Robert E. Van Voorst

Robert Van Voorst pursued doctoral study in religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York City while he served as a parish pastor in the Reformed Church in America. In 1989 he became a professor of religion at Lycoming College in Pennsylvania. In 1997 he was a visiting professor in the University of Oxford, where he researched and lectured on the relationship of Christianity and Judaism.

Now retired from Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, where he served for nineteen years as a professor of New Testament, Dr. Van Voorst researches primarily in the New Testament and early Christianity, and secondarily on world religions. He writes frequently in various scholarly journals and has contributed articles to leading reference works, including the "New Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible" (Abingdon Press). In the spring of 2012, he was interviewed for a Discovery Channel documentary on Jesus, and in December of 2012 he was interviewed on National Public Radio (WNPR) on the birth of Jesus. In November of 2014 he gave a series of lectures to Ph.D. students in Christianity at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. In 2015-16 Dr. Van Voorst served as an adjunct professor of classics at Hope College. He is the author of 12 books, including textbooks in religious studies drawing on his teaching experience, the co-author of two other books, and the editor of a free-access online book of current scholarly methods of research into the New Testament.

His "Anthology of World Scriptures," now in its ninth edition, is a widely used anthology in religious studies classes in the United States. One of his research monographs, "Jesus Outside the New Testament," examines traditions about Jesus from pagan, Jewish, and Christian documents before and after the New Testament and has been published in Italian. His "Reading the New Testament Today" textbook has been translated and published in China, where it is used in Chinese universities that have programs in religious studies. He authored a college textbook introducing world religions with the 4LTR Press imprint of Cengage Learning, entitled "RELG: World"; now in its 4th edition. The third edition of his "Readings in Christianity" textbook was published in 2014. His latest book is "Commonly Misunderstood Verses of the Bible: What They Really Mean." A twenty-minute video interview on this book can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea0sEzPXZGs&t=28s . This book was featured in a column in CNN.com.

Dr. Van Voorst is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature and Tyndale Fellowship, an international association of biblical researchers based in the University of Cambridge, England. He also served on the board of the West Michigan Academic Consortium for Inter-religious Understanding. He has been named for more than twenty-five years to "Who's Who in America" and "Who's Who in the World" (both Marquis publications) for his contributions to the field of religious studies.