Dennis MacDonald

DENNIS R. MACDONALD received his undergraduate degree from Bob Jones University, his Master of Divinity from McCormick Theological Seminary, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University (1978). From 1980-1998 he taught at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, with stints as a visiting professor at the Harvard Divinity School (1985-1986) and the Union Theological Seminary of New York (spring 1991). Since 1998 he has been the John Wesley Professor of New Testament at the Claremont School of Theology and Professor of Religion at the Claremont Gradate University. In 2000 MacDonald became Director of the IAC at CGU where he also directs the Mimesis in Ancient Christian and Jewish Literature project.

MacDonald has published nine books and scores of articles, especially on topics related to Christian apocryphal writings and imitations of Homer in ancient Jewish and Christian writings, including the gospels of Mark and Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. His books include The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (Yale University Press, 2000) and Does the New Testament Imitate Homer? (Yale Press, 2004). His lecture in September will address five theses for reconsidering the intertextuality of the gospels: (1) Like the authors of the gospels of Matthew and Luke, the author of Mark knew Q; (2) Luke’s sources included Q, Mark and Matthew; (3) Papias likewise knew Q, Mark and Matthew; (4) Q and the writings of Papias vanished because of false prophecies; and (5) Ancient rhetorical imitation is the key to solving the Synoptic problem.

A history professor at Truman State University since 1995, M. LYNN ROSE is the author of The Staff of Oedipus: Transforming Disability in Ancient Greece (U of Michigan Press, 2003) and a contributing author for the Encyclopedia of Disability, ed. Gary L. Albrecht (Sage Press, 2006). She was the 2003-4 Mary E. Switzer Distinguished Fellow and guest lecturer that year at the Martin Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg, and Truman State Educator of the Year in 2005. In 2006, she received the Missouri Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, as well as the Carnegie Foundation Professor of the Year Award for Missouri. Her paper, “Teaching Gilgamesh: The Historical Context of Obliteration,”  co-authored with  3 undergraduate  students,

received one of ten International Awards for Excellence from the International Journal of Humanities. Rose credits her interest in the ancient world to her childhood move with her parents from Indiana to Egypt and their summer vacations in Greece.

Rose's interest in disability issues and rights came while completing her undergraduate work in history at the University of Minnesota where she also earned her PhD. Her October lecture for the Institute explores the assumption that discarded children in the ancient world were unwanted children and insists that modern assumptions about the economic worth and aesthetic appeal of deformed people, cloaked in the standards of medical health, do not provide an appropriate framework of interpretation for the evidence about the lot of anomalous infants in the ancient Greek world.