Executive Director
R. Steven Notley, PhD
R. Steven Notley is Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Alliance University (2001-present). He received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University, where he studied with David Flusser. Dr. Notley lived sixteen years in Jerusalem with his wife and four children, during which time he was the founding chair of the New Testament Studies program at the Jerusalem University College. He has been directing groups of students and laypeople to Israel and the eastern Mediterranean region for 30 years. He is the author of many books and articles. He continues collaborative research and publication with Israeli scholars in the fields of historical geography, ancient Judaism and Christian origins. Among his list of publications, he co-authored with Flusser the historical biography, The Sage from Galilee: Rediscovering Jesus' Genius (Eerdmans 2007); with Anson Rainey (Tel Aviv University) the monumental biblical atlas, The Sacred Bridge: Carta's Atlas of the Biblical World (Carta Publishing 2005); with Ze'ev Safrai (Bar Ilan University) an annotated translation of Eusebius' important description of Roman Palestine, Eusebius, Onomasticon: A Triglott Edition with Notes and Commentary (Brill 2005). He rejoined Safrai for their second work, a pioneering collection and translation of the earliest rabbinic parables that provide the literary and religious context for the parables of Jesus, The Parables of the Sages (Carta 2011).
Academic Coordinator
Jeffrey P. García, PhD
Jeffrey P. García is an Associate Professor of New Testament and Second Temple Literature and head of the Bible department at Alliance University. He holds a Ph.D. in Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York University, where he studied with Lawrence Schiffman. His research interests include the Second Temple, early Rabbinic period (i.e. Tannaim), and the Gospels. Dr. García is particularly invested with the role of the Gospels and Acts as part of the corpus of ancient Greco-Roman Jewish texts.
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He is the author of Understandingthe Gospels as Ancient Jewish Literature
(Jerusalem: Carta), and co-editor (w/ R. Steven Notley) of The Gospels in First-Century Judaea (Brill, 2016).He has also contributed to the Biblical Archaeology Review (w/ R. Steven Notley), the Lexham Bible Dictionary (Lexham Press, 2016), and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions (Routledge,2015). He is currently preparing a new volume, Creation, Composition, and Condition: On Being Human in Ancient Judaism. Dr. García works as a teaching guide in Israel, Jordan, and Greece with the Center for Holy Lands Studies.
Board of Directors
Tom Guilliams, Chair
Sunya Notley, Secretary
Wink Thompson, Treasurer
Rachel Semmel​
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