carried along these fallacies without any opposition, and the picture of the early church fathers as white men continues to exist in much of global academia.4 Scholar Thomas Oden indicates that this was intentional: If the writings of Philo, Synesius, Victor of Vita and Shenute of Atripe had all been written in France, they would be called European. But they were not. They were written in Africa. So why shouldn’t they be called African? There is a prejudice at work here: suspect anything of intellectual