Our 2008 Ruben L. Speaks Lecturer is Dr. James H. Charlesworth, Princeton Seminary’s George L. Collord Professor of New Testament Language and Literature and director and editor of the Seminary’s Dead Sea Scrolls Project. He holds a B.D. from Duke Divinity School, a Ph.D. from Duke University Graduate School, and an E.T. (Eleve Titulaire) from the Ecole Biblique de Jerusalem. An ordained Methodist minister, he is active in the United Methodist Church, Greek Orthodox and Methodist Symposia and directs the Syrus Sinaiticus Project at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. His academic interests include the Dead Sea Scrolls, apocryphal works, the historical Jesus, the Gospel of John, and the Revelation of John. He teaches courses on the relationship between the Jesus traditions in the gospels and the theologies of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the life and thought of Jesus of Nazareth, the Old Testament in the New, the Gospel and Epistles of John, and the Hebrew and Theology of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Major Publications
The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols. (1984–1985)
Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Doubleday, 1992, 1995)
The Beloved Disciple (Trinity Press International, 1995)
The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 3 vols. (2006)
The Serpent: A Symbol of Life or Death? (Anchor Bible Reference Library, 2006)
The Serpent (forthcoming, 2008)