Arjuna Badger Press

The African Worlds Study Bible

Africa in Scripture and the Early Church

Status: Development proposal — August 2026 · Digital sampler live Working title: The African Worlds Study Bible Campaign line: See the biblical world whole. Read the edition: study-bible/ — spreads, atlas, essays, claims audit.

The proposal in one sentence

An Africa-centred, evidence-led study Bible that restores Africa's lands, peoples, textual traditions, interpreters, and earliest churches to the ordinary reading of Scripture — without replacing European distortion with unsupported counterclaims.

The Bible did not begin as a European story. It arose chiefly through Jewish history in the Levant, inside an Afro-Asiatic world joined by the Nile, the Red Sea, deserts, ports, empires, trade, refuge, war, and migration.

Egypt is not outside Africa. Cush is not a poetic abstraction. Cyrene is not a European city. Alexandria is not merely a footnote. African readers are not late guests in a faith delivered to them by modern Europe.

Africa is part of the map, the text, the transmission, the argument, and the earliest history of the church.

Why this edition should exist

For centuries, popular biblical art and teaching often rendered the ancient world through a European lens. North Africa was detached from Africa. Cush became a vague "Ethiopia." Darker Arabian and African peoples were lightened, marginalised, or removed. Christianity in Africa was frequently narrated as though it began with European missions.

That account is historically incomplete.

This edition will recover what the biblical text and surviving history can establish:

• Egypt appears throughout Israel's memory as refuge, oppression, neighbour, empire, and

intellectual world.

• Cush/Kush was a powerful Middle Nile civilisation, principally in present-day Sudan and

southern Egypt.

• Libya, Put, Cyrene, and Alexandria place North Africa inside the Bible's Mediterranean

world.

• Ebed-melech the Cushite, Simon of Cyrene, the official of the Kandake, **Apollos of

Alexandria**, and others will be treated as people with real geographies rather than colourless names.

• Alexandria, Carthage, Numidia, Hippo, Aksum, and the Christian kingdoms of Nubia belong to

the formation of Christian theology, biblical transmission, monasticism, and church life.

• African and diaspora communities have interpreted, sung, contested, survived, and reclaimed

Scripture for centuries.

The purpose is not to make Africa decorative. It is to make the biblical world complete.

Four truths the edition will state plainly

1. Africa is structurally present in Scripture

The most defensible claim is not that every biblical person was African. It is that Africa is indispensable to the biblical world.

The biblical lands also include the Levant, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Persia, Anatolia, Greece, and Rome. Christianity began as a Jewish movement in Roman Judea. Ancient Israel emerged chiefly in a Levantine and Canaanite environment while remaining connected to Egypt, Cush, Arabia, and the wider eastern Mediterranean.

Central does not mean exclusive. Recovery does not require annexation.

2. Ancient Arabia was not a pale or uniform world

Modern media often imagines ancient Arabians through a narrow, light-skinned template. The evidence supports a much broader range.

A 2024 ancient-DNA study of four people from Tylos-period Bahrain, dated approximately 300 BCE to 600 CE, predicted brown eyes and brown or black hair for all four. Two were predicted to have dark skin pigmentation with greater than 90% probability. The remaining predictions were less certain. This is direct evidence for those ancient eastern Arabian individuals — not proof that every Arabian looked the same.

The phrase "original Arabs" also needs care. Early imperial writers used labels related to "Arab" for varied desert and steppe populations. People across pre-Islamic Arabia more often identified through particular kingdoms, peoples, cities, and tribes: Sabaean, Himyarite, Nabataean, Hadramite, and many others. There was no single original Arab phenotype.

The responsible conclusion is still important:

Ancient Arabian peoples included people with brown through very dark complexions. Biblical illustration should show that range instead of treating European appearance as the unmarked default.

Sources: ancient genomes from eastern Arabia · the historical development of Arab identity · long-term Red Sea population connections

3. Genesis opens with a plant-fed world

Genesis 1:29–30 gives seed-bearing plants and fruit to humans, and green plants to other living creatures. The scene precedes animal fear, slaughter, and permission to consume flesh. Many biblical scholars therefore describe the creation account as presenting a vegetarian or nonviolent dietary ideal.

