If you’re a Western Christian, your spiritual ancestry is African

If you’re a Western Christian, your spiritual ancestry is African (Angelus)

Western Christianity is fundamentally African, in the way that Eastern Christianity is fundamentally Greek...

Western churches will acknowledge that their own roots are Latin, but few of us in those Western congregations know that our Latin roots are African... Carthage was the great administrative and commercial center in the Roman province of Africa... As Rome became an empire, Africa emerged as a key province, strategically important for military and administrative reasons, but essential also as a source of food and other goods. Carthage prospered and developed its own distinctive literary culture and style...

Africa’s intellectual culture was Roman, but influenced also by the Punic and Berber peoples who claimed the land as home. Nevertheless, it was unabashedly and unreservedly Latin... The Church appears rather suddenly in the archaeological and documentary remains from the end of the A.D. 100s — and it appears fully formed, thriving, with members from every social class...

How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity by Thomas C. Oden

The thesis of this book can be stated simply: Africa played a decisive role in the formation of Christian culture. Decisive intellectual achievements of Christianity were explored and understood first in Africa before they were recognized in Europe, and a millennium before fore they found their way to North America. Christianity has a much longer history than its Western or European expressions. The profound ways African teachers have shaped world Christianity have never been adequately studied or acknowledged, edged, either in the Global North or South.

This African enthusiasm is commendable but excessive. St Augustine was a heretic until he came to Rome. So was much of the Egyptian Church.

>3 eschator83: St Augustine was a heretic until he came to Rome

Surely St Augustine is one of the great examples of conversion? In any case the church has recognised him as one of the great saints and doctors of the church, and there is no doubting his profound influence on Christian doctrine. Unfortunately he also brought elements of his former Manichean dualism into the church with him, and we are still dealing with the fallout from that import.

Surely you understand that St Augustine learned his Christianity in Rome, not in Africa?

>5 eschator83: And from his mother.

>5 eschator83:

Is it important where he learned it? He was African, along with the likes of Tertullian, Perpetua, Felicity, Clement of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, Cyprian and Athanasius. He was Bishop of Hippo, in north Africa.

“It has been well said that the Egyptians were better prepared to receive and accept Christianity than any of the nations round about them. For thousands of years before St. Mark came to Alexandria to preach the Gospel of his Master Christ, the Egyptians believed in Osiris the Man-god who raised himself from the dead. He was held to possess the power of bestowing immortality upon his followers because he had triumphed over Death, and had vanquished the Powers of Darkness. He was the Judge of souls and the supreme lord of the Judgment of the Dead; he was all-wise, all-knowing, all-just, and his decrees were final and absolute. No man could hope to dwell with him in his kingdom unless he had lived a life of moral excellence upon earth, and the only passports to his favour were truth-speaking, honest intent, and the observation of the commands of the Law (Maat), coupled with charity, alms-giving and humane actions....” Dr. E.A. Wallis Budge, “The Cult of Isis and the Worship of the Virgin Mary compared,” Legends of Our Lady Mary (1)

“In the development of Christianity Africa plays the very first part;
if it arose in Syria, it was in and through Africa that it became
the religion for the world.”
“Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen (30 November 1817 – 1 November 1903) was a German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician and archaeologist. He was one of the greatest classicists of the 19th century. His work regarding Roman history is still of fundamental importance for contemporary research. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902 for being "the greatest living master of the art of historical writing, with special reference to his monumental work, A Historyof Rome", after having been nominated by 18 members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He was also a prominent German politician, as a member of the Prussian and German parliaments. His works on Roman law and on the law of obligations had a significant impact on the German civil code.”- Wiki

