The African Roots of the Day of Pentecost

This is amazing!

Daniel D. Isgrigg

Of all the books I read in 2021, nothing caught my eye more than this assertion by Thomas C. Oden in his 2011 book The African Memory of Mark:

The first Pentecost took place in the home of an African Jewish woman.

Oden’s remarkable study points out that the African church memory is shaped by St. Mark and his Gospel. St. Mark was born in Cyrene in Libya, North Africa and was the Apostle who evangelized Egypt and in Africa at large. African Christians see Mark as representative of the African perspective of Christianity.

While hints of Mark’s important African identity are present in Western considerations, it is no secret that most of Western church history accounts are Euro-centric and have ignored African church history and the continent’s ancient testimony about the shaping of Christianity. This is a point from another book I read in 2021 by Phillip Jenkins…

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