That claim must be stated precisely. Genesis 1 says, "I have given" rather than issuing a modern dietary manifesto. Genesis 9:3 later permits animal food after the flood, with blood prohibited. The Torah subsequently regulates meat, sacrifice, and festival meals. The whole biblical canon therefore does not impose universal veganism.

What it does preserve is a meaningful theological sequence:

1. Creation begins with plant food.
2. Violence enters the human story.
3. Animal consumption is later permitted and bounded.
4. Prophetic visions of peace repeatedly imagine the ending of predation and harm.

The study Bible will let readers see that sequence without pretending the later texts do not exist.

Source: The Vegetarian Ideal in the Bible

4. Climate, diet, and skin colour require science rather than racial mythology

Humans were flexible omnivores before entering Ice Age Europe. In colder regions, seasonal plant scarcity often increased reliance on animal and marine foods, but archaeological evidence also shows plant processing and consumption among Neanderthals and early modern humans.

Lighter pigmentation did not evolve simply because people became cold or carnivorous. It emerged through different combinations of:

• reduced ultraviolet-B exposure at higher latitudes;
• vitamin-D and folate biology;
• migration and population mixture;
• inherited pigmentation variants;
• diet and cultural practice;
• natural selection acting differently in different populations.

Some ancient Europeans retained darker pigmentation for thousands of years. Some Arctic peoples retained comparatively darker skin while adapting through diet and vitamin-D metabolism. A vitamin-D-rich animal or marine diet can reduce, rather than create, selection pressure for lighter skin.

The edition will not turn human adaptation into a moral hierarchy. Pigmentation is an adaptation, not a measure of civilisation, divine favour, intelligence, or spiritual identity.

Sources: human pigmentation and ultraviolet radiation · plant foods in Neanderthal and early modern human diets

The editorial maxim: restore without annexing

This project will be bold about evidence and conservative about certainty.

It will not:

• remove Egypt or North Africa from African history;
• depict every biblical person as northern European;
• claim that every Israelite, Judean, or biblical figure was African or modern Black;
• use biblical genealogies as modern genetic pedigrees;
• turn skin colour into proof of nationality, tribe, covenant, or moral character;
• call living Jewish communities impostors or erase the Jewish identity of Jesus and the earliest

Jesus movement;

• treat a modern religious testimony as archaeological evidence;
• collapse the continent's peoples into one timeless "African culture";
• replace Eurocentrism with a mirror-image ethnocentrism.

It will:

• name African locations and people directly;
• distinguish ancient geography from modern borders;
• separate text, material evidence, historical reconstruction, tradition, and modern reception;
• show uncertainty where evidence is incomplete;
• commission scholars from across Africa and its diasporas;
• include Jewish review wherever claims concern Israel, Judaism, ancestry, or antisemitism;
• maintain a public bibliography, corrections record, and revision history.

Evidence readers can see

Every contested historical annotation will carry two labels.

The reader should never have to guess whether a note describes what a biblical text says, what an archaeologist found, what a church remembers, or what a modern community believes.

Signature features

Africa in the Text

Notes on people, places, rulers, institutions, migration, trade, warfare, and political relationships.

Words and Maps

Ancient place names, translation choices, changing boundaries, disputed identifications, and maps that use modern borders only for orientation.

Ancient Worlds

Archaeology, inscriptions, manuscripts, coins, agriculture, foodways, routes, climate, and material culture.

Africa's Early Churches

Alexandria, Egyptian Christianity, Carthage, Numidia, Hippo, desert monasticism, Aksum, and the Christian kingdoms of Nubia.

Africana Readings

Continental and diaspora interpretation: inculturation, oral and mother-tongue reading, African-Initiated churches, liberation, Black theology, womanism, African women's theology, postcolonial and decolonial work, and ordinary community reading.

