Dennis Ronald MacDonald (born 1946) is the John Wesley Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at the Claremont School of Theology in California.
MacDonald proposes a theory wherein the earliest books of the New Testament were responses to the Homeric Epics, including the Gospel of Mark and the Acts of the Apostles.
In subsequent works, MacDonald expanded his hypothesis to include the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel of Mark as being Christian variations of the Homeric epics.
"[4] The book begins by examining the role that the Homeric Epics played in antiquity—namely that anybody who was considered educated at the time learned to read and write, and they did so by studying the Odyssey and Iliad.
[5][6][7][8][9] Karl Olav Sandnes notes the vague nature of alleged parallels as the "Achilles' heel" of the "slippery" project.
Daniel Gullotta from Stanford similarly writes "MacDonald's list of unconvincing comparisons goes on and has been noted by numerous critics.
Despite MacDonald's worthy call for scholars to reexamine the educational practices of the ancient world, all of the evidence renders his position of Homeric influential dominance untenable.
"[8] Kristian Larsson discusses the concept of intertextual density and its application in what MacDonald views as one of the most convincing cases of Markan imitation, namely the Cyclops – Circe complex in Odyssey 9-10 and the Gerasene demoniac story in Mark 5.