Allen Dwight Callahan

Callahan

Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, Allen Callahan's area of study is the New Testament and early Christianity, with special attention to the history of biblical interpretation. Reverend Dr. Callahan is also an ordained minister in the Progressive National Baptist Convention.

John Dominic Crossan

Crossan

Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at De Paul University, John Dominic Crossan is generally acknowledged to be the premier historical Jesus scholar in the world. He has written twenty books on biblical history, including: Excavating Jesus; Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts, co-authored with Jonathan L. Reed, The Historical Jesus, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, Who Killed Jesus? and The Birth of Christianity. He was a Roman Catholic monk for nineteen years and a priest for twelve years. Professor Crossan is the recipient of the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence, among his many religious and secular honors. Professor Crossan is a former co-chair of the Jesus Seminar and chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, an international scholarly association based in the United States.

Paula Fredriksen

Fredriksen

Paula Fredriksen, the William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of Scripture at Boston University, specializes in the social and intellectual history of ancient Christianity from the late Second Temple Period to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Professor Fredriksen has written extensively on religious conversion, Jewish-Gentile relations in late antiquity, apocalypticism, St. Paul and his interpreters, and on Jesus and Christian tradition. Among her publications are From Jesus to Christ; The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus; and Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews; A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity, for which she received a National Jewish Book Award.

John G. Gager

Professor of Religion at Princeton University, John Gager has been widely celebrated for his ground-breaking new book, Reinventing Paul. He has written scores of scholarly articles and over several books, including The Origins of Anti-Semitism (1983), and Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (1975). His numerous honors include a current fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Hebrew University, Israel; a Fulbright Fellowship to Israel (1987-88); and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1974). He teaches courses on the origins of Christianity, the religions of the Roman Empire, ancient Judaism, and the relationship between Jews, Gentiles, and Christians in the ancient world.

Erich Gruen

The Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics at U.C. Berkeley, Professor Gruen is an expert on Jews in the Greco-Roman World and an internationally prominent classicist. Among his many honors, Professor Gruen was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships (1969/70 and 1989/90), two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships (1996, 1984), the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Austrian Cross of Honor for distinguished work in scholarship. Professor Gruen's many publications include The Last Generation of the Roman Republic, (nominated for a National Book Award) and Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition, and, most recently, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans.

Richard Horsley

Horsley

Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and the Study of Religion at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, Richard Horsley has written widely on the political context of early Christianity within the Roman Empire. His many influential books include: Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (editor, 1997); Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark's Gospel (2001), and Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (2002); and The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World, written in collaboration with Neil Asher Silberman.

Amy-Jill Levine

Levine

E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of New Testament Studies and Director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality at the Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion of Vanderbilt University. Amy-Jill Levine's numerous books and articles address such topics as Christian origins, formative Judaism, and the Historical Jesus. Her recent projects include editing a twelve-volume series, The Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Literature, for Sheffield University Press and the filming of "Great Figures of the New Testament for the Teaching Company's Great Courses" series.

Tom Wright

Wright

Dr Tom Wright, Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey, has written more than thirty books on Jesus, Paul, the early church, and the relevance of Christianity today. He has taught New Testament studies at Oxford, Cambridge, and McGill Universities, and has served as Dean of Lichfield. Among his publications are Jesus and the Victory of God, The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is, and What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?, and the Everyone series of textual commentaries, which includes Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians, and Luke for Everyone. His major work on the resurrection, The Resurrection of the Son of God, is due for publication shortly. He has recently been appointed Bishop of Durham.