Academic Fellows

Dr. Vince Bantu

Vince Bantu is the Ohene (President) of the Meachum School of Haymanot and is Assistant Professor of Church History and Black Church Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary. Vince’s assignment from the Lord is to proclaim that the Bisrat (Gospel) of Yeshua is for all nations, tribes and tongues and to do this by teaching on the earliest history of Christianity in Africa and Asia. Vince is the author of A Multitude of All Peoples (IVP), Gospel Haymanot (UMI) and The Bisrat (Jude 3 Project). Vince is also the Ohene (President) of the Society of Gospel Haymanot (SGH), an academic society of theological Gospelism—Afro-rooted theology committed to the universal Lordship of Jesus, biblical authority and the liberation of the oppressed. Vince also serves as the Katabi (Editor) of the publication of SGH—the Haymanot Journal. Vince, his wife Diana, and their daughters live and minister in St. Louis and they love to travel, watch movies and bust some spades. 


Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman

Joshua Berman is a professor of Hebrew Bible at Bar-Ilan University, Israel.  A graduate of Princeton University, Dr. Berman also studied for eight years at Yeshivat Har-Etzion in Israel and has rabbinical ordination from the Israeli Chief Rabbinate.  He is the author of many works, including Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought  (Oxford, 2008) and Inconsistency in the Torah: Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism (Oxford, 2017). In addition to his scholarly output, Dr. Berman has also published pieces on the Hebrew Bible and contemporary thought in Mosaic Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Berman served as a member of the International Advisory Council of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.


Dr. Jeffrey P. Garcia

Jeffrey P. García is an Assistant Professor of New Testament and Second Temple Literature at Nyack College, NYC. 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. He is the author of Understanding the Gospels as Ancient Jewish Literature (Jerusalem: Carta), and co-editor (w/ R. Steven Notley) of The Gospels in First-Century Judaea (Brill, 2016). He is currently preparing a new volume, Creation, Composition, and Condition: On Being Human in Ancient Judaism.


Rev. Dr. Peter Leithart

Peter J. Leithart is President of the Theopolis Institute, a theological think tank and training center in Birmingham, Alabama, and serves as Teacher at Trinity Presbyterian Church (CREC). He is author, most recently, of 1 & 2 Chronicles (Brazos Press, 2019). He and his wife Noel have ten children and twelve grandchildren.


Rev. Dr. Ryan O’Dowd

Ryan O’Dowd is a Senior Fellow at Cornell University’s Chesterton House and pastor of Bread of Life Anglican Church of Ithaca, New York. His research interests include biblical law, wisdom, and poetry, as well as Christian theological approaches to ethics, work, and vocation. Dr. O’Dowd holds the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve with 30 years of combined service in active duty and reserve status. His books include The Wisdom of Torah: Epistemology in Deuteronomy and the Wisdom Literature (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht); Old Testament Wisdom Literature: A Theological Introduction, with Craig Bartholomew (Apollos); Proverbs (Zondervan); and Numbers Through the Centuries, Blackwell Bible Commentaries, ed. John Sawyer and David M. Gunn (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming).


Dr. Jonathan Pennington

Jonathan T. Pennington (PhD in New Testament Studies from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland) is Associate Professor of New Testament Interpretation and Director of Research Doctoral Studies at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky (USA). He is the author of The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing, Heaven and Earth in the Gospel of Matthew, and Reading the Gospels Wisely. He is on the preaching staff at Sojourn East in Louisville, Kentucky, and is also the host and co-producer of the YouTube show, Cars, Coffee, Theology.


Dr. Jeremiah Unterman

Rabbi Dr. Jeremiah Unterman has been resident scholar at the Herzl Institute, and, since 2017, the academic editor for the Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel. He is the author of Justice for All: How the Jewish Bible Revolutionized Ethics and From Repentance to Redemption: Jeremiah’s Thought in Transition, and over 60 articles in scholarly journals and encyclopedic publications in the U.S. and Israel. He has lectured frequently at scholarly conferences in the United States and Israel, such as the World Congress of Jewish Studies, the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, and the annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, and at numerous universities in the U.S. and Israel. He received Ph.D. in the Judaica Program of the Near Eastern Studies Department at U.C., Berkeley. He is a citizen of both the United States and Israel, and served in the Israel Defense Forces. He lives in Jerusalem, Israel.


Dr. Shira Weiss

Shira Weiss holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Philosophy and has taught at Yeshiva University.  She has earned fellowships from the NEH, The Templeton Foundation, and Ben Gurion University.  Dr. Weiss is the author of Joseph Albo on Free Choice: Exegetical Innovation in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Oxford University Press) and Ethical Ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge University Press), as well as articles in a variety of academic journals. She is currently working on a manuscript, Biblical Heroes on Trial: Justice and Vigilantism in the Hebrew Bible, and is co-authoring a book on protests against God in the Book of Job according to the three Abrahamic faiths.