are noticeably different from the European types, notwithstanding the Hellenistic cultural incursions, beginning in earnest just over 300 B.C.E. In fact, it has only been in recent centuries that the Egyptians and other North Africans have been officially racially classified as somehow "Caucasians" (similar to the manner in which Western Civilization has come to regard all of the indigenous Africans north of the Sahara). Nevertheless, for thousands of years, Africans have migrated out of biblical Ethiopia and Egypt and have by land passed through Palestine en route to the Fertile Crescent or Mesopotamia. Thus the term Afro-Asiatic emerged and it is a fitting description of persons from Abraham to Jesus and his disciples. Beyond this, we must also consider the hundreds of Shrines of the Black Madonna have existed in many parts of North Africa, Europe, Meso-America and Russia. These are not some weatherbeaten misrepresentations of an original white Madonna. Rather, as recent studies of the oldest such Madonnas in Italy have shown, they are uncanny reminders of the diverse ethnography of those who inhabited Palestine at the time of Jesus of Nazareth and earTHE SPHINX™ SUMMER 1999