MacRae was born in
Calumet, Michigan, the son of a Canadian-born physician who valued academic pursuits and who attended a social and intellectual club where talks were given and papers read. At age 16, Allan entered
Occidental College, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1922 and a Master of Arts the following year. In 1923–24, MacRae studied under
R. A. Torrey at the
Bible Institute of Los Angeles. In 1927, he earned a Th.B. and a Master of Arts in Semitic Philology from
Princeton Theological Seminary. Awarded a fellowship at the
University of Berlin, MacRae studied
Arabic,
Syriac, Babylonian
cuneiform, and Egyptian
hieroglyphics, also becoming fluent in German as he engaged in his hobby of mountain hiking. During his second year at the
University of Berlin, he spent four months in Palestine, meeting archaeologist
Flinders Petrie and studying in the
American Schools of Oriental Research under
William F. Albright. Although MacRae intended to complete his doctoral work in Berlin, he became so involved in seminary teaching that he instead finished his PhD at the
University of Pennsylvania in 1936 with a dissertation on personal names discovered in the ancient Mesopotamian city of
Nuzi. In 1929, Princeton theologian
Robert Dick Wilson invited MacRae to join him as his assistant in the Old Testament department of the newly formed
Westminster Theological Seminary. There he and Wilson wrote a scholarly refutation of the
JEDP theory of
higher criticism, supporting the conservative position in the
Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy. In 1936, after
J. Gresham Machen and other conservatives were forced to leave the
PCUSA, MacRae became a founding minister of what became the
Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC). Nevertheless, holding strong beliefs about
premillennialism and abstinence from alcohol, MacRae joined with Harold S. Laird, Carl McIntire, Roland K. Armes, and several other conservative Presbyterians to found Faith Theological Seminary, a school intended to serve the
Bible Presbyterian Church, of which MacRae became a minister. At Faith Seminary, MacRae met and married a former student and temporary secretary, Grace E. Sanderson; they had one son, John Phillip MacRae. On his honeymoon, while hiking and climbing in the Grand Canyon, MacRae played a key role in locating and reaching three Army pilots who had parachuted from a
B-24 bomber. In 1956, conflict in the Bible Presbyterian Church—officially about synod-controlled agencies but actually over the strong hand of Carl McIntire in the denomination—resulted in a church split, with most of the faculty of Faith Seminary resigning. MacRae remained loyal to McIntire and the mission of the seminary that they had established. Nevertheless, in 1971, McIntire ousted MacRae, and he, with Jack Murray and others, formed Biblical Theological Seminary. There MacRae continued to teach and serve as seminary president, with his only respite being summer hiking trips taken in various parts of the United States. Though MacRae officially retired in 1983, his chosen successor as head of the seminary soon died; MacRae soldiered on until 1986, when he was 84, and then took the honorary title of chancellor. During his career MacRae subordinated his personal scholarship to his teaching, but he served as president of the
Evangelical Theological Society in 1960. He also worked as an editor for the New
Scofield Reference Bible, as a translator for the
New International Version of the Bible, and as a commentator for the
NIV Study Bible. MacRae was a prolific letter writer, and a selection of his letters was edited by a former colleague, Swee Hwa Quek, and published as
Biblical Christianity (1986). A
festschrift, R. Laird Harris, et al.,
Interpretation & History: Essays in Honor of Allan A. MacRae was also published in 1986. MacRae died on September 27, 1997, at the Quarryville Presbyterian Retirement Home in
Quarryville, Pennsylvania. ==Works==