A Brief Biography:

After receiving two baccalaureates in his native Texas, E. P. Sanders did graduate work in Göttingen, Jerusalem, Oxford and New York, culminating in a Th. D. from Union Theological Seminary. He joined the Faculty at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) in 1966. In 1984 he was elected Dean Ireland's Professor of Exegesis in the University of Oxford and a Fellow of The Queen's College. He moved to Duke University as Arts and Sciences Professor of Religion in 1990. He retired June 30, 2005, and is now Arts and Science Professor Emeritus.

Sanders has held visiting professorships at Brandeis University, Tulane University and The College of William and Mary in Virginia, visiting lectureships at Trinity College Dublin and Cambridge University, and a visiting fellowship at Trinity College Cambridge.

His field of special interest is Judaism and Christianity in the Greco-Roman world. Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 1977, won the National Religious Book Award, Biblical Category (Religious Media Today), and the National Religious Book Award, Scholarly Book Category, (Religious Book Review). It was also listed on the Outstanding Academic Books List by Choice. Jesus and Judaism, 1985, was named one of the two most significant works of religious history in the 1980s by the London Correspondent. It also won the Grawemeyer Award in Religion for work published in the 1980s. His other principal publications are The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition (1969), Paul, the Law and the Jewish People (1983), Studying the Synoptic Gospels (with Margaret Davies; 1989), Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah (1990), Paul: Past Master (1991), Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE - 66 CE (1992), and The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993). His publications have been translated into Italian, French, German, Finnish, Dutch, Spanish, Danish, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Korean and Japanese.

While at McMaster, he headed a team that won a Canada Council Programme Grant for a five year study of "Normative Self-Definition in Judaism and Christianity." During the course of the project he edited volumes on normative self-definition in Judaism, Christianity and Greco-Roman religion.

His work has also been supported by two Killam Senior Research fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and fellowships of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Academy, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In recent years Sanders has received further degrees: Doctor of Letters from the University of Oxford and Doctor of Theology (honoris causa) from the University of Helsinki. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.