Babylon's Apostle: Why Bible‑Reading Rastas Should Leave Paul Behind
Spiritual Archaeology • Rastafari • Decolonial Theology
Let me start with a confession.
I am a Rasta who reads the Bible with a shovel.
Not because I hate the Bible. Quite the opposite.
I respect it too much to treat it like a magic book that dropped out of heaven yesterday morning, complete with a King James cover and a divine copyright notice.
I read it the way a spiritual archaeologist might examine a broken amphora: carefully, respectfully, but with a brush in one hand and a scalpel in the other.
Because underneath the Bible are layers.
Hebrew religion. Greek philosophy. Roman politics. African Christianity. European theology. Colonial Christianity. And, eventually, Jamaica.
And somewhere in all those layers is a fellow called Paul.
We need to talk about Paul.
Not because Paul is the devil. That would be too easy.
And certainly not because everything Paul said is useless. It isn't.
The question is more uncomfortable:
Why does a man who never met Jesus during Jesus' earthly ministry have such enormous influence over how Christians understand Jesus?
And perhaps the even more uncomfortable question for Rastafari is this:
Why have some of us inherited so much Pauline and Protestant thinking while insisting that we have escaped Babylon?
That is where the archaeology begins.
Rastafari escaped Christianity — but did it escape Protestantism?
Rastafari emerged in Jamaica as a radical response to colonial Christianity, white supremacy, European domination and the spiritual humiliation of African people.
We looked at the Christianity handed to us and said, essentially:
Hold on. Something is wrong here.
The white Jesus did not look like us.
The God preached by colonial institutions seemed strangely comfortable with slavery.
The Bible was being used to teach Black people obedience while European empires were busy conquering half the planet.
So Rastafari turned the Bible around.
Ethiopia became central.
Africa became central.
Marcus Garvey's prophetic vision became central.
Haile Selassie I became central.
Babylon became a system of oppression rather than merely a geographical location.
That was revolutionary.
But here is the funny part.
Sometimes we threw out the colonial furniture while keeping the colonial toolbox.
We rejected Babylon but retained some of Babylon's theological software.
We say:
"I don't follow man-made religion."
Good.
Then five minutes later we are arguing over which verse Paul wrote and whether somebody is "saved."
We say:
"The church is Babylon."
Then we reason like Baptists, Pentecostals and evangelical fundamentalists who simply changed the wallpaper and put a Lion of Judah over the door.
That deserves examination.
Because the theological world of Haile Selassie I was not Protestant.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo tradition is an ancient African Christian tradition with its own liturgy, sacramental life, canon, saints, Marian devotion and priesthood. Its biblical and ecclesiastical tradition is substantially broader than the narrow Protestant canon familiar to most Jamaicans. Ethiopian Orthodox sources, for example, describe a scriptural collection containing 46 Old Testament books and 35 New Testament books, alongside extensive liturgical and theological literature.
Holy Communion is not some optional church decoration in that tradition either. It is described as the central sacrament — the "Mystery of Mysteries" — and the Eucharist sits at the heart of Ethiopian Orthodox worship.
And Mary?
Forget the Jamaican Protestant idea that Mary is basically a woman who appears briefly in the Christmas story before disappearing backstage.
Ethiopian Christianity has a deeply developed Marian tradition.
So when a Rasta says, "We don't need no priest, ritual or sacrament," I have to ask:
Whose theology is talking?
Because that voice does not automatically come from Africa.
Sometimes it sounds suspiciously like Geneva.
Enter Paul: the elephant in the tabernacle
Paul of Tarsus is one of the most consequential figures in the history of Christianity.
Possibly second only to Jesus himself.
And that should make us pay attention.
Paul did not meet Jesus during Jesus' earthly life. His encounter with Christ came after Jesus' death, through what Paul understood as a revelation. Yet Paul did have contact with people from Jesus' original movement, including Peter and James, Jesus' brother. Scholars therefore generally distinguish between Paul not knowing Jesus personally and Paul knowing something about Jesus through early Christian traditions.
That distinction matters.
Because the argument is not:
"Paul knew nothing about Jesus."
The argument is:
Paul's letters give us a very different emphasis from the later Gospel portraits of Jesus.
And that difference is fascinating.
