His family moved back to the United States and he was then raised in Berea, Kentucky, where he graduated high school in 1953.
[1] From 1967 to 2002, Dungan 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.
This meant he argued against both Markan priority and the necessity of the Q document proposed in the more accepted and common two-source hypothesis.
[5] He authored numerous articles and books on the subject, including A History of the Synoptic Problem (Yale University Press, 1999).
[7] 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.