Dr. James D. Tabor is a retired Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is a historian of ancient Mediterranean religions with a focus on Christian Origins, ancient Judaism, and Biblical studies more generally. He earned his BA in Greek and Religion from Abilene Christian University; his MA in Christian Origins from Pepperdine University, and a second MA and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

He previously taught at the University of Notre Dame and the College of William and Mary. He retired as Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2022 where he taught Christian origins and ancient Judaism for thirty-three years, serving as Chair of the Department for a decade. His Ph.D. is from the University of Chicago. He now devotes himself full-time to research, archaeological field work, and publishing.

Tabor combines his work on ancient texts with extensive field work in archaeology in Israel and Jordan. Since 2008 he has been co-director, with Drs. Shimon Gibson and Rafi Lewis, of the acclaimed Mt Zion excavation in Jerusalem and he has been involved in a half dozen other archaeological projects in the Holy Land over the past thirty years. In the early 1990s he was involved in the release of the unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls and was one of the first scholars to examine and publish several very important ones. In 1995 he testified before the US Congress on the Waco tragedy, drawing upon his expertise in understanding ancient Biblical apocalyptic ideas.

Tabor has published ten books: Things Unutterable (1985); A Noble Death with Arthur Droge (1992); Why Waco: Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America with Eugene Gallagher (1995); The Jesus Dynasty: A New Historical Investigation of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity (2006); The Jesus Discovery: The New Archaeological Find that Reveals the Birth of Christianity with Simcha Jacobovici (2012); Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity (2012): Paul’s Ascent to Paradise (2020); The Book of Genesis: A New Transation from the Transparent English Bible (2020); and Marie: De son enfance juive à la fondation du christianisme (2020), which will appear in English in a revised version as The Lost Mary: From the Jewish Mother of Jesus to the Virgin Mother of God, in 2024.