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Ben Witherington III

Ben Witherington III is Amos Professor of New Testament for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary and on the doctoral faculty at St. Andrews University in Scotland. A graduate of UNC, Chapel Hill, he went on to receive the M.Div. degree from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from the University of Durham in England. He is now considered one of the top evangelical scholars in the world, and is an elected member of the prestigious SNTS, a society dedicated to New Testament studies. Dr. Witherington has presented seminars for churches, colleges and Biblical meetings in the U.S., England, Estonia, Russia, Europe, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Australia. He has written over thirty books, including The Jesus Quest and The Paul Quest, both of which were selected as top Biblical studies works by Christianity Today. In addition to his many interviews on radio networks across the country, Professor Witherington has been featured on the History Channel, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, The Discovery Channel, A&E, and the PAX Network.

Presenter at

Bible & Archaeology Fest XV, November 16-18, 2012
A Veiled Threat? Head Coverings for Woman Prophets
Headcoverings were important in many different forms of worship. In the Greco-Roman world everyone covered their heads when offering a sacrifice. In the Jewish world, married women normally had headcoverings (not veils), and men covered their heads when they prayed. Paul, however, is trying to set up a gender specific Christian headcovering practice for his converts in Corinth, as 1 Corinthians 11 makes clear. But why? This presentation will explore the issue of women's hair and headcoverings in early Christianity and explore why they were an issue in worship settings, particularly in light of the text in 1 Corinthians 11 and 1 Timothy 2.

Bible & Archaeology Fest XIV, November 18-20, 2011
The Gobeckli Tepe Temple and the Origins of Religion: Are Humans Inherently Religious?
Anthropologists and sociologists studying the origins of human civilization have long argued for three things: 1) that civilization as we know it begins somewhere around 10,000 B.C.E. and 2) that it wasn’t until hunter gatherers became agriculturalists that civilizations evolved from sedentary village life and 3) that religion began to be practiced only once village life became well established—in other words, considerably later than the hunter gatherers. However, a recent archaeological discovery in southeastern Turkey at Gobeckli suggests that religious inclinations were inherent in humanity from the very beginning. This presentation examines the startling discovery at Gobeckli and explores its theological ramifications. Are human beings more than just hunter gatherers? What does it mean to say humans are ‘homo religiosis’?

Bible & Archaeology Fest XIII, November 19-21, 2010
Is the Word of God Really Inspired? Inspiration and Sacred Texts in the Greco-Roman World
Sacred texts in antiquity did not function the way that they do today. This is because many of them were part of—and used by—cultures that had mostly oral traditions rather than written ones. This lecture will explore what the written text of the Bible would have meant to people in antiquity, and how that would have compared to the oral method of conveying sacred narratives as the Word of God. Additionally, the presentation will take a close look at what the ancient concepts of inspiration were, and what the implications of these concepts meant for that way that ancient people understood their sacred traditions.

Bible & Archaeology Fest XII, November 20-22, 2009
Oral Texts and Rhetorical Contexts
The cultures of the Bible were oral cultures, with only about ten percent literacy at the most. In such a culture, texts function differently: they are surrogates for or prompts of oral communication. This lecture will examine the ramifications of this fact for the study of the New Testament.