Allan MacRae

Allan Alexander MacRae (February 11, 1902, Calumet, Michigan – September 27, 1997, Quarryville, Pennsylvania)[1] was a Christian scholar, educator, minister, and with Jack Murray, a co-founder of Biblical Theological Seminary in Hatfield, Pennsylvania.[2]

He graduated from Occidental College in 1922 and earned a Master of Arts at the same school the following year. He studied under R. A. Torrey at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles then obtained a Th.B. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1927. He earned an A.M. from Princeton University the same year, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1936.

MacRae was a scholar of Babylonian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Arabic, Syriac and other Semitic languages. He studied at the University of Berlin and spent four months with William F. Albright in archaeological exploration of the Biblical city Ham, mentioned in Genesis 14. He collaborated with Princeton theologian Robert Dick Wilson to produce a scholarly refutation of the JEDP theory of higher criticism, a key issue supporting the conservative position in the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy.[3]

He was a founding minister of the Presbyterian Church of America which became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) in 1936. However, he was of a certain segment of those within the OPC that held strong beliefs advocating premillennialism and abstinence from alcohol.[4] The following year, along with Carl McIntire, he organized Faith Theological Seminary, a seminary which primarily served the Bible Presbyterian Church, of which MacRae was a member. Continuing disputes with McIntire reached a critical point in 1971, when MacRae, Murray, and others departed Faith Seminary to form Biblical Theological Seminary.[2][5] He was a translator of the original New International Version in the 1970s, employing his scholarship in ancient Hebrew and particularly the Book of Isaiah.[6]

MacRae died on September 27, 1997, at the Quarryville Presbyterian Retirement Home.

Works

• The Gospel of Isaiah
• The Prophecies of Daniel
• Biblical Christianity (a compendium of correspondence)

References

1. "WTS Bio Page". Retrieved January 4, 2010.
2. "Biblical Seminary Quick Facts". Archived from the original on 2010-11-20. Retrieved January 4, 2011.
3. Allan Alexander MacRae (1994). JEDP: Lectures on the Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch. ISBN 9780944788899. Retrieved 26 April 2017.
4. "Allan A. MacRae Papers". PCA Historical Society. Archived from the original on 21 December 2010. Retrieved January 4, 2011.
5. Yeo, John J. (2009). Plundering the Egyptians: The Old Testament and Historical Criticism at Westminster Theological Seminary (1929–1998). University Press of America. p. 155. ISBN 9780761849605. Retrieved 20 September 2015.
6. International Bible Society. "The NIV Committee on Bible Translation". Retrieved 25 April 2017.

External links

• Biography of Allan MacRae
• Biography of Allan MacRae