I'm Joel Kramer-adventurer, archaeologist, and teacher. Since boyhood, I've had an adventurer's heart. Growing up in the Middle East, the son of an oil company worker, my desire to explore was nurtured on family caravan trips through the Arabian desert.

After graduating from college, I pursued my passion for discovery by setting out on a two-man expedition across New Guinea. This harrowing experience brought me to the brink of death and transformed my understanding of what it means to lead by serving. I wrote a memoir about that experience called Beyond Fear: A Journey Across New Guinea.

Several years after returning from that expedition, I became the lay pastor of a small protestant church in northern Utah, where I gained a new passion-exploring Scripture. My desire to learn about the context of the Bible led me back to the Middle East, to Jerusalem, where I lived for nearly a decade. While there, I earned an M.A. in Archaeology, excavated extensively in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Ai, and explored the rich landscape of Biblical sites. My book, Where God Came Down: The Archaeological Evidence, comes out of my time there.