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6 Conclusion and Implications The argument of this work has been to describe how Paul’s construction of Abraham in Romans assisted Africans to appreciate Christianity, not as a foreign religion, but as one that was in alignment with African traditional religion. The Aeneas-Abraham paradigm is new, and it fits the experience of African Christianity. This comparison is powerful because Paul did what Christians do. He did not just walk onto the scene seeking to impose his Jewish ancestry. Rather, he selectively appropriated aspects of the Aeneid story and made them central to his Jesus story. Therefore, the creative action out of a situation of encounter and collision between cultures is a point of solid comparison and analogy between Paul and the African experience. The implication of this comparison leads to two fundamental theological views. First, I would propose to my fellow postcolonial African Christians that Paul did exactly what we have done. In the Old Testament, we see that God is referred to as “God of the patriarchs,” and after reading the vernacular Bible, Africans saw similar references in which God is referred to as “God of the ancestors.” Second, I would say to Euro-American New Testament scholars that because I come out of the experience of Shona Christianity, I understand something about Paul that they have not yet seen. The genealogical tree found in Matt. 1:1-17 and the one Paul revisits in Romans 4 must be taken into account when doing a theological exegesis of Paul. I believe that when New Testament scholars take into account the genealogies found in the Bible, there will be a transformation in the way cultures will begin to appropriate the message of the Bible. The revelation of God has always been through ancestral figures, and to ignore that aspect makes it difficult to formulate a reasonable theological account of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. In this case, culture continues to be a formidable force in biblical interpretation. On the one hand, Roman poets and writers such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Virgil strove to maintain the ideological stance that emperors and the ruling elites were 97 guardians and champions of Rome’s mos maiorum. On the other hand, Diaspora Jewish historians—namely, Philo and Josephus—saw it as their responsibility to preserve, maintain, and guard the metanarratives of their ancestors. In these two Jewish historians, Abraham was an ancient figure who abandoned astrology in Chaldea, migrated to Palestine under divine inspiration, sought wisdom, and ultimately achieved perfection in his piety toward God. Like any other ancient Greco-Roman ancestor, Abraham lived and practiced all the cardinal virtues. Thus Abraham embodied all the elements of Hellenistic heroes. What this book has proven is that ancestors, or nostri maiores, are central to identity formation. In Rom. 4:1-25, Paul creatively constructs Abraham as an ancestor of all peoples, nations, and races. We as African Christians already felt an affinity for Paul’s notion of ancestry, and we creatively selected aspects of Western Christianity and appropriated them into our African colonial and postcolonial Christianity. In the same way, Paul’s appeal to Abraham is a counter to the Aenied. There is no doubt that the Aeneid was the dominant ancestry—the “imperial ancestry”— of Paul’s day, and he opposed it with Abraham. The Aeneid, as I have argued, was meant to establish the propaganda of Augustus anchored in the Trojan legend. Theologically and sociologically, Africans recognize that humanity does not live in isolation, but there is always a community of both the living and the dead.1 The community is guided by ancestors, who are invoked at all times, and the loss of ancestral connections is one of the most devastating experiences of many Africans. Thus humanity is part of this entire process of evolution, and all individuals belong to a family of the living and the dead. New Testament commentaries and exegeses, especially on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, must take into account the centrality of kinship, which the Roman elite of the Augustan era sought to guard, protect, and establish as the foundation of the empire. The appropriation of Abraham’s ancestry into African Christianity is thus a major new development in New Testament theology. The New Testament, whether read from an African or Western perspective, furnishes the best tractate on the testament of ancestors of faith who in their daily living modeled how humanity should conduct its life in this world and in the...

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