Born and raised in Tustin, California, I earned my B.A. in psychology from Cal State Fullerton. From there, I went on to earn the M.Div. from San Francisco Theological Seminary. After a brief, two-year-plus foray into housepainting and a semester as a substitute teacher in the Cincinnati Public Schools, I returned to academia to earn an M.A. in Religion from Miami University (Ohio). I earned the Ph.D. in Religion (New Testament) from Claremont Graduate University in 1998. For several years, I tooled around Southern California as an adjunct instructor, while finishing my dissertation. Then I was hired by Lycoming College. The rest is history.

Academic interests of mine include the study of the interaction between early Christian communities, gospel studies, the sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas and the Sayings Gospel Q, Gnosticism as it applies to early Christianity and second temple Judaism, Greek and archaeology. I just finished a fascicle (Q 7:1-10: The Centurion's Faith in Jesus' Word) for the Documenta Q series published by Peeters of Leuven, Belgium.

One of my responsibilities at Lycoming College is to coordinate summer archaeological digs as part of our Archaeology & Culture of the Ancient Near East Program. The past two summers we have dug at the ancient city of Idalion, on the island of Cyprus. Check out some of the pictures of our trip to Cyprus. The dig is now called the 2005 Lycoming College Expedition to Idalion.

Non-academic interests include basketball, mystery novels, hiking, backpacking and sports in general. My sweetheart and spouse, Dr. Ellen Davis, is the Director of Music at St John's-Newberry United Methodist Church here in Williamsport. In the fall of 2001, she taught REL 342: The Nature and Mission of the Church here at Lyco, and she is currently teaching voice lessons at St. John's School of the Arts.

His personal website can be found at http://srv2.lycoming.edu/~johnson/.