The thesis addresses the imperative and identifies a basis for Africans to undertake Biblical hermeneutics from African socio-cultural realities and epistemological constitution. It presumes that the Modern Missionary Movement was profoundly shaped by the European Enlightenment and that missionaries inevitably brought this worldview to Africa along with Christianity. It understands the historical critical method as a product ofEnlightenment thought. The thesis follows the approach of modern African biblical scholars who exploit the intellectual criticism of the Enlightenment in the post-modern movement to participate in biblical scholarship from their own epistemological constitutions and social-cultural realities. Finally, it argues that epistemological continuities between the Zambian and the biblical material provide a base on which Africans can articulate biblical hermeneutical theory that is rooted in their socio-cultural realities and epistemology and is empathetic to the socio-cultural realities and epistemology in the biblical texts.

The thesis will offer critical evaluation of the hermeneutics and homiletics of select preachers in Eastern Province, Zambia, and the hermeneutics in select intra-Biblical appropriations and re-appropriations of the Exodus event under the three scholarly disciplines mentioned above with a view to establish the epistemologies in them. It will compare these epistemologies to establish continuities. These continuities form the basis for articulating African Biblical hermeneutical methods and establish the value of the epistemology in the Zambian data for biblical scholarship as an alternative to the ongoing hegemony of Western epistemology in biblical scholarship in Africa.

The thesis makes use of qualitative research data gathered from select preachers in Zambia to establish a correlation between their worldview and socio-cultural realities and their hermeneutics. It uses select intra-Biblical appropriations and reappropriations of the Exodus event to establish that the appropriations imply a particular worldview and epistemology. Analysis of sermons and interviews in the Zambian data and of the Exodus narrative and its appropriations and reappropriations in the Hebrew Bible enables epistemologies to emerge that make comparison and the articulation of a basis for African Biblical hermeneutical methods possible.

The Bible Through African Eyes, is a comparative study of the epistemologies in primary research data from Zambia and select intra-biblical appropriations and reappropriations of the Exodus event with a view to delineate continuities between them and to use these as a basis for African Biblical hermeneutical methods. It is based on the hypothesis that the two epistemologies are similar. The thesis belongs to philosophical hermeneutics, cultural anthropology and Biblical studies.

The thesis is organised in three parts. Part I summarizes the discourse regarding the influence ofWestern philosophies in sub-Saharan Africa, continuities between African and OT worldviews in African biblical scholarship and sets out our research methods and parameters. Part II contains the primary data chapters and the epistemologies for comparison in Part III. Part III establishes epistemological continuities in the data and grounds for an African biblical hermeneutic.