CH 272A Out of Africa: Christianity in North Africa Before Islam

Abstract

"Africa, the Church of the Martyrs." A haunting, beckoning epitaph seals the tomb of the Christian Church in North Africa. What lies behind the tombstone? Can we resurrect the life and thought of six brief centuries of African men and women in their struggle to follow the God-man of the Christians in an age-old pagan world? Only a skeleton of the Church in Africa survived native hordes and the sweep of Islam by the seventh century, yet it was in and through Africa that Christianity became a universal religion, western as well as eastern.