Resourcing New Testament Studies

Literary, Historical, and Theological Essays in Honor of David L. Dungan

Allan J. McNicol, David B. Peabody, J. Samuel Subramanian

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780567565471
• eBook ISBN: 9780567016119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Resourcing New Testament Studies includes fifteen essays, contributed by twenty, internationally known scholars, including representatives from North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. These colleagues joined together to honor David Laird Dungan, Emeritus Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, whose impressive teaching, research, and publishing career has now spanned over four decades. Opening 'Part I. In Honor of David L. Dungan, ' is a lively and revealing 'Cooperative Essay on a Collaborative Scholar, ' composed by five of Dungan's colleagues; three, from the University of Tennessee; a fourth, from the editorial team with Dungan for The International Bible Commentary; and the fifth, Dungan's friend from childhood and co-author of their popular Sourcebook for the Study of the Gospels. Part I concludes with a full bibliography of Dungan's published work. Subsequent Parts of the volume focus on three themes, each reflecting some aspect of Dungan's own work, 'Part II. The Synoptic Problem;' 'Part III. Jesus, the Gospels and Acts' and 'Part IV. Canon, Theology and Ethics.' Contributors to this Festschrift include David R. Cartlidge, Robert A. Derrenbacker, Jr., William R. Farmer, David Noel Freedman with Henry Innes MacAdam, Albert Fuchs, Birger Gerhardsson, Jan Lambrecht, Adrian Leske, David E. Linge, Sean McEvenue, Ralph V. Norman, Samuel Oyin Obogunrin, Charles H. Reynolds, Hans-Hartmut Schroeder, Joseph B. Tyson, William O. Walker, Jr., and the three co-editors, Allan J. McNicol, David B. Peabody and J. Samuel Subramanian.

Part I
In Honor of David L. Dungan

David Laird Dungan’s Life and Work

A Cooperative Essay on a Collaborative Scholar

Charles Reynolds, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, co-coordinator with

David Linge and Ralph Norman, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

David R. Cartlidge, Maryville College, Maryville, Tennessee and

Sean McEvenue, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Introduction and Overview

Charles Reynolds

David Laird Dungan was born May 10, 1936 in New Haven, Connecticut, while his parents were home on leave as Presbyterian missionaries assigned to the China Inland Mission (central China). The family had been in China since 1926, although David’s father, Irvine Dungan, first went there alone as a short-term missionary in 1922. From September 1936 to December 1940, the entire family returned to Shanghai despite the growing presence of Japanese forces in north China. But by mid–1940, most of China was under Japanese domination, so David’s parents decided that his father would remain in China to protect mission property, while his mother and their four sons would return home. Mrs. Dungan settled with her sons in Wooster, Ohio, to wait out the war with other missionary families. In 1941, after the United States declared war on Japan following Pearl Harbor, Irvine Dungan, along with other Americans, was arrested by the Japanese and put in a concentration camp near Shanghai.¹ He was released in 1943 as part of a prisoner exchange between the American and Japanese governments. The family then moved from Wooster to Berea, Kentucky, where Irvine Dungan became interim head of the Psychology Department at Berea College. Many of David’s perspectives on family, religion, and politics appear grounded in these early childhood experiences and, by his late childhood, were shaped by the culture and mission of Berea College, an institution devoted to providing a liberal arts education to the children of impoverished Appalachian families. Students at Berea had to work in the fields, the shops, and help cook and clean to help pay for their education.

Anyone who knows David realizes that he has always been a dogged worker with stamina and perseverance, regardless of the task at hand. And while seldom a political activist, David has always been an academic activist by trying to undermine any scholarship not grounded in solid evidence, by fostering courses and programs to serve the underserved, promote the common good, and by teaching in ways that demand and promote self-learning by all students. David’s undergraduate students experience his high scholarly expectations and begin, many for the first time, to see their work in his courses as part of a larger scholarly vocation.

