Jan currently works at Andrews University, USA and is also a research consultant for the Center for Collaborative Study of Trauma, Health Equity, and Neurobiology.
Jan was formerly the Doctoral Programs Coordinator and Associate Professor of Old Testament at the Theologische Hochschule Friedensau, Germany. He was an Associate-Director of their Institute of Biblical Studies and Archeology, developed their Master of Theological Studies (Biblical Studies) program, and dug with the Balu’a Regional Archaeological Project, a major Iron Age Moabite site in Jordan. Jan also represented Friedensau at the Gesellschaft für Bildung und Forschung in Europa (GBFE) a network of thirteen (theological) institutions in Denmark, Germany, Norway, Russia and Switzerland.
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 in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. In these landmark studies, he discussed and diagramed the complete beliefs (18), and provided evidence for how Theodicy played a major role in the formation of these beliefs. He also identified that they had developed in isolation rather than built on one another using support texts from books that later formed the TaNaKh (Hebrew Bible/Protestant Old Testament).
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. Jan’s areas of specialization are Old Testament Exegesis and Theology, Early Judaism, and Archaeology. Prior to coming to Germany, he taught undergraduate and graduate levels at Andrews University in the USA, was a faculty senator, Doctoral Programs Committee member, and researcher.
He is also known as the author of ExegesisPaper.com, a website that teaches students how to undertake exegesis, the primary research methodology of scholarly biblical research. This free online resource has been used by over 100,000 students from more than 190 countries.
Jan speaks English and Norwegian. He was born in Norway, is a dual citizen of the United States, and has lived in Norway, England, the United States, Israel, Australia, and Germany. He loves to travel and, given his Viking heritage, wants to build a Viking ship one day. His wife Leanne (a triple United States, Australian, and Maltese citizen), trained as a psychologist but is now an academic research project manager. They have young three sons who are all STEM, NASA, and Star Wars fans.