Nothing is new or original in Christianity. All features and components of what is now known as Christianity were present in mythologies that flourished before Jesus is alleged to have lived, and the following presentation from the master teacher, John Henrik Clarke, shows how those myths evolved into todays religion. Many would dismiss the idea of Christianity before Christ as being ridiculous without looking at any evidence. Yet some church fathers have admitted that the Christian religion did in fact exist before the Christian era. St. Augustine himself said, that the very thing which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancient Egyptians also, nor was it wanting from the inception of the human race until the coming of Christ in the flesh, at which point the true religion which was already in existence began to be called Christian. This is an important lecture for those interested enough to look at valid research. John Henrik Clarke (born John Henry Clark, January 1, 1915 -- July 16, 1998), was a Pan-Africanist American writer, historian, professor, and a pioneer in the creation of Africana studies and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s. He was Professor of African World History and in 1969 founding chairman of the Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He also was the Carter G. Woodson Distinguished Visiting Professor of African History at Cornell Universitys Africana Studies and Research Center. In 1968 along with the Black Caucus of the African Studies Association, Clarke founded the African Heritage Studies Association. Born on January 1, 1915, in Union Springs, Alabama, as the eldest child to sharecroppers John (Doctor) and Willie Ella (Mays) Clark, he renamed himself John Henrik (after rebel playwright Henrik Ibsen) and added an e to his surname Clarke. Counter to his fathers wishes for him to be a farmer, Clarke left Alabama in 1933 by freight train and went to Harlem, New York, where he pursued scholarship and activism. Prominent during the Black Power movement, Clarke advocated for studies on the African-American experience and the place of Africans in world history. He challenged academic historians and helped shift the way African history was studied and taught. Clarke was a scholar devoted to redressing what he saw as a systematic and racist suppression and distortion of African history by traditional scholars. When some of the scholarship he championed was dismissed by many historians, Clarke imparted to them the biases of Eurocentric views. He was memorialized for devoting himself to placing people of African ancestry on the map of human geography. Clarke said: History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be. Besides teaching at Hunter College and Cornell University, Clarke was active in creating professional associations to support the study of black culture. He was a founder and first president of the African Heritage Studies Association, which supported scholars in areas of history, culture, literature and the arts. He was a founding member of other organizations to recognize and support work in black culture: the Black Academy of Arts and Letters and the African-American Scholars Council. His writing included six scholarly books and many scholarly articles. He edited anthologies of black writing, as well as his own short stories, and more general interest articles. He was co-founder of the Harlem Quarterly (1949--51), book review editor of the Negro History Bulletin (1948--52), associate editor of the magazine Freedomways, and a feature writer for the Pittsburgh Courier and the Ghana Evening News. Unity, Love, Peace.~AHS https://youtube/watch?v=rPkGi7-0pJg
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 09:00:51 +0000
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