Princeton Seminary Scholar Receives Doctoral Fellowship Award
Fresh out of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Ebo Quainoo pursued the civil engineering career he had longed for. The gifted math and science student was soon designing and building roads and bridges in Atlanta. But Quainoo has since traded in his construction equipment for Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic—the linguistic tools of his new trade: Scholar of the Old Testament.
“It all happened quite unexpectedly, and it’s nothing short of amazing,” said Quainoo, who is going into his third year of the Biblical Studies PhD Program at Princeton Theological Seminary. “I feel incredibly fortunate to be a student in this program that’s equipping me with the knowledge I need to become a scholar of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible.”
Quainoo, an ordained minister in the Methodist Church Ghana, says his transformation from engineer to bible scholar was gradual—a spiritual and intellectual odyssey that began in the early 2010s. But he is rapidly gaining recognition for his accomplishments. He recently received a doctoral fellowship from the Forum for Theological Exploration, a venerable organization that supports promising young Christian leaders from diverse backgrounds with the aim of helping them foster positive societal change. Quainoo is one of 15 scholars in the United States and Canada to receive the fellowship.
“This prestigious fellowship underscores the remarkable promise of Quainoo’s work,” says Heath Carter, the Seminary’s Director of PhD Studies.
He stands in a long and conspicuously global line of scholars who have pursued doctoral study at Princeton Seminary and gone on to distinguished leadership in the church, the academy, and society beyond.
Born in Ghana, Quainoo was raised in a devout Christian family and moved to the United States when he was a teenager. His late father, the Very Rev. Dr. Albert Oswald Quainoo, was a prominent and pioneering pastor who started the first church in Atlanta for the growing Ghanaian immigrant community, which soon spawned other congregations in this Wesleyan movement.
“I was a ‘PK’ – a pastor’s kid,” Quainoo said. “I grew up in a pastor’s home”. But when it was time to leave that home and start college, he chose Georgia Tech over his father’s preference for Emory University, where the elder Quainoo had received his PhD in theology. Quainoo graduated cum laude in 2008 from Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, one of the premier engineering programs in the country. “I just love building things,” Quainoo said. “And my love for physics and for calculus just pushed me into the arena of engineering.” After a few years, however, he began having a change of heart. His father had died in 2007, a crushing blow in his final year of college.
“Around 2013, I had the call to enter ministry,” he said. “I was going back and forth, but in the end, I had to heed the call.” He enrolled in Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, where among his first courses was an introductory class in the Old Testament. Though long familiar with the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Quainoo was encouraged by his mentor, the scholar Brent A. Strawn MDiv’95, PhD’01 to study the scripture in its original languages.
Learning the languages just opened up a whole new world of interpretation, a whole new world of understanding of the cultural milieu of the biblical corpus.
“Looking at English translations, these are all interpretations because people’s translations are informed by their social location.“ Reading deeply into the text, Quainoo made another discovery: The themes of exile and return so prominent in the stories of the ancient Israelites spoke to his own 21st-century experience as an immigrant from Ghana. “I am part of a community that is constantly negotiating issues of identity and belonging,” he said. “These are themes that exist throughout the scripture.”
After getting his MDiv and ThM at Candler, Quainoo served as a pastor in congregations in Georgia, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania that are part of the North America Diocese of the Methodist Church Ghana. But he felt called to continue scholarly study of the Old Testament, so he earned an MTS in biblical studies from Loyola University while he pastored a church in Baltimore.
At Princeton Seminary, he’s in a five-year program that includes thorough instruction in ancient languages, including Hebrew, Aramaic, and the related Semitic languages of Akkadian and Ugaritic. “The more languages I take, the more I realize how exciting the world of the Old Testament really is,” he said. “Thinking about people’s conception of God; people’s conception of the cosmos, it all comes out when you are doing the languages.”
A gifted preacher, Quainoo’s sermons draw upon his scriptural knowledge while making the themes relatable to everyday audiences. At a youth ministry convention in 2023, Quainoo reflected upon Psalm 34, discussing the struggles of David and relating it to how humans adapt in times of crisis. “God gave (David) the ability to adapt, God gave him the ability to know what to do,” Quainoo said in his sermon. “Wisdom is knowing what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.”
Those words could fit Quainoo’s own life, and the journey that has brought him to Princeton Seminary for a calling he hadn’t foreseen in his younger days. His goal is to become a professor of the Old Testament. But even as he makes his professional home in academia, he notes that his focus on scripture and his research into the themes of exile and diaspora, both ancient and contemporary, keep him closely connected to his community.
“As a post-colonized community, there is an ongoing question of how we negotiate our religious and cultural identity in a way that is meaningful for us and for subsequent generations of Ghanaian Americans,” he said. “For someone who has been a preacher in this community, the question for me is how can I bring my research and scholarship to bear on these emergent issues that continue to evolve day in and day out.”