Dennis MacDonald
Dennis Ronald MacDonald is a biblical scholar who holds the John Wesley Professorship of New Testament and Christian Origins at the Claremont School of Theology and teaches religion at the Claremont Graduate University. He is best known for developing Mimesis criticism, a methodology that interprets early New Testament writings, including the Gospel of Mark and the Acts of the Apostles, as deliberate responses to the Homeric epics. MacDonald contends that the failure to recognize the influence of Homeric poetry has skewed modern readings of early Christian narrative.
He also advances the Q+/Papias hypothesis, a proposed solution to the synoptic problem that reconstructs an earlier source titled the Logoi of Jesus.
Career
MacDonald earned his undergraduate degree from Bob Jones University, a Master of Divinity from McCormick Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1978. He taught at Goshen College before joining the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado where he taught Theology and Biblical Studies from 1980 to 1998. Since 1998 to present he has been the John Wesley Professor of New Testament at the Claremont School of Theology and Professor of Religion at the Claremont Graduate University.From 1999-2010 he served as the director of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at Claremont. He was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School for the 1985-1986 academic year and at Union Theological Seminary in New York for spring 1991. He has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. MacDonald served as President of the Rocky Mountain/Great Plains Region of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature in 1984-1985, and as President of the Pacific Region of these organizations in 2005-2006. He has served on editorial boards, chaired program units for various professional societies, and appeared as an expert on A&E, PBS, and the History Channel.
Mimesis criticism
Mimesis criticism is a method of interpreting texts in relation to their literary or cultural models, pioneered by MacDonald and first published in his 1994 book Christianizing Homer. The methodology examines how ancient authors deliberately imitated classical Greek sources within early Christian narratives, looking for intertextual relationships that go beyond simple allusions or citations. MacDonald developed six key criteria for identifying mimesis:- Accessibility - Could the proposed source text have been available to the later author?
- Analogy - Is there evidence of other writers imitating this same source text?
- Density - How many meaningful parallels exist between the texts?
- Order - Do the parallel elements appear in a similar sequence?
- Distinctive Traits - Are there unique shared motifs or wording that stand out?
- Interpretability - What did the later author aim to achieve by echoing the source?
Q+/Papias hypothesis
The Q+/Papias hypothesis is MacDonald's proposed solution to the synoptic problem, first presented in his 2012 work Two Shipwrecked Gospels. The hypothesis suggests that both Matthew and Mark used an earlier document called the Logoi of Jesus, which was structured as a rewriting of Deuteronomy, and that Luke later used Mark, Matthew, and Papias. Unlike other synoptic solutions, this hypothesis significantly reduces the number of independent sources for reconstructing the historical Jesus to just two: the Logoi of Jesus and the undisputed Pauline epistles.John S. Kloppenborg notes that the reconstruction requires reevaluating both Q's scope and Papias's historical reliability, while questioning whether Luke could have used multiple written sources simultaneously. The Society of Biblical Literature highlighted the theory's significance by dedicating a Q Section session to it at their 2013 Baltimore meeting. MacDonald further developed these ideas in From the Earliest Gospel to the Gospel of Mark, incorporating additional Papian fragments into his analysis.
''Christianizing Homer''
In one of MacDonald's first books, Christianizing Homer: The Odyssey, Plato, and the Acts of Andrew, he posited the theory that the apocryphal Acts of Andrew was a Christian retelling of Homer's Iliad. In it he argued that one could detect trends that showed parallels between the Homeric epic and the Acts of Andrew. He argued that the Acts of Andrew is better understood in light of the Odyssey. That the order of events in the Acts follows those found in the Acts of Andrew, that certain events in the Acts are better understood when understood in context of the Homeric epics, and that the Homeric texts commonly were available during the first century AD. In subsequent works, MacDonald expanded his hypothesis to include the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel of Mark as being Christian variations of the Homeric epics.In Christianizing Homer, MacDonald lays down his principles of literary mimesis, his methodology for comparing ancient texts. There are six aspects he examines 1) accessibility, 2) analogy, 3) density, 4) order, 5) distinctive traits, and 6) interpretability. According to his hypothesis, not only was Homer readily available to the authors of the New Testament, but the Homeric epics would have been the basic texts upon which the New Testament authors learned to write Greek. MacDonald also argues that the number of common traits, the order in which they occur, and the distinctiveness thereof between the Homeric Texts and early Christian documents help to show that the New Testament writers were using Homeric models when writing various books.
In his earliest reviews, MacDonald only applied his hypothesis to works such as Tobit and the Acts of Peter. In later works, he posits the Acts of the Apostles, the Gospel of Mark, and Gospel of Luke merged two cultural classics of his time period in order to "depict Jesus as more compassionate, powerful, noble, and inured to suffering than Odysseus."
''Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark''
MacDonald's most famous work, however, is The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark. According to MacDonald, the Gospel of Mark is "a deliberate and conscious anti-epic, an inversion of the Greek 'Bible' of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, which in a sense updates and Judaizes the outdated heroic values presented by Homer, in the figure of a new hero."The book begins by examining the role that the Homeric epics played in antiquity—namely that anybody who was considered educated at the time learned to read and write, and they did so by studying the Odyssey and Iliad. Students were expected, not only to understand the epics, but be able to rewrite the stories in their own words. Rewriting the Homeric epics was commonplace and accepted in biblical times.
In using the Homeric epics, the ancient writers were not trying to deceive their readers; in fact MacDonald believes the ancient readers understood the juxtapositions of Jesus with Odysseus. "Mark's purpose", he argues, "in creating so many stories about Jesus was to demonstrate how superior was to Greek heroes. Few readers of Mark fail to see how he portrays Jesus as superior to Jewish worthies... He does the same for Greek heroes."
MacDonald's thesis has not found acceptance and has received strong criticism by other scholars. Karl Olav Sandnes notes the vague nature of alleged parallels as the "Achilles' heel" of the "slippery" project. He has also questioned the nature of the alleged paralleled motifs, seeing MacDonald's interpretations of common motives. He states, "His reading is fascinating and contributes to a reader-orientated exegesis. But he fails to demonstrate authorial intention while he, in fact, neglects the OT intertextuality that is broadcast in this literature."
Daniel Gullotta from Stanford similarly writes "MacDonald's list of unconvincing comparisons goes on and has been noted by numerous critics. Despite MacDonald's worthy call for scholars to reexamine the educational practices of the ancient world, all of the evidence renders his position of Homeric influential dominance untenable."
Adam Winn, though adopting MacDonald's methods of mimetic criticism, concluded after a detailed analysis of MacDonald's theses and comparisons between Homer and Mark that "MacDonald is unable to provide a single example of clear and obvious Markan interpretation of Homer... because MacDonald's evidence is at best suggestive, it will ultimately convince few."
Kristian Larsson discusses the concept of intertextual density and its application in what MacDonald views as one of the most convincing cases of Markan imitation, namely the Cyclops – Circe complex in Odyssey 9-10 and the Gerasene demoniac story in Mark 5.
David Litwa argues that problematic parts of MacDonald's thesis include that he construes both large ranges of similarity in addition to large range of difference as evidence for parallel, that he alters his parallels in order to make them more convincing like suggesting that Jesus walking on water is comparable to Athena and Hermes flying above water, that he has an inconsistent application of his own six criteria, and that he often has completely unconvincing parallels such as his comparison of Odysseus on a floating island to Jesus sitting in a boat that floats on water.