James Petigru Boyce (1827–1888) served as a Southern Baptist pastor, theologian, author, seminary professor, and founder and first president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

James Petigru Boyce was born in 1827. He was educated at Brown University under Francis Wayland, whose evangelical sermons contributed to Boyce's conversion, and at Princeton Theological Seminary under Charles Hodge who led Boyce to appreciate Calvinistic theology.

After completing studies at Princeton he served as pastor of the Columbia S.C. Baptist Church and as a faculty member at Furman University. In 1859 he founded the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Greenville, South Carolina. The seminary was forced to close during the Civil War, and during this period Boyce served as a chaplain in the Confederate army and as a representative to the South Carolina legislature. After the war ended, he restarted the seminary and moved it to Louisville, Kentucky. He taught theology from 1859 until his death in 1888 and served as the President of the institution. Throughout his ministry, Boyce insisted on the importance of theological education for all ministers. In a preface, he described his Abstract of Systematic Theology, published the year before his death, as follows: "This volume is published the rather as a practical text book, for the study of the system of doctrine taught in the Word of God, than as a contribution to theological science."

Boyce died in Pau, France on December 28, 1888. He had traveled to Europe with his family in early July 1888 and had been expecting to be traveling abroad for a number of months. News reports at the time indicated that he had been suffering from gout and that while traveling his condition worsened and became fatal. (wikipedia.org)