Mark A. Chancey is professor of religious studies in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. His research interests range from the historical Jesus, archaeology and the Bible, and the political and social history of Roman-period Palestine to church-state issues and religion and contemporary public education. He is the author of two books with Cambridge University Press, The Myth of a Gentile Galilee (2002) and Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus (2005), and is the coauthor of  Alexander to Constantine: Archaeology of the Land of the Bible (Yale University Press, 2012).