Are There Black People In The Bible

Just Over Half Of Black Americans Say Belief In God Is Necessary For Morality

Among Black Americans, 54% say that belief in God is required in order for a person to be moral and have good values. Fewer say belief in God is not necessary to be moral and have good values.

Across congregation types, Black Protestants who attend religious services at least a few times a year are more likely to say belief in God is necessary to be moral than to say it is not necessary. By comparison, Catholics who attend religious services are evenly divided on this question. Black Protestants who rarely or never attend religious services also are split.

For Black Americans who are unaffiliated with a religion or who identify with a non-Christian faith, the balance of opinion swings the other direction, with majorities in both groups saying it is not necessary to believe in God to be a moral person. And Black adults with a college degree are more likely than those with less education to take this position.

Old Testament View On Slavery

God is depicted as both approving of and regulating slavery, ensuring that the traffic and ownership of fellow human beings proceed in an acceptable manner.

Passages referencing and condoning slavery are common in the Old Testament. In one place, we read:

When a slave owner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished. But if the slave survives a day or two, there is no punishment for the slave is the owner’s property.

So, the immediate killing of a slave is punishable, but a man may so grievously injure a slave that they die a few days later from their wounds without facing any punishment or retribution. All societies in the Middle East at this time condoned some form of slavery, so it shouldn’t be surprising to find approval for it in the Bible. As a human law, punishment for the slave owner would be commendablethere was nothing quite so advanced anywhere in the Middle East. But as the will of a loving God, it appears less than admirable.

The King James Version of the Bible presents the verse in an altered form, replacing “slave” with “servant”seemingly misleading Christians as to the intentions and desires of their God. In fact, though, the “slaves” of that time were mostly bondservants, and the Bible explicitly condemns the type of slave trade the flourished in the American South.

Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnappers possession .

The Bible In Black Theology

Abstract

Although misuse of the Bible has caused much suffering to Black people, it still plays a pivotal role in their lives. These people have engaged with the Bible over many centuries and in different circumstances. In this paper I outline the prophetic readings of the Bible by three groups: the Black slaves, the authors of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black/womanist scholars of today.

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Black Adults More Likely Than Us Adults Overall To Believe In God Of The Bible

Almost all Black Americans say they believe in God or a higher power. When asked to specify further, three-quarters say they believe in God as described in their religions holy scripture . An additional 21% say they do not believe in God as described in scripture, but that they do believe in some other kind of higher power or spiritual force. Only 2% report not believing in any kind of higher power at all.

Among Christians, Black Protestants are more likely than Black Catholics to believe in the God of the Bible. Roughly nine-in-ten churchgoing Black Protestants believe this, regardless of the racial composition of their church.

While the vast majority of religiously unaffiliated Black Americans say they believe in God or a higher power, more of them say they believe in a spiritual power that is not the God of the Bible than say they believe in the God of the Bible .

Black women are more likely than Black men to say they believe in the biblical God, and Black adults in the two youngest generations in the survey are less likely to say they believe in the God of Bible than those in older generations. But even among these younger adults, overwhelming majorities say they believe in some kind of higher power.

In addition, Black adults who identify racially as Black alone are more likely to believe in the God of the Bible than those who identify as Black and some other race or as Black and Hispanic .

The Five Black Bible Heroes America Needs Todaya

Caleb Mathis

You know those pictures from Sunday School of blonde-hair, blue-eyed Jesus? Theyre just wrong. Im a white American, descended from Europeans, and theres no one in the Bible that looks like me. Instead, the Bible is chock full of stories about, and from the perspective of, people of color. While most of the heroes of Scripture are ethnically Jewish, there are a number of black and brown men and women who have an astounding impact. In this moment in time, with our country in deep pain around racism, Im learning by following their example.

In the wake of unnerving police brutality, the world is rightfully taking a good long look in the mirror when it comes to race. One of my most important mirrors is the Bible. I dare to believe this ancient book, and I base my life and decisions upon its wisdom.

A few days ago, social media feeds went black. Blackout Tuesday was an opportunity for minority thinkers, creatives, and activists to be featured on social media, with an endgame of increasing their followership and magnifying their voice. There are many biblical voices that get plenty of amplification , so its important to turn the spotlight on a few of the unsung black heroes of the Bible. You cant tag them, or follow them on Instagram, but their influence and example is real.

