Gay L. Byron is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, DC. Her scholarship focuses on race and ethnicity in the Bible, the origins of Christianity in ancient Ethiopia, and the use of ancient Ethiopic (Ge’ez) sources for the study of the New Testament. She is the author of Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (Routledge Press) and coeditor of Womanist Interpretations of the Bible: Expanding the Discourse (SBL Press). She teaches courses on race, ethnicity, and the Bible; African American and womanist hermeneutics; Ethiopic manuscripts; and early Ethiopian Christianity.