Martin Hengel

He was born on 14 December 1926 in Reutlingen, a textile manufacturing town south of Stuttgart, and the family moved soon after to Aalen, a smaller town roughly eighty kilometres to the east. The Weimar Republic was in its final years; the world into which Hengel arrived would be unrecognisable within a decade. He was seventeen in 1943, and seventeen in 1943 meant conscription. The Wehrmacht posted him to an anti-aircraft battery on the Western Front, where his job was to shoot at aeroplanes rather than to read Greek. He did that until 1945, when, after one of the last engagements of the European war, he shed his weapons and his uniform and walked back to Germany on foot. He finished his schooling in 1946.

What came next looked, for a while, like a clear path. He enrolled at the University of Tübingen in late 1947 to read Christian theology, transferred to the University of Heidelberg in 1949, and by 1951 had passed the first qualifying examination for the Lutheran ministry. Brief assistant-minister posts in Calw and Heilbronn followed. He had every reason to suppose he was headed toward an academic or clerical career, and no particular reason to suppose he wasn’t. But in 1954, after his second examination, his father made a different plan. The elder Hengel ran Hengella, the family textile firm in Aalen, and he wanted his son inside it. Martin went.

The decade that followed was, by his own account, the worst of his life. He spoke of it as “wasted years,” a phrase his colleagues noticed he used with something more like grief than resentment. The combination of full-time commercial work and frustrated scholarly ambition drove him to a serious breakdown. He carried, for the rest of his career, what several colleagues described as an inferiority complex, a sense that the years between his mid-twenties and mid-thirties had been taken from him and could never be returned. In August 1957 he married Marianne Kistler, and his wife’s steadiness across the decades ahead was, by all accounts, what made the rest possible. She called him “mein Mann” throughout their life together, and her devotion to him was visible to everyone who knew them.

He didn’t stop working. Academic study had to happen in the margins of factory schedules, grabbed in evenings and on weekends, and yet in 1959 he completed a doctorate on the Zealots under the supervision of the Tübingen New Testament professor Otto Michel. The Zealots were Jewish militants in Roman Palestine, men who turned religious conviction into armed resistance, and the question of what drove them would sit at the centre of Hengel’s thinking for decades: how Jewish identity, under Roman pressure, produced both violence and theological innovation. After the doctorate came the Habilitation thesis, the research credential required for a German professorial appointment. He wrote large sections of it while managing a factory in Leicester, England, far from Tübingen’s libraries, and he completed it in 1967.

He never fully disentangled himself from Hengella. The firm continued to operate as an upmarket women’s lingerie brand, and Hengel remained a director until his death. Late in his career he was still talking to close friends about manufacturing logistics, about the economics of moving production east to stay price-competitive. He held the two lives in parallel without, so far as anyone could tell, any sense that one cancelled the other. But those who knew him well understood what the arithmetic had cost: ten years of the sharpest decade for language acquisition and close reading, gone to the factory floor. The inferiority complex his colleagues described was its residue.

Geschichte des Frühen Christentums

Die Urgemeinde und das Judenchristentum

Martin Hