Tribute and Prayer for Rev. Dr. Gay L. Byron
Rev. Dr. Gay L. Byron, who had a distinguished career as a Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Howard University School of Divinity died suddenly and unexpectedly on December 6, 2023. Dr. Byron was an ordained minister of Word and Sacrament (Teaching Elder) in the Presbyterian Church (USA), a scholar, and a teacher. Her pastoral leadership, teaching and scholarship, and service to the Society of Biblical Literature intersected at her call to serve God and God’s people, the commitment that initially drew her to pursue biblical studies. Dr. Byron received her M.Div., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.
Dr. Byron’s research was significant for the ways it pushed beyond the traditional boundaries of New Testament interpretation and included ancient Ethiopian sources that were often ignored or dismissed as fanciful in relation to New Testament studies. Her book Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature highlighted the rhetorical significance of Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Blacks for understanding race and ethnic discourses in early Christian writings. Her co-edited volume, Womanist Interpretations of the Bible: Expanding the Discourse featured her commitments to womanist and liberationist hermeneutics. Dr. Byron was at work on a monograph, Hidden in Plain Sight: Ethiopic Manuscripts and Early Christianity, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities at the time of her death. She touched many lives through her ministry, research and teaching, and leadership and will be greatly missed.
Giver of life and sustenance, I offer you thanks and praise for your lovingkindness towards us that you saw fit to make us in your own image and likeness. You breathed the breath of life in us and covenanted with us to be our God and we your people through life in Jesus Christ. You accompanied our ancestors before us and now one who was recently among us has left to dwell in the ancestral realm. I offer up prayers for Gay Lynne Byron, our beloved sister, daughter, mentor, friend, mother, scholar, educator, and leader. Although her time with us was cut short, we thank you, O’ God, for gracing us with her presence for as long as you saw fit to spare her. We are comforted by the knowledge that though we are separated by flesh, we will be reunited in spirit in the sweet by and by where we shall meet on that beautiful shore. Rest in peace, Gay. In the name of Jesus, I pray. Amen.
– Rev. Dr. Vanessa Lovelace