EBED-MELECHJeremiah, a prophet of God to his people, was charged with delivering some very unpopular news: the king of Babylon was coming, and he would conquer Jerusalem.

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Majority Of People Were Tanned

Because Bible history mainly happened in the Middle-East, it is very likely that the large majority of people mentioned in the Bible were tanned . To become the ancestors of both black and white people, Adam and Eve must have had the genes both for black and white skin. This would have resulted in them being darkish brown. A likely candidate for the first person that the Bible seems to indicate that he was black-skinned is Cush. He was the son of Ham, the son of Noah. His descendants, the Cushites, are the inhabitants of Africa south of Egypt. Often this is equated with Ethiopia, but Nubia probably is more correct.

Quranic And Muslim Traditions

These variations have been explained in various ways, and have been co-opted to make assertions about race. For example, Ana Echevarría notes that medieval Spanish writer Jiménez de Rada in his Historia arabum chooses a version to emphasise that Jesus is whiter than Muhammad, quoting the Ibn Abbas version: “I saw Jesus, a man of medium height and moderate complexion inclined to the red and white colours and of lank hair.” Echevarría comments that “Moses and Jesus are portrayed as specimens of a completely different ‘ethnic type’, fair and blond ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ differences between them and Muhammad are thus highlighted.” More references needed to prove ethnic/racial difference, none of the hadith state anything about racial difference of Moses has never been made in the Qura’n or hadith. Furthermore, most accounts of hadith say Moses was of dark complexion, i.e. Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 55, Number 607, Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 55, Number 648, Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 55, Number 650. There is almost universal agreement that Moses was of dark complexion by sixth-century Hijazi standards.

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What Did Jesus Look Like

In 2018 historian Joan Taylor published What Did Jesus Look Like? which traced portrayals of Jesus back through time from the European Jesus of western art to Jesus himself. By working with Yossi Nagar, an Israeli anthropologist who was able to prove that the physical characteristics of the bones of Jews which date back to the time of Jesus have similarities to the bones of contemporary Iraqi Jews, Taylor concluded that Jesus had honey/olive skin, brown eyes and black hair. As for the honey/olive description, Taylor writes that his skin was “a darker hue consistent with the skin tone of people of the Middle East” . Taylor thinks the BBC’s reconstruction is “quite speculative” because reconstruction of cartilage is guesswork.

Evidence Of Black Africans In The Bible By Dan Rogers

In 1992, I took a class at Emory University in Atlanta called Introduction to the Old Testament. As I read the various required textbooks for the course, I saw something I had not noticed before. Many Old Testament scholars, particularly European scholars of the 18th, 19th and early 20th century, had written their books and commentaries on the Old Testament from the perspective that there were no people of color mentioned in the Scriptures.

Puzzled, I began to look into the topic more deeply. I studied intensively for about a year, attending lectures and interviewing scholars. I began to realize that this was a particularly difficult and controversial subject, and it has caused much hurt. Thankfully, times have changed, but some of the wounds remain. So lets look at it, and put to rest once and for all this biased and unfair distortion of the Bible.

Let me apologize in advance for some of the terms that I will need to use as we discuss this topic. They are not the terms we would prefer today, but they are terms that historians, ethnologists and Bible commentators of past centuries, and even the 20th century, have employed to explain their ideas about the origin of blacks. These ideas, steeped in racial prejudice, were alleged to provide a biblical justification for black slavery and the subjugation of black peoples.

What do we mean by black?

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Early Church To The Middle Ages

Despite the lack of direct biblical or historical references, from the second century onward various theories about the appearance of Jesus were advanced, but early on these focused more on his physical appearance than on race or ancestry. Larger arguments of this kind have been debated for centuries.

Justin Martyr argued for the genealogy of Jesus in the biological Davidic line from Mary, as well as from his non-biological father Joseph. But this only implies a general Jewish ancestry, acknowledged generally by authors.

The focus of many early sources was on the physical unattractiveness of Jesus rather than his beauty. The second-century anti-Christian philosopher Celsus wrote that Jesus was “ugly and small” and similar descriptions are presented in a number of other sources as discussed extensively by Robert Eisler, who in turn often quotes from Ernst von Dobschütz‘ monumental Christusbilder.Tertullian states that Jesus’s outward form was despised, that he had an ignoble appearance, and the slander he suffered proved the ‘abject condition’ of his body. According to Irenaeus, he was a weak and inglorious man, and in the Acts of Peter he is described as small and ugly to the ignorant.:439Andrew of Crete relates that Christ was bent or even crooked:412 and in the Acts of John he is described as bald-headed and small with no good looks.

