Dexter Brown

Biography

Dexter Brown teaches broadly in the areas of Ancient Judaism, New Testament and early Christianity, and classics. His scholarship explores the little-known intersections of Ancient Judaism and Ancient Greek literature. It focuses on how ancient literary critics went about interpreting and commenting upon two authoritative texts, the Greek Torah and the Homeric epics.

His current project seeks to answer the following question: when and why did the idea of authorial intention become central to ancient literary criticism, both Homeric and Mosaic? The answer hinges on the discovery that Philo of Alexandria—the most prominent Grecophone Jewish scholar of antiquity—was far more indebted to the Homeric criticism of his time than has been recognized in previous studies. For both Homeric scholars and Alexandrian Jewish scholars like Philo, a startlingly new idea of literary criticism took hold around the first century CE: that nothing in an authoritative text could be said in vain or without purpose. Every word, every syllable, every omission must prove to be deliberate, beneficial, and replete with meaning. This intentionalist turn in ancient literary scholarship, shared between Homeric and Jewish scholars, had a decisive influence over the history of later criticism and theory.

Other research interests include: the history of Alexandrian Jewish literature; Ancient Greek scholarship; the linguistic variation and diachronic development of post-classical Greek; and ancient language pedagogy.

In addition to research, Dexter is passionate about teaching and making the study of ancient languages and literature available to as wide an audience as possible.