James Washington, the first African-American graduate in Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, once complained to me that David expected him to be a scholar and not just a student. James was always having to rewrite papers (sometimes up to three times) that he submitted to David. But David saw scholarly promise and ability in this student that most other faculty at UT missed. With this demanding encouragement, James Washington eventually went on to get a master’s degree from Harvard and a doctorate from Yale in American Church History. He subsequently joined the faculty at Columbia University where he rose to the rank of Handy Professor of Religion in America, one of the premier positions in this field.²

Those who have known David for some time realize how he can change habitual practices and convictions rather quickly when confronted with a challenging new direction he believes has more merit than he previously thought. In the fall of 1964, during my first semester in the Harvard Graduate Program, I was working evenings at the Divinity School Library and noticed that William R. Farmer, a New Testament scholar with whom I had studied at the Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, finally published his major history of the debate over the Synoptic Problem. Several students and I had helped Dr. Farmer with some of his research and knew how potentially revolutionary it was. I mentioned Farmer’s book to David the next morning, as some of us were sitting around drinking coffee. David’s response was that he had already heard of him from one of his teachers there, namely, that he was a poor scholar and even something of a lunatic. My response was that I had heard the same thing from my teachers at Perkins, none of whom supported his work, but that my own work with him had convinced me that the Two-Source hypothesis (the priority of Mark + Q) was at least open to serious debate. A few weeks later David told me that he had just finished reading the Farmer book and that he intended to rely on some of Farmer’s results in the dissertation he was then writing. To the best of my recollection, that was the only time David and I discussed those issues as graduate students. Years later, however, I received a letter from Farmer crediting me with doing more to advance New Testament studies than any other student he had taught. The reason he gave was that it was my encouragement that prompted David’s extensive scholarship on the order of the Gospels! I cannot think of a higher accolade that Farmer could have bestowed upon David.

Three events in the 1970s profoundly shaped David’s future as both a teacher and research scholar. One was David’s attendance at a summer workshop at Amherst College, sponsored by the Washington School of Psychiatry. Its focus was on the importance of small group interactions and discussions for facilitating active learning. David soon changed from embodying the traditional models of authority of a professor lecturing in the classroom to that of becoming a facilitator of participatory student learning.³ That is his primary teaching style to this day.

A second event in the mid–1970s was when David first served as the Catholic Biblical Association visiting professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute at the Gregorian University in downtown Rome. This was David’s first immersion in a Catholic institution as well as that institution’s first Protestant faculty member. It was also David’s first opportunity to teach in depth a course dealing with the Synoptic Problem. Never one simply to teach a theoretical position, David began to see that the standard analytical tools used to examine the Gospels, such as Gospel synopses, unwittingly relied on the Two-Source hypothesis for their arrangement. Therefore, using these synopses to “prove” the correctness of this hypothesis was a totally circular operation. His important essay on “Theory of Synopsis Construction,” which was published in Biblica in 1980, was the fruition of David’s recognition of this circular reasoning.

A third event in the late 1970s that had a major impact on David’s productivity in research and scholarship was his joining with William R. Farmer and the Benedictine monk, Dom John Bernard Orchard, of Ealing Abbey, London, in founding and managing the International Institute for the Renewal of Gospel Studies. The central purpose of this institute was to bring together a small number of scholars who would work to advance the understanding and acceptance of the Two-Gospel (Neo-Griesbach) Hypothesis, as opposed to the Two-Source hypothesis, through research, publications, and special conferences. The first item on its agenda was to convene a small, high-level, international symposium on every aspect of the Synoptic Problem; it would be held in April 1984, in Jerusalem. David agreed to be the secretary of the planning committee. For it to be a success, the institute sponsored or collaborated in no fewer than seven preparatory conferences in the years leading up to it to identify the best scholars to invite to Jerusalem and the key issues to put on the program. The conferences took place between 1976 and 1982 in Great Britain and Europe, at such universities and abbeys as Cambridge, Ampleforth (York), twice; in Tübingen, Münster, and Rome, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, and in Dallas. The symposium reports were subsequently edited and published by Peeters of Brussels.

Following the 1984 Jerusalem Symposium, the Research Team of the Institute met three times a year in order to fill two lacunae in the scholarly literature: a volume explaining how Luke was composed on the Two-Gospel Hypothesis, eventually published as Beyond the Q Impasse: Luke’s Use of Matthew in 1996; and a comparable volume explaining how Mark was composed on the same hypothesis, One Gospel from Two: Mark’s Use of Matthew and Luke (2002).

