Ralph Marcus (August 17, 1900 – December 25, 1956) was an American classical philologist and historian of Hellenistic Judaism and the Second Temple period.
[1][2] After attaining his doctorate, he acquired a teaching position at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, a seminary of Reform Judaism in New York.
[2] Marcus's most notable achievements were landmark translations for the Loeb Classical Library of the works of Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus.
(Allen Wikgren finished 16–17 that Marcus had started before his death, and Louis H. Feldman would translate volumes 18–20 of the mammoth work.)
[1][2] Toward the end of his life, Marcus contributed to academic study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a cache of scriptures of the Essenes found in the late 1940s that greatly expanded knowledge of Hellenistic and Roman era Judaism.