Helmut Koester (1926–2016)

Helmut Koester, professor emeritus at Harvard Divinity School, died on New Year’s Day 2016, shortly after his 89th birthday. He was one of the last scholars to write his dissertation under the direction of Rudolf Bultmann, therefore an important exponent of the historical-critical investigation of Christian origins. That dissertation was on Gospel quotations in the early Church fathers, so in a sense this book, Ancient Christian Gospels, is the culmination of a lifetime devoted to the question.
In the years between Koester’s dissertation, published in 1957, and the appearance of this book, one of the most important developments in the field was access to the trove of manuscripts discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. A distinguishing feature of Koester’s book is that he makes judicious use of some of these documents, such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Dialogue of the Savior, to supplement what the canonical Gospels and the early Church fathers contain to reconstruct, as the subtitle says, the history and development of the written accounts of the sayings, deeds, passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. An insight that might surprise some readers is that the composition of Mark, John, Matthew and Luke did not put an end to the oral tradition nor to the use of short written collections of sayings or harmonized accounts. Even Justin Martyr, writing in the middle of the second century, quotes from these, not our canonical Gospels (even though he might have known them).
An appealing trait of Koester the scholar was that he often invited others to contribute chapters on topics about which their expertise was greater than his. This book is no exception; the concluding chapter, on Tatian’s Diatessaron, is by William L. Petersen.
Although this book, written for advanced students of the New Testament, is useful as a resource for dipping into, it becomes even more valuable when read in its entirety, a process also helpful for understanding the structure of the book, which could strike the cursory reader as confusing.… (altro)