In 1885, this brilliant German classicist wrote in The Provinces of Rome , 49:
“In the development of Christianity Africa plays the very first part;
if it arose in Syria, it was in and through Africa that it became
the religion for the world. As the translation of the sacred books
from the Hebrew language into the Greek, and that into the popular
language of the most considerable Jewish community out of Judaea,
gave to Judaism its position in the world, so in a similar way for
the transference of Christianity from the serving East to the ruling
West the translation of its confessional writings into the language
of the West became of decisive importance; and this all the more,
inasmuch as these books were translated, not into the language of the
cultivated circles of the West, which early disappeared from common
life and in the imperial age was everywhere a matter of scholastic
attainment, but into the decomposed Latin already preparing the way
for the structure of the Romance languages–the Latin of common
intercourse at that time familiar to the great masses. If Christianity
was by the destruction of the Jewish church-state released from its
Jewish basis (p. 229), it became the religion of the world by the
fact, that in the great world-empire it began to speak the universally
current imperial language; and those nameless men, who since the
second century Latinised the Christian writings, performed for this
epoch just such a service, as at the present day, in the heightened
measure required by the enlarged horizon of the nations, is carried
out in the footsteps of Luther by the Bible Societies. And these men
were in part Italians, but above all Africans.307 In Africa to all
appearance the knowledge of Greek, which is able to dispense with
translations, was far more seldom to be met with than at least in
Rome; and, on the other hand, the Oriental element, that preponderated
particularly in the early stages of Christianity, here found a readier
reception than in the other Latin-speaking lands of the West. Even as
regards the polemic literature called especially into existence by
the new faith, since the Roman church at this epoch belonged to the
Greek circle (p. 226), Africa took the lead in the Latin tongue. The
whole Christian authorship down to the end of this period is, so far
as it is Latin, African; Tertullian and Cyprian were from Carthage,
Arnobius from Sicca, Lactantius, and probably in like manner Minucius
Felix, were, in spite of their classic Latin, Africans, and not less
the already mentioned somewhat later Augustine. In Africa the growing
church found its most zealous confessors and its most gifted defenders.
For the literary conflict of the faith Africa furnished by far the
most and the ablest combatants, whose special characteristics, now in
eloquent discussion, now in witty ridicule of fables, now in vehement
indignation, found a true and mighty field for their display in the
onslaught on the old gods. A mind–intoxicated first by the whirl of
a dissolute life, and then by the fiery enthusiasm of faith–such
as utters itself in the Confessions of Augustine, has no parallel
elsewhere in antiquity.”

>3 eschator83: The first arrival of Christianity in Africa can be pushed back to dates much earlier than Western historical skepticism has typically allowed. This will require further examination of archaeological and textual evidence. The early Alexandrian tradition may indeed go back to the sixties, fifties or possibly even the forties. The evidences for the history of the transmission of this tradition has been largely ignored by the previous generation of European scholars. "European chauvinism" is a kind way of speaking about this neglect.

Thomas C. Oden. How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity (Kindle Locations 156-158). Kindle Edition.

>5 eschator83: In the period of its greatest vitality, the first half of the first millennium, the African intellect blossomed so much that it was sought out and widely emulated by Christians of the northern and eastern Mediterranean shores. Origen, an African, was actively sought out by the teachers of Caesarea Palestina. Lactantius was invited by Emperor Diocletian (245-313) to be a teacher of literature in his Asian palace in Bythinia. Augustine was invited to teach in Milan. There are dozens of similar cases of intellectual movement from Africa to Europe-Plotinus, Valentinus, Tertullian, Marius Victorinus and Pachomius among them. This point must be savored unhurriedly to sink in deeply: The Christians to the south of the Mediterranean were teaching the Christians to the north. Africans were informing and instructing and educating the very best of Syriac, Cappadocian and Greco-Roman teachers. This flow of intellectual leadership in time matured into the ecumenical consensus on how to interpret sacred Scripture and hence into the core of Christian dogma. The common misperception is directly the opposite-that intellectual leadership typically moved from the north to the south, from Europe to Africa. But in Christian history, contrary to this common assumption, the flow of intellectual leadership demonstrably moved largely from Africa to Europe-south to north.

Thomas C. Oden. How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity (Kindle Locations 209-216). Kindle Edition.

>7 John5918: It took years of working daily in the history of exegesis for those of us editing the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture to realize how profound had been the African influence on every subsequent phase of scriptural interpretation. We were not prepared for the breadth and power of this evidence. Nowhere in the literature could we find this influence explained. Everywhere in the literature it seemed to be either ignored or resisted. It came only from decades of experience with African texts and ideas. Finally we learned to trace the path back from Antioch, Jerusalem, Constantinople, Nisibis and Rome to its origins in Africa. This intellectual leadership moved by land from the Nile Valley to the deserts of the Negev, the hills of Judea, and north through Syria and Cappadocia, and by sea to all points north. The core ideas of the monastic movements moved from the Nitrian desert and from the Pharaonic-speaking central Nile Valley north to the lauras and monastic communities of the Jordan, and all the way to the Tigris and Halys Rivers during the fourth and fifth centuries. All these brilliant centers of mind and spirit from Gaza to Nazianzus (Asia Minor) were constantly being fed by the ideas flowing from Africa in the third and early fourth centuries. The Christian leaders in Africa figured out how best to read the law and prophets meaningfully, to think philosophically, and to teach the ecumenical rule of triune faith cohesively, long before these patterns became normative elsewhere.

Thomas C. Oden. How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity (Kindle Locations 219-226). Kindle Edition.

Oden apparently has books to sell to a particular revisionist group and now I know to avoid the biased "Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture".