There’s a version of Christian history that most people learn — one that moves neatly from Jerusalem westward into Europe, to North America and eventually to the Global South. Vince Bantu has spent his career challenging that version. Through published works, peer-reviewed articles, and lectures delivered across six continents, Vince has worked to illuminate the Christian faith’s ancient, sophisticated, and often overlooked presence across Africa and Asia.
Vince holds a Ph.D. in Semitic and Egyptian Languages from The Catholic University of America and a graduate degree in theology from Princeton Theological Seminary. This academic base enabled him to engage in primary sources in Coptic, Syriac, Ge’ez, Classical Arabic, Old Nubian, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Knowing these languages gives him access to texts and traditions from Nubia, Ethiopia, Egypt, and North Africa that most Western academics lack.
His 2024 study tour of Ethiopia and presentations at global conferences in Oxford, Brussels, and Rome reflect a devotion to fieldwork and academic exchange that keeps his research grounded and current.
In 2022, Vince was awarded the Paul C.C. Szeto Fellowship for Global Studies and Research, which brought him to Chad to participate in the excavation of medieval Kanem — a site connected to the spread of the Church through trans-Saharan networks. He has taught in Egypt, Senegal, and Ivory Coast, and served on the advisory group for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art’s landmark Africa and Byzantium exhibition.
Vince is the founding Katabi — that is, editor — of the Haymanot Journal, a peer-reviewed publication of the Society of Gospel Haymanot dedicated to Afro-rooted theology and the universal Lordship of Jesus. His own published articles have appeared in Horizons, the Africanus Journal, and the Dumbarton Oaks Africa and Byzantium Symposium, among others.
Taken together, they build a case regarding understanding African Church history not as a footnote to Western Church history, but as one of its oldest and most vital expressions.
Vince’s scholarship is designed to reach outside academic walls. His goal has always been to make this history available to the communities it belongs to — particularly those from African and African-American backgrounds who have rarely seen their heritage reflected in the faith they practice.
