The Holy Piby, an early document in the Rastafari tradition that is sometimes referred to as “the black man's Bible,” was compiled by Robert Athlyi Rogers from 1913 to 1917 and first published in 1924 in Newark, New Jersey. According to Rastafarians and members of certain Afrocentric churches, Rogers recovered the original message of the Bible out of the belief that the Bible had undergone significant tampering to the extent that it had acquired socially constructed deficiencies. The intended practical purpose of the Holy Piby is to provide instructions in the form of laws that guide and direct the transformation of global Pan- African society toward liberation from political, economic, and cultural domination to a state of autonomy. The Holy Piby also played a key role in the development of a black theology, one that posits a black Jesus and calls attention to blacks in the Old Testament. This theology laid the groundwork for black liberation theology in the following decades.