Jas Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at the University of Oxford, Humfrey Payne Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Art and Religion at the University of Chicago. In 2009 he was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and since 2013 has been Principal Investigator in the Empires of Faith Project. He is married with four children and lives in Oxford.

"Jaś Elsner's ground - breaking account discusses both Roman and early Christian art in relation to such issues as power, death, society, acculturation, and religion ... he presents a fresh and challenging interpretation of an extraordinarily rich cultural crucible in which many fundamental developments of later European art had their origins." -- Mark Beumer, Kleio-Historia

"Elsner's innovative goal was to address "the movement of aspects of Roman art into the east, and the presence of some aspects of Asian material culture in the Roman world" (xv), and he succeeds in doing so." -- Fred S. Kleiner, Boston University, Journal of Roman Archaeology