The Rev. Dr. Gay L. Byron is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, D.C. Her scholarship focuses on the origins of Christianity in ancient Ethiopia with emphasis on ancient Ethiopic (Ge`ez) sources for the study of the New Testament and other early Christian writings. She is the author of Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (Routledge Press) and co-editor (with Vanessa Lovelace) of Womanist Interpretations of the Bible: Expanding the Discourse (SBL Press). She is currently co-editing (with Hugh Page) a volume titled #BlackScholarsMatter for the Society of Biblical Literature.

Dr. Byron preaches and leads workshops throughout the country for a variety of denominational bodies, and lectures at theological schools and universities on topics dealing with race, ethnicity, and the Bible; African American and womanist hermeneutics; Ethiopic manuscripts; and early Ethiopian Christianity. She holds degrees from Florida State University (B.S.), Clark Atlanta University (M.B.A.), and Union Theological Seminary in New York City (M.Div. and Ph.D.).

Dr. Byron, the mother of two sons, is also an ordained minister of the Word and Sacrament (Teaching Elder) in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). She has pastored churches in the Bronx, New York, and Washington, D.C.

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