David Laird Dungan


David Laird Dungan was Distinguished Professor of the Humanities and Emeritus Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a major scholar of the synoptic problem. As a founding member of the International Institute for the Renewal of Gospel Studies and a member of the Research Team of the International Institute for Gospel Studies, he was a proponent of the Two-Gospel Hypothesis, also known as the Griesbach hypothesis, which argues that the Gospel of Mark is derived from the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, thereby arguing against both Markan priority and the necessity of the conjectural Q document proposed in the two-source hypothesis. He authored numerous articles and books on the subject, including A History of the Synoptic Problem.
The son of Presbyterian missionaries, Dungan was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and grew up in Shanghai, China, and in Berea, Kentucky, where he graduated high school in 1953. He earned degrees from The College of Wooster, McCormick Seminary in Chicago, and Harvard Divinity School.
From 1967 to 2002, he was a faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, teaching courses in Biblical literature, Church history, and images of Jesus. His teaching was interdisciplinary, with courses linking religion to the environmental crisis, and an innovative course in the 1980s on religious legacies of the Vietnam War, in which local veterans served as guest lecturers, sharing their experiences with students. His teaching was inquiry based; according to one colleague, it was designed "to put students in the presence of what is primitive and, far more, pristine about biblical texts," to put students "in the grip of serious uneasiness" with their prior assumptions, and to challenge them to work through dilemmas of faith and scholarship for themselves.
His scholarship and teaching were recognized internationally. In 1976-77 and again in 2006, he taught at the invitation of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. Documents for the Study of the Gospels, which he began co-editing in the 1970s with David R. Cartlidge, is used by scholars and students worldwide. And from 1990 to 1998, he co-edited the International Bible Commentary: a Catholic and Ecumenical Commentary for the 21st Century, comprising biblical scholars from diverse Christian traditions from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.
At the time of his death, he was working on a multimedia book project entitled Images of Jesus in America. Colleagues have assembled a volume of essays in his honor, which includes an introductory set of essays on his life of teaching and scholarship. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has established the David L. Dungan Memorial Lecture Fund to support an annual lecture by a noted scholar on an issue that motivated Dungan's work.

Publications by David Laird Dungan

Books Authored
Books Edited
Articles and Essays Authored