Abuse and Repair

The "curse of Ham," slavery, colonialism, racism, antisemitism, gender violence, and the history of texts used as weapons — followed by responsible interpretation and repair.

Claims Audit

Popular historical, racial, and genealogical claims tested openly against textual, archaeological, historical, and genetic evidence.

Across Traditions

Clearly attributed Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, African-Initiated, and Jewish perspectives where traditions differ.

Living Voices

Contemporary testimony represented accurately as testimony. The Penuel Show interview with Sar Ahmadiel Ben Yehuda, for example, documents the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem's present self-understanding. It does not independently prove ancient tribal descent.

Sample study notes

Genesis 1:29–30 — The first table

God gives seed-bearing plants and fruit trees to humanity and green vegetation to land animals and birds. Within this creation account, dominion does not begin as permission to kill for food. Human and animal life share a plant-fed world. Read beside Genesis 9:1–4, this scene has often been understood as an original ideal of nonviolent provision rather than a description of the world as later experienced.

Genesis does not use the modern term "vegan," and other biblical texts permit animal food. The sequence nevertheless matters: Scripture's opening food economy is abundance from the ground, not the fear of animals.

Evidence: TXT — established. Vegetarianism as the passage's moral ideal — probable and interpretively debated.

Genesis 9:3–4 — Permission with a boundary

After the flood, God permits humans to eat moving creatures "just as" green plants had previously been given. The permission is immediately restricted: flesh with its lifeblood may not be eaten. The narrative therefore acknowledges a changed relationship marked by animal fear and human violence while placing a boundary around consumption.

Readers may understand this as concession, adaptation, or expanded provision. It cannot honestly be used to claim that Genesis never presented plant food as the original arrangement.

Evidence: TXT — established. "Concession" as theological interpretation — probable but not grammatically explicit.

Jeremiah 38:7–13; 39:15–18 — The Cushite who trusted and acted

Ebed-melech, whose name or title means "servant of the king," is explicitly identified as a Cushite in Jerusalem's court. Here Cush is best located in the African Middle Nile world of Kush/Nubia, south of Egypt, rather than automatically in the modern Ethiopian state.

During Jerusalem's siege, Judean officials leave Jeremiah to die, but Ebed-melech challenges the king and organises a careful rescue. God later promises him survival "because you have trusted in me." His African origin is neither incidental nor to be translated away: a foreign courtier embodies courage, mercy, and trust when powerful insiders fail.

Evidence: TXT — established. Middle Nile identification — probable to established.

Acts 8:26–40 — An African royal official at the widening frontier

Luke calls the traveller an Aithiops and places him in the service of the Kandake, the dynastic title used by queens or queen mothers of Meroitic Kush. In this setting, "Ethiopia" points principally to the Nile kingdom centred in present-day Sudan, not automatically to modern Ethiopia or Aksum.

The official is powerful, literate, and agentic: he invites Philip to interpret Isaiah and then requests baptism. His baptism places African participation inside the apostolic-era expansion described by Acts, centuries before modern European missions.

Later traditions connecting him directly to the Ethiopian church belong in reception history. Acts does not say he founded a church; securely documented royal Christianity at Aksum belongs to the fourth century.

Evidence: TXT/HIST — Meroitic setting and Kandake title established. Religious status — disputed. Church-founding claim — TRAD, historically unverified.

The major essay programme

1. Africa in the biblical worlds: names, maps, routes, and changing borders
2. Before "Black" and "white": race, ethnicity, phenotype, and antiquity
3. Egypt in Scripture: refuge, oppression, wisdom, empire, and diaspora
4. Cush, Kush, Nubia, and biblical "Ethiopia"
5. Libya, Put, Cyrene, and Jewish North Africa
6. Alexandria, Egyptian Judaism, and the Greek Scriptures
7. Israel's Levantine emergence and its African connections
8. Arabia and Africa across the Red Sea
9. Food in Scripture: creation, concession, sacrifice, fasting, and justice
10. Human pigmentation, climate, diet, and the limits of racial storytelling
11. Africa in the New Testament
12. Alexandria and Coptic Christianity
13. Carthage, Numidia, and Latin African Christianity
14. Aksum and the Christian kingdoms of Nubia
15. African biblical languages, manuscripts, and differing canons
16. The "curse of Ham": invention, enslavement, resistance, and repair
17. African hermeneutics in the plural
18. Black and diaspora interpretation: Ethiopianism, liberation, and womanism
19. African women and ordinary readers as interpreters
20. Jews and Jewish communities in Africa
21. Hebrew Israelite movements: history, self-understanding, genealogy, and antisemitism

