Helmut Koester

Helmut Koester (born 1926, Hamburg) is a German-born American scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. His research is primarily in the areas of New Testament interpretation, history of early Christianity, and archaeology of the early Christian period.

Life

Koester studied under Rudolf Bultmann at the University of Marburg, Germany, after being released from a POW camp there in 1945. He submitted his dissertation in 1954, and then became an assistant to Günther Bornkamm at the University of Heidelberg from 1954-1956. Koester began teaching at Harvard Divinity School in 1958 and became John H. Morison Research Professor of Divinity and Winn Research Professor of Ecclesiastical History in 2000. Although now emeritus, he continues to teach at Harvard University. Koester is co-editor and chair of the New Testament editorial board of the commentary series "Hermeneia: A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible" published by Fortress Press (Minneapolis). He has served as the president of the Society of Biblical Literature (1991), is a member of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas (SNTS) and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Koester is an ordained minister of the Lutheran Church. In 1953, he married Gisela Harrassowitz, with whom he had four children, named Reinhild, Almut, Ulrich, and Heiko. He has three grandchildren including Christopher, Lukas, and Alexander.

Work

In his dissertation (published as Synoptische Überlieferung bei den Apostolischen Vätern, i.e. "Synoptic tradition in the Apostolic Fathers"), Koester was able to demonstrate that much material in the so-called Apostolic Fathers that parallels elements in the Synoptic Gospels need not necessarily reflect dependence upon the written form of the Synoptics known to us. This was an extremely significant observation, and one with which all subsequent scholarship on early Christian gospel traditions would have to reckon. Among his numerous subsequent publications, his two-volume Introduction to the New Testament has become a standard reference work.

Select Publications

Commemorative

James D. Smith III and Philip Sellew (eds.), The Fabric of Early Christianity: Reflections in Honor of Helmut Koester by Fifty Years of Harvard Students, Presented on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday (Eugene, Ore., 2007)

References

    External links

    Helmut Koester's faculty page at Harvard Divinity School