Paul's surviving letters are primarily concerned with Jesus' death, resurrection, messianic significance, salvation, faith, law, sin and the emerging communities of believers.
But where are the parables?
Where is the Sermon on the Mount?
Where is the Good Samaritan?
Where is the prodigal son?
Where is the Kingdom of God?
Where is the man wandering around Galilee telling people to feed the hungry, love their enemies, challenge religious hypocrisy and reconsider who counts as neighbour?
Paul knows some Jesus traditions. He even cites sayings attributed to Jesus.
But compared with the later Gospel traditions, Jesus' earthly ministry is surprisingly faint in Paul's letters. One major scholarly study puts the issue bluntly: Paul shows knowledge of Jesus traditions, but makes remarkably little use of the parables, the Palestinian ministry or the central Gospel theme of the Kingdom of God.
And that creates an interesting historical problem.
Jesus preached the Kingdom.
Paul preached Christ.
Those things are not necessarily contradictory.
But they are not exactly the same emphasis either.
And Christianity spent the next two thousand years arguing over what to do with that difference.
Paul is not the whole problem
Now let me complicate my own argument.
Because scholarship matters.
It is tempting to say:
"Paul wrote the New Testament."
He didn't.
Of the thirteen letters traditionally attributed to Paul, seven are widely regarded by modern scholars as genuinely Pauline:
- Romans
- 1 Corinthians
- 2 Corinthians
- Galatians
- Philippians
- 1 Thessalonians
- Philemon
The authorship of the others is debated, with Ephesians and Colossians disputed and the Pastoral Epistles — 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus — widely regarded by critical scholars as coming from a later Pauline tradition rather than Paul himself.
That is important.
Because some of the passages most useful historically to authoritarian Christianity may come not from Paul himself but from later writers speaking in Paul's name.
That doesn't make them irrelevant.
It makes them more interesting.
Because now we can watch Christianity evolve.
A movement begins around an itinerant Jewish teacher.
Then comes Paul.
Then comes a growing network of communities.
Then comes institutionalisation.
Then comes bishops, creeds, councils, canon formation and imperial Christianity.
Then Europe gets hold of the whole thing.
Then Christianity crosses the Atlantic.
Then somebody hands an enslaved African a Bible.
And eventually the Bible comes back to Jamaica.
History is messy.
Religion is messier.
And pretending otherwise is how we end up confusing theology with geology.
The problem with "Paul says…"
There is a particular Jamaican religious habit that deserves examination.
Somebody asks a question.
The answer is:
"Paul says…"
You ask another question.
"Paul says…"
You ask why.
"Paul says…"
At some point you begin wondering whether you are having a conversation with the Holy Spirit or Paul's answering machine.
This is not an argument against Scripture.
It is an argument against proof-texting.
A verse can be ancient and still be misunderstood.
A text can be sacred and still have a historical context.
A writer can be brilliant and still be a product of his time.
And a Bible verse can be quoted correctly while being interpreted completely wrong.
That is basic historical literacy.
Yet colonial Christianity trained generations of Africans to approach the Bible less like historians and more like lawyers searching for ammunition.
Find verse.
Quote verse.
Close case.
Next question.
Rastafari should be better than that.
The Pauline problem becomes bigger when we reach empire
Now we get to the uncomfortable part.
Some later Pauline texts contain household codes in which wives are instructed to submit to husbands and enslaved people are instructed to obey masters. Other New Testament passages tell believers to submit to governing authorities.
These texts have complicated histories of interpretation.
They have also been used repeatedly by institutions of power to legitimise hierarchy.
That does not mean Paul personally designed European colonialism from his tent.
That would be historically ridiculous.
Paul lived in the first century.
European colonialism came much later.
But texts travel.
And once a religious text enters an imperial system, the question becomes:
Who gets to interpret it, and who benefits from that interpretation?
That is where decolonial theology becomes useful.
We are no longer asking merely:
"What does the Bible say?"
We are asking:
"Who said it? When? To whom? Under what political conditions? Who interpreted it later? And who gained power from that interpretation?"
That is not disrespect.
That is scholarship.
And frankly, it is also good Rastafari reasoning.
Because Rastafari has always asked:
Who is Babylon?
Well, if we are serious about that question, we cannot stop at politicians.
We have to examine ideas too.