A new edition, not an erased lineage

This project follows important predecessors.

The Original African Heritage Study Bible, edited by Cain Hope Felder and first published in 1993, recovered African presence and Black heritage through the King James Version.

The Africa Study Bible brought together more than 350 contributors from 50 countries and connected the New Living Translation to African life and application.

The African Worlds Study Bible should not duplicate either achievement. Its distinct task is to combine:

1. a complete licensed Bible text;
2. African geography and peoples inside the biblical worlds;
3. African manuscript, translation, and canon histories;
4. early Christianity in Egypt, Roman North Africa, Aksum, and Nubia;
5. continental and diaspora reception;
6. visible sourcing and explicit treatment of disputed claims.

The preferred translation for publisher discussion is the NRSVue, including feasibility for the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books, because of its scholarly and ecumenical fit. No translation has yet been licensed. The study apparatus should remain reference-keyed and portable so that it can support another authorised text or, if necessary, first appear as a verse-keyed companion.

Who should build it

The project requires a smaller, accountable contributor body rather than a symbolic list of names: approximately 60–90 commissioned contributors supported by strong section editors.

Governance should include:

• an Africa-based editor-in-chief or genuinely Africa-led co-editorship;
• at least two-thirds African or African-diaspora representation on the executive board;
• at least half of that board based at African institutions;
• regional representation from North, West, Central, East/Horn, and Southern Africa;
• Coptic, Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo, Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical,

Pentecostal/Charismatic, and African-Initiated Church voices;

• Jewish scholars of ancient Judaism, African Jewish communities, and Black Jewish experience;
• specialists in Hebrew Bible, New Testament, archaeology, Egyptology, Nubian studies, Arabian

history, patristics, manuscripts, genetics, food history, and Africana hermeneutics;

• gender parity and meaningful participation by younger scholars and ordinary readers.

No contributor should be asked to represent a continent, race, region, or denomination alone.

Development path

A credible full study Bible is a four-to-five-year publishing project, not a fast content drop.

The first funded development phase should produce ten finished sample spreads:

1. Genesis 1 — creation and the first table
2. Genesis 9 — permission, blood, and violence
3. Genesis 10 — a family map, not a race chart
4. Exodus — Egypt as both African civilisation and imperial oppressor
5. Jeremiah 38–39 — Ebed-melech the Cushite
6. Matthew 2 — refuge in Egypt
7. Acts 2 — Egypt, Libya, and the diaspora at Pentecost
8. Acts 8 — the official of the Kandake
9. Acts 13 — Cyrene inside the Antioch church
10. One map, one visual timeline, and one transparent claims audit

Full commissioning should begin only after a publisher, translation-rights pathway, editorial leadership, development funding, tested page model, and reader validation are in place.

Build it with us

This is a public development proposal, not yet a published Bible.

Arjuna Badger Press is looking for:

• African and diaspora biblical scholars;
• Egyptologists and Nubian, Ethiopian, Arabian, and North African historians;
• Jewish historians and reviewers;
• theologians across African Christian traditions;
• archaeologists, manuscript specialists, geneticists, food historians, cartographers, and

artists;

• churches, seminaries, publishers, rights holders, and funders willing to develop the work

without controlling its findings.

If this belongs in your field, tradition, classroom, church, or publishing programme, write to info@arjunabadger.press.

The aim is not to colour the old illustrations darker and leave the old assumptions untouched. The aim is to read the evidence, restore the map, and see the biblical world whole.

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