Dr. Mark Ellison is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ancient Scripture and an affiliate faculty member in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Global Women’s Studies at Brigham Young University. He joined the BYU faculty in 2017 after having earned a Master’s degree in Bible and Archaeology from the University of South Florida, and an MA and PhD in Early Christianity from Vanderbilt University.
The BYU Jerusalem Center figured in a major turning point in Dr. Ellison’s educational and professional journey. He attended BYU (BA English, 1990; MEd Education, 1998) and began his career working for the Church Educational System as a seminary teacher (1990-97), an institute director/coordinator in Tampa, FL (1998-2005), and an instructional designer at the Church Office Building (2005-13). While he was in Florida, he and his wife, Lauren, participated in what would be the last year of the CES Lands of the Scriptures Workshop (1999), an intensive travel study program that took Latter-day Saint religious educators to Rome, Egypt, and Israel for on-site learning. The experience was life-changing, especially the two weeks spent in Israel. While visiting the BYU Jerusalem Center on that occasion, he and Lauren sensed how exciting it would be to return as part of the Jerusalem Center faculty and help students discover more of the wonders of scripture and history in the Holy Land. The experience sparked a insatiable curiosity for study, travel, and learning more about the biblical world. It was at this point that he began studying biblical Hebrew and earned that second master’s degree in Bible and Archaeology at USF. He then continued his studies at St. Petersburg Theological Seminary, learning New Testament Greek. After working at Church headquarters (where he was the project manager for the writing of the New Testament institute of religion student manual), he left CES employment to return to graduate school full-time, accepting a full scholarship at Vanderbilt, where he earned a third master’s and a doctorate.
He and Lauren have traveled extensively in Israel, Jordan, Greece, Italy, England, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland. He has worked on archaeological excavations in the Galilee region at et-Tell (2001) and Huqoq (2018, 2023) and has helped lead groups of BYU Ancient Near Eastern Studies students in archaeology field school seminars hosted at the BYU Jerusalem Center (2018, 2023). At BYU, he has taught religion courses in New Testament and the Book of Mormon, as well as Ancient Near Eastern studies courses in late ancient Christian and Jewish art, and a Global Women’s Studies course (team-taught with Lauren Ellison) on Women in the Christian Tradition. In his teaching and research, he loves to bring the past to life in ways that allow modern learners to sense its continuing relevance. His academic research exploring intersections of early Christian artifacts, texts, and practices has been published internationally by Oxford University Press, Routledge, Lexington-Fortress, Studia Patristica, Theologische Revue, Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, The Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, and The Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity. He has also published numerous essays for Latter-day Saint readers, including contributing to the volume Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints (BYU Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2022), which won the 2022 Award for Religious Non-Fiction from the Association for Mormon Letters.
He and Lauren were thrilled to finally realize a bit of that long-held dream to serve on the BYU Jerusalem Center faculty, over 20 years after they had first visited the Center in 1999. (Lauren herself had since earned an MTS in Biblical Studies from Iliff School of Theology, and is now a PhD student in New Testament at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA.) During the Spring-Summer term of 2022, they were part of the first group to re-open the Jerusalem Center following the Covid shutdown, and during Fall semester of 2023, they returned for what they hoped would be a year-long experience, which sadly was cut short after the events of October 7, 2023. Even though both semesters were disrupted by world events, they absolutely loved being with the students, faculty, and staff of the Jerusalem Center, and sharing with them in the wondrous, horizon-expanding learning experiences of the Jerusalem Center program. Some of Dr. Ellison’s favorite sites to visit with students are churches in the Holy Land with roots deep in Christian history that preserve fascinating archaeological or decorative elements of early
Christianity—the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Church of the Pater Noster on the Mount of Olives, the Church of the Multiplication on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee, and more. He also loves visiting more modern churches, ancient synagogues, and sites in Greece associated with the travels of the apostle Paul. He is known for geeking out whenever there’s a chance to look at an ancient baptismal font (Avdat, Kursi, Tabgha, Jerash, Petra, Philippi, etc.), a museum display of Byzantine oil lamps, Eastern Orthodox icons, figured mosaics, or heaven help you, a sarcophagus. 🙂
