About Jordan Ryan

Jordan Ryan

Jordan J. Ryan is Associate Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, Illinois, and heads the Roman-period research unit for the Tel Shimron Excavations in Israel, where he works on the excavation of an early Jewish village. He is the author of The Role of the Synagogue in the Aims of Jesus (Fortress, 2017) and From the Passion to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (T&T Clark, 2021).


Presenter at

BAS Symposium: The Life of Jesus, May 17, 2025
The Synagogue and Village Life in the Time of Jesus

All four canonical Gospels depict synagogues as an important site for Jesus’s teaching, especially during his Galilean ministry. Recent archaeological excavations have greatly expanded our understanding of early Roman-period synagogues in Galilee, Judea, and Gaulanitis through the discovery of several Jewish public buildings that have been reasonably identified as synagogues. We now have as many as 16 candidates for early Roman (63 BCE to 135 CE) or late Hellenistic (167-63 BCE) period synagogues. Each discovery provides new data that can help us to better understand the nature of early synagogues, which can in turn help us to better contextualize and situate Jesus’s ministry. These discoveries go hand in hand with the ongoing excavation of Roman-period villages in Galilee, which have helped to illuminate the nature of Jewish daily life and religion. Synagogues help us to better understand the nature of public Jewish life, both religious and civic, in these same villages, and provide us with a fuller picture of the world in which the gospel narratives and the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth took place.


BAS Scholars Series, December 6, 2023
The Life of Jesus Written in Stone: The Earliest Commemorative Churches in Roman Palestine

During the age of Constantine, monumental commemorative churches dedicated to events in the life of Jesus first emerged in Roman Palestine. Beginning with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (constructed c. 324 CE), these churches were constructed by imperial authority, and served to interpret, localize, and remember life-of-Jesus narratives. The first three churches constructed during the reign of Constantine—the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Nativity, and the Eleona church—each represented and presented a particular vision of a key event in Jesus’s life: the nativity, the passion, and the ascension. These churches, all of which were in the vicinity of Jerusalem, were soon joined by others in Galilee, at sites like Tabgha, Nazareth, and Capernaum. Together, they presented a particular memory of Jesus and a narrative of his life. Thus, pilgrims could experience the life of Jesus in a new form by visiting these sites, a sort of selective vision of the life of Jesus in monuments, a “Gospel” that could be touched and seen, not written in ink on papyrus but in stone upon ground. This lecture will discuss the archaeology and architecture of these churches, as well as the narratives and traditions that quickly attached themselves to them, and the particular vision and understanding of Jesus that they presented in late antiquity.

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