Researcher
Publications & Research
Jan’s areas of research specialization are Old Testament Exegesis and Theology, Second Temple Period Judaism, and Archaeology.
Jan is best known for his two major works, published by Bloomsbury T&T Clark in their Jewish Christian Text Series, where he identified all of the resurrection and afterlife beliefs (18) in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. In these landmark studies, he discussed and diagramed the complete beliefs, and provided evidence for how the question of theodicy played a major role in the formation of these beliefs. He also identified that these beliefs had used support texts from books that later became the TaNaKh (Hebrew Bible/Protestant Old Testament) and had developed in isolation rather than being systematically built on one another.
He has participated in 15 research projects including the Beyond Beliefs Research Project, a major study investigating Millennial young adults' responses to over 100 sociocultural, demographic and religious topics.
Jan was a visiting research fellow for two years at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and undertook his PhD in Religion at Andrews University, USA, a school specializing in Old Testament, Early Judaism, and Biblical Archeology.