The Rev. Dr. Bruce D. Chilton, Rector

The Rev. Dr. Bruce D. Chilton is Rector of the Church of St John the The Evangelist, and Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College. He is an expert on the New Testament and early Judaism, and has contributed fifty books and more than a hundred articles to those fields of study. His principal scholarship has been in the understanding of Jesus within Judaism and in the critical study of the Targumim, the Aramaic paraphrases of the Bible. Jesus appears clearly as a rabbinic teacher in Dr. Chilton's analysis, on the basis of his study of the Targum of Isaiah, which he has edited and translated in the first commentary ever written on that book.

Dr. Chilton has earned degrees at Bard College, the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, and Cambridge University. Previous to his chair at Bard College, he held positions at the University of Sheffield in England, at the University of Münster in Germany, and at Yale University (as the first Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament.) His books include Beginning New Testament Study (Eerdmans and SPCK), A Galilean Rabbi and His Bible (Glazier and SPCK), The Isaish Targum (Glazier and Clark),The Temple of Jesus (Penn State University Press), and A Feast of Meanings (Brill). With Jacob Neusner, he has written Judaism in the New Testament (Routledge), a trilogy entitled Judaism and Christianity--the Formative Categories (Trinity Press International), and Jewish-Christian Debates (Fortress). He contributed the article on the high priest Caiaphas in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, and for that reason was consulted by academic, governmental, and journalistic reporters at the time of the discovery of the tomb of Caiaphas outside Jerusalem. His most recent works are Pure Kingdom: Jesus' Vision of God (Eerdmans), the first in a series of books on Jesus, which he is editing with Craig Evans and Rabbi Jesus: The Jewish Life and Teaching That Inspired Christianity (Doubleday), Rabbi Paul (Doubleday).

(With appreciation to the Institute for Advanced Theology at Bard College for the biographical sketch.)