Before Christianity, Africa was already thinking
Here is where the conversation becomes bigger than Paul.
Africa did not begin thinking spiritually when Christianity arrived.
Kemet had theology.
Kush had political and religious traditions.
Nubia had civilizations.
Axum developed into one of the ancient world's major centres of power.
The Nile Valley produced some of humanity's earliest surviving philosophical, theological and funerary texts.
So Christianity cannot be treated as the moment Africa discovered God.
That story makes no historical sense.
At the same time, we have to be careful.
It is fashionable to say that Christianity simply copied Osiris, Horus or every other ancient African religious tradition.
That is too simplistic.
The old "every dying-and-rising god is basically Jesus" argument has been heavily criticised by scholars. Ancient religions had different concepts, different mythologies and different historical contexts.
But we don't need exaggerated claims to make the bigger point.
Africa had sophisticated religious and philosophical systems long before Christianity.
Christianity became African too.
That is the important distinction.
Africa did not merely receive Christianity.
Africa interpreted Christianity.
Ethiopia is proof.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church represents one of the world's oldest continuous Christian traditions, and its scriptural, liturgical and theological traditions developed in a distinctly Ethiopian cultural environment. Its literature includes biblical texts, theological writings, canon law, liturgical books, historical works and philosophical traditions.
So the history is not:
Europe → Christianity → Africa.
It is much more complicated.
And that complication is exactly where Rastafari should be comfortable.
Haile Selassie I complicates the Protestant Rasta story
This is where His Imperial Majesty creates an interesting theological problem for some of us.
Haile Selassie I was not a Protestant Jamaican fundamentalist.
He was an Ethiopian emperor shaped by an ancient Christian civilisation.
The Ethiopian Orthodox tradition had sacrament, liturgy, priests, bishops, saints and Marian devotion.
It had a completely different relationship with the Bible from the stripped-down Protestant Christianity that dominated Jamaica.
The Ethiopian tradition also possesses an expansive body of sacred literature beyond the familiar Western Protestant Bible.
That does not mean Rastafari has to become Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity.
It doesn't.
Rastafari is its own historical phenomenon.
But it does mean that we should stop unconsciously treating Protestant Christianity as the default definition of Christianity.
It isn't.
And if Rastafari is going to claim Ethiopia seriously, we have to encounter Ethiopia on its own terms.
Not simply extract Haile Selassie I from Ethiopian history, place him beside a King James Bible and call the resulting theology African.
That is too easy.
So should Rastas throw away the Bible?
No.
That would miss the entire point.
I am not suggesting that Bible-reading Rastas burn their Bibles.
Although, knowing Jamaica, somebody would probably turn up at the next reasoning with lighter fluid and completely misunderstand the assignment.
The issue is not the Bible.
The issue is Bible idolatry.
There is a difference between reading a sacred text and worshipping a text.
There is a difference between Scripture and interpretation.
There is a difference between Jesus and every theological system subsequently built around Jesus.
And there is a difference between Christianity and the Christianity colonialism exported to us.
Those distinctions matter.
What would "leaving Paul behind" actually mean?
It does not mean pretending Paul never existed.
It means putting Paul back in his historical place.
Paul becomes a source.
Not the final authority.
A voice.
Not the voice.
A historical actor.
Not God.
That changes everything.
We can read Paul critically.
We can appreciate his brilliance.
We can recognise his contribution to the spread of the early Jesus movement.
We can acknowledge that his letters are among our earliest Christian documents.
And we can still say:
Hold on, Paul. Let me check that against Jesus.
That is the part I think Rastafari needs to recover.
Not blind rejection.
Not blind acceptance.
Discernment.
Three foundations for a decolonised Rastafari theology
If we are serious about decolonising Rastafari theology, I would begin with three foundations.
Recover the historical Jesus
Not the blond European Jesus.
Not merely Paul's cosmic Christ.
Not the Jesus of European paintings.
And not the Jesus of prosperity television.
Recover the Jewish teacher moving through Roman-occupied Palestine.
The preacher of the Kingdom.
The storyteller.
The healer.
The social critic.
The man who constantly inverted status:
the first becoming last,
the poor becoming blessed,
the outsider becoming neighbour,
the hungry becoming visible,
the powerful being warned that their power was temporary.