The Bible Was Used To Justify Slavery Then Africans Made It Their Path To Freedom

When the Rev. Jaymes Robert Mooney takes his pulpit to preach, sometimes he pictures the graveyard that is where his congregation was born.

It was called Georgia Cemetery, named, he has been told, for the place the enslaved were stolen from before being sent to work the fields in Huntsville, Ala.

The graveyard was where they buried their loved ones. It was there they could gather in private. It was there where they could worship a God who offered not only salvation, but the thing they sought most the promise of freedom.

That graveyard, and those who founded what is now St. Bartley Primitive Baptist Church in 1820, weighs heavy on the young minister who now leads the congregation. It is not lost on him that the Gospel he preaches, the Gospel so many African Americans embraced to sustain them through the horrors of beatings and rapes, separations and lynchings, separate and unequal, is the same Gospel used to enslave them.

Thats the history of the black church, said Mooney, who at 29 leads a congregation of 2,000 members that will celebrate 200 years in existence next year.

He makes sure every new member goes through a church orientation to learn that history all of it. He preaches about the ways slaveholders claimed the Bible was on their side, citing passages that commanded servants to obey. And he talks about the ways African Americans have reclaimed the Bible and its message of liberation.

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The Curse Of Ham A False Teaching

There are many church leaders that have helped spread the false teaching that Ham was cursed by Noah to have blackskin, and that teaching has been used to justify both slavery and racism toward black people all over there world. Here is what the Bible actually says:

And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father and their faces were backward, and they saw not their fathers nakedness. Genesis 9:21-23

The attempt to make Ham the target of the curse is the very definition of false teaching, when the verse clearly names Canaan as the target of the curse. As the story unfolds, we see that Ham was the one that discovered his father naked and immediately told his brothers. From these three verses, many false teachers have decided to create false doctrine to push on the church.

Beware of False Teachers Adding Words

And Ham, the father of Canaan, uncovered the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.

Problem #1 The Wrong Words

The Belt Of Truth Keeps The Armor Together

In this last post-Roman age of iniquity the world still remembers the truth, The man of leprosy attempted to destroy history and repaint himself in every juncture of the book of life they even painted a graven image of the Messiah as a skinny, long haired hippie looking white man. Paganism and the wickedness of this man shall be met with vengeance says the Lord, Israel, Samaria, Egypt and Ethiopia are all one land, although they are different nations, they are one land and there is no such thing called the Middle East! Nubia, Cush, Kemet, but no Africa or middle east, The lies, murder, destruction of others land and territory and deceit shall be this mans destruction.

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Acheiropoieta And Reported Visions

During the Middle Ages, a number of legendary images of Jesus began to appear, at times, they were probably constructed in order to validate the styles of the depictions of Jesus which were reported during that period, e.g. the image of Edessa. The Veil of Veronica was accompanied by a narrative about the Passion of Jesus.

A number of descriptions of Jesus have been reported by saints and mystics who claim that they have seen Jesus in visions. Reports of such visions are more common among Roman Catholics than they are among members of other Christian denominations.

By the twentieth century, some reports of miraculous images of Jesus began to receive a significant amount of attention, e.g. Secondo Pia‘s photograph of the Shroud of Turin, one of the most controversial artifacts in history. During its May 2010 exposition, the shroud and its photograph of what some authors consider the face of Jesus were visited by more than two million people.

Another twentieth-century depiction of Jesus, namely the Divine Mercy image is based on Faustina Kowalska‘s reported vision, which she described in her diary as a pattern that was then painted by artists. The depiction is now widely used among Catholics, and it has more than a hundred million followers worldwide.

Christ Pantocrator

Jesus Christ Was A Black Man

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JESUS CHRIST WAS A BLACK MAN – ACCORDING TO THE BIBLEPharaoh TutI am blackI am blackThe image of Mary and Jesus was originally black. It was changed to white during the renaissance period in Europe .the image of baby Jesus and Mary was originally a black imagePope John Paul II kissing the original image of BLACK mother Mary and Jesus ChristPope Benedict and Pope Francis worships the real BLACK image of mother Mary and JesusThe real BLACK image of mother Mary and Jesus is still in the Vatican, but its hidden away from the worldChristianity before ChristAfrican origins of the major western religionWatch the documentary below!

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