Meanwhile, in 1989, William Farmer and Bernard Orchard began work on a major, one-volume, international commentary on the Bible. Although numerous commentaries presupposing the Two-Source hypothesis had been published, this commentary would be unique in that it would showcase how the Two-Gospel Hypothesis facilitated what its editors considered to be a superior historical and theological understanding of the Bible as a whole. After numerous planning conferences in the United States and abroad, an English version was published by Liturgical Press in 1998. A Spanish version came out a few months later, and, to date, Dutch and Polish editions and a second English edition, prepared especially for readers in India, have appeared with further editions in Arabic, Croatian, French, Italian, Japanese, and Russian still planned.⁴

While all this was going on, David was writing a lengthy account of the history of the debate over the Synoptic Problem. It appeared in 1999 as part of the Anchor Bible Reference Library under the title A History of the Synoptic Problem: The Canon, the Text, the Composition, and the Interpretation of the Gospels.

When one adds up all of the funds raised by David and his colleagues on behalf of institute projects, including state-of-the-art computer hardware and software for the Research Team, the total for the period 1970 to 2000 surpasses one million dollars! Quite a testimony to the sustained, far-flung, and significant contributions of this relatively small group of scholars to Gospel research.⁵

Dungan’s Interdisciplinary Teaching

David Linge

David belongs to a generation of scholars who began their academic careers in the 1960s—at a time when many found their happy pursuit of scholarly specialities intruded on by the convulsions of the Vietnam War and by a growing awareness that our consumer society was degrading the natural world at such a furious pace as to be undermining the conditions necessary for its continued existence. David’s long and distinguished teaching career reflects the impact of these great issues of our civilization upon him. Over the years he designed and taught a number of courses related to religion and the environment, peace, and the Vietnam War. In all these areas, David’s efforts came to have an impact on both students and colleagues, beyond the Department of Religious Studies. It was especially in connection with these courses, on topics beyond the pale of his specialized training as a New Testament scholar, that Dungan emerged as an early advocate and champion of interdisciplinary studies at the University of Tennessee.

In the case of environmental issues, Dungan’s courses on religion and the environment stretch back over almost forty years, dating to the time of the first national Earth Day in 1970. He was one of the first professors at the University of Tennessee beyond the biological sciences to grasp the importance of ecological issues and to begin to address them as matters requiring the attention of teachers and students in the humanities, as well as the natural sciences. Even at that early date David was not the only member of the religious studies faculty to offer courses on environmental subjects; indeed, some of David’s earliest teaching endeavors in this area were courses developed collaboratively and team-taught with colleagues within the department. What is truly remarkable in Dungan’s case, however, is that, while his colleagues gradually shifted their attention to other topics and ceased to offer courses on religion and the environment, David has continued his teaching in this important area throughout his career as a university professor. Given the enormous amount of concentration required over many years for him to attain the preeminent position he enjoys in his chosen field of New Testament and early Christian studies, David’s sustained commitment to teaching about the environment, including the time required to research ever-new facets of the environmental crisis, is all the more impressive. When asked about this parallel focus on the environment, he jokingly replied that teaching biblical subjects in the “Bible belt” made him feel crazy at times and he needed something completely different just to maintain his sanity.

Perhaps nothing reveals more clearly than his environmental courses the moral dimension of David’s work as a teacher, that is, his dedication to the task of teaching his students to think critically and responsibly about some of the overriding environmental problems of our time. Over the years, Dungan’s introductory religious studies course focused on such issues as global warming, population, food production and consumption, energy, resource scarcity and use, among others. His purpose in these courses was to get students to see that these are more than merely technical problems to be left to the experts, but also problems of value, rooted in a people’s worldview, a shared sense of the meaning and purpose of human life, and the relationship of humans to the non-human world. Thus, at one and the same time, Dungan was able to heighten student awareness of the environmental crisis and to help them learn something about the nature of religious traditions, as historically constituted, socially shared frameworks out of which people experience, imagine, and act, and, in terms of which, they provide the ultimate justification for their activities. Hence, environmental problems can be solved only to the extent that people are willing to rethink their own values, in order to be open to the possibility of acting differently in the world. David made this rethinking process a personal one for his students. What he required of them was not simply an analysis of the core values of our culture that have gotten us into our current predicament, but a critical awareness of how their own habits, vocational goals, and lifestyles tied them personally into the environmental crises. This deeper “religious” agenda of David’s environmental teaching was a kind of pedagogical embodiment of Gandhi’s precept, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” The reflexive dimension of these courses was facilitated by another feature of David’s teaching that emerged first in his environmental classes, but was to become a hallmark of all his teaching, including his courses in New Testament—namely, his emphasis on his students’ active participation in the class through group reports, debates, and, generally, on students taking responsibility for shaping and teaching the course. Often as much as one-third of a semester’s class time would be given over to these participatory activities.