Jesus needs to be studied historically, not merely worshipped theologically.
That is what the historical Jesus project attempts to do.
And that research does not require us to become atheists.
It requires us to become intellectually honest.
Recover Africa without turning history into mythology
Africa does not need fake history.
We don't need to claim that every Egyptian god was secretly Jesus.
We don't need to invent civilisations where there were none.
We don't need TikTok archaeology.
We need the real thing.
Kemet.
Kush.
Nubia.
Axum.
Ethiopia.
Ancient African philosophy.
African Christianity.
African cosmologies.
Archaeology.
Linguistics.
Oral traditions.
Manuscripts.
And the lived intellectual traditions of African people.
The African past is already extraordinary.
We don't have to exaggerate it.
Treat the African diaspora as a living text
This is where Rastafari has something that academic theology sometimes lacks.
Livity.
We are not merely studying oppression.
We inherited it.
We are not simply researching exile.
Our ancestors lived it.
We are not theorising Babylon from a comfortable European seminar room.
We know what Babylon feels like.
Plantation.
Middle Passage.
Colonialism.
Colourism.
Police violence.
Economic dependency.
Cultural erasure.
Migration.
Poverty.
Resistance.
And somehow, still, music.
Still laughter.
Still family.
Still creativity.
Still argument.
Still survival.
Still consciousness.
Still rising.
That lived experience is not a substitute for scholarship.
It is another archive.
The real Babylon may be our intellectual dependency
Perhaps this is the deeper lesson.
Babylon is not merely "them."
Sometimes Babylon is the intellectual habit that tells us we cannot think unless somebody in Europe has already thought it for us.
Sometimes Babylon is believing that African spirituality needs European approval.
Sometimes Babylon is assuming that the only legitimate philosophy comes with footnotes from Oxford.
Sometimes Babylon is believing that the Bible must be either completely true or completely false.
That is a false choice.
A mature African spirituality should be capable of saying:
This text is important.
This text is ancient.
This text influenced my people.
This text contains profound wisdom.
This text also contains contradictions, historical layers, political assumptions and human fingerprints.
And I can still learn from it.
That is not weakness.
That is intellectual freedom.
I am not throwing Paul away
And here is the irony.
After writing all this, I don't actually want to throw Paul away.
I want to demote him.
Put him back on the shelf.
Label the shelf properly.
"First-century Jewish missionary and theologian. Extremely influential. Historically fascinating. Occasionally brilliant. Sometimes problematic. Do not confuse with Jesus."
There.
Problem solved.
Because the objective is not to replace one fundamentalism with another.
We don't need Paul fundamentalism.
But we also don't need anti-Paul fundamentalism.
That is just changing jerseys.
The real Rastafari move is to reason.
Read.
Compare.
Question.
Investigate.
Ground.
And then decide.
No mansion required
I am not Nyabinghi.
I am not Bobo Ashanti.
I am not Twelve Tribes.
I am a groundation of one.
I came to Rastafari through the questions.
And questions have always been my problem with rigid religion.
I cannot look at a complicated civilisation, a complicated Bible, a complicated African history and pretend that everything can be settled with one verse.
I need archaeology.
I need history.
I need philosophy.
I need comparative religion.
I need African studies.
I need textual criticism.
I need lived experience.
And, occasionally, I need to laugh at the whole human enterprise because apparently God gave us consciousness and we immediately started arguing over whose interpretation of God was better.
That is human beings for you.
But perhaps that is also the work.
To dig.
To question.
To remove the sediment.
To separate Jesus from Paul.
Paul from later Pauline Christianity.
Christianity from European colonialism.
Ethiopian Christianity from Protestantism.
Africa from the colonial caricature of Africa.
And Rastafari from every assumption it inherited without examining.
The Bible can remain.
Paul can remain.
Jesus can remain.
Haile Selassie I remains.
But our minds must remain our own.
Because if Rastafari is truly about liberation, then liberation cannot stop at the plantation gate.
It has to enter the mind.
And maybe that is where the deepest Babylon has been hiding all along.
One love. One ground.
Selah.
But our minds must remain our own.
Disclaimer: This article represents the personal theological reflections of the author and is intended as a constructive contribution to Rastafari discourse and decolonial thought.
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