David Laird Dungan

Who was 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.