Not surprisingly, the first environmental issue that attracted Dungan’s attention was nuclear energy. When David arrived in Knoxville in 1967, both the city and the university were deeply involved in the development and promotion of nuclear energy. At that time, the Tennessee Valley Authority, with headquarters in Knoxville, was building fourteen nuclear power plants and had another eight on the drawing boards. As such, it was the nation’s leading nuclear power generator and one of the most prominent advocates of increasing our national dependence on it. TVA also provided the electricity for the government facilities in Oak Ridge, which, during the years of the Reagan presidency in the 1980s, were a national center of nuclear weapons production. Great controversy raged at that time around the plan to build a new type of “breeder” reactor in Oak Ridge—a very risky technology that was soon abandoned, in part, due to grassroots opposition in which Dungan participated. One of the earliest topics in his introductory course on religion and the environment was nuclear waste. His research and preparation for teaching that course brought him into contact with colleagues in such diverse fields as philosophy, geology, botany, zoology, metallurgical engineering, and nuclear engineering. In 1979, together with some of these colleagues, Dungan organized one of the earliest interdisciplinary courses at the University of Tennessee, “Technology, Society and the Common Good,” which focused, among other things, on the issue of the hazards of long-term control of highly radioactive waste. That endeavor led to the founding of a University Studies program that is still thriving. In 1985, it also resulted in David and several colleagues being awarded a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation to study public participation in defining and selecting options for dealing with high-level nuclear waste. This involved conducting hearings at such places as Stony Brook, New York, and Phoenix, Arizona, to gather views of public policy makers and state and local officials. David’s involvement in the University’s expanding course offerings on environmental issues led to other responsibilities, such as being asked by the dean to chair the academic review of the Graduate Program in Ecology. All of this illustrates very well how his strong and dedicated teaching led to ever-widening circles of scholarship, recognition, and responsibility.

One final instance of David’s teaching in subject areas beyond a narrowly defined study of the New Testament and early Christianity deserves attention. In 1985, some Vietnam combat veterans asked David to consider teaching a course on American involvement in Vietnam. The Vietnam Memorial had been recently completed in Washington, and it helped spark a national debate about the Vietnam War. Many students had fathers or uncles who had been in Vietnam and came back total strangers. They wanted to know what had happened to them. Plus, they had heard of the turbulent “sixties,” including demonstrations at UT itself during a Billy Graham Crusade in Knoxville. Why did students at the University of Tennessee approach Dungan, who had not served in the Vietnam conflict and was not in any sense a scholar of the Vietnam era in American history? David’s own answer to the question of why students approached him, despite his not being a Vietnam veteran, is that he was willing to schedule the course and then bring in visiting speakers who did know first-hand what had happened to stimulate the actual class discussions.

His first step was to visit the Knoxville Vietnam Veterans Outreach Center, to ask them to come to the campus and meet with the students. Five agreed, and soon they had enlisted numerous friends as well. By the middle of the course there were eighteen vets helping David teach fourteen students! The vets as teachers turned out to be the most extraordinary feature of an altogether remarkable course, entitled “The Vietnam War: Its Cultural and Religious Legacies,” first offered, experimentally, in the December 1985 “miniterm” as an introductory religious studies course. The veterans proved to be powerful teachers, bringing to their eighteen-year-old listeners a terrifying, concrete realism about the way the war was fought, capped by the brutal “shunning” they experienced from American society and their own families when they returned. Their teaching, therefore, placed the “objective facts” about America’s war to “contain Communism” in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos within the context of the often-shocking personal experiences of actual men and women, which profoundly transfused the undergraduates’ study of the war with a seriousness and moral intensity that could not have been achieved in any other way. Moreover, the classroom interaction between veterans-turned-teachers and undergraduate students c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword Allan J. McNicol, David B. Peabody, and J. Samuel Subramanian, Editors
• Abbreviations
• Part I. In Honor of David L. Dungan
• Part II. The Synoptic Problem
• Part III. Jesus, the Gospels, and Acts
• Part IV. Canon, Theology, and Ethics
• Footnotes