Timothy Johnson graduated in 1984 from Grace College with a BA in Biblical Studies and a minor in Greek. After completing a post-baccalaureate program in Greek and Lain at the University of Pennsylvania he earned an M.A. in Classics from the University of Kentucky (1987) and a PhD in Classical Phliology from the University of Illinois (1993). He taught at Luther College, Cornell College (1993), Truman State University (Kirksville, Missouri) and Baylor University before moving in 1999 to the Classics Department at the University of Florida, where he is now an Associate Professor.

Prof. Johnson's primary areas of research are Greek/Roman lyric poetry and New Testament Studies. He is the author of A Symposion of Praise: Horace Returns to Lyric in Odes IV (University of Wisconsin Press 2005), a number of articles on Horace, and several entries for the Dictionary of New Testament Backgrounds (InterVarsity Press 2000). He has edited a special collection on Homer for Classical World, and he was editor for Religious Studies Review. His current project is a book-length study of the iambic Horace, tentatively titled Singing Through the Rage, Horace's Iambic Criticism: Placing Anger in Social Reconstruction.

From the outset of Odes IV Horace engages Pindar in a poetic agon to determine who will gain the mastery in the praxis of praise. The athletic competition (the audience, athlete, and praise-singer) overlays the interpretive environment of Horatian panegyric so that there is more to the poetic experience than the perspective of the winner. Horace's praise draws the audience in as an active participant who not only watches the poet-athletes compete, but in this literary agon, where there is no defined finish-line, serves as the judge for all competitors, the laudandi and laudatores (nos canemus). Thus the laudator both competes in the agon and draws the interpretive space for the viewer. As with Pindar the praise is itself an action where the poet competes to win a prize of immortal famce. Horace is competing for the prize, but unlike his opponent he does not attempt to win by persuading the audience to adopt the viewpoint of the victorious athlete or warrior. he manipulates the differing points of view to create an ongoing interpretive dialogue, that is, he re-enacts the competition. This is the most novel dimention of Horace's challenge to lyric in Odes IV. Horatian panegyric embraces the entirety of the athletic event: the audience, the celebrant, and the poet. The interpretive agon between these often competing vantage points produces the pathos, the outcome or experience that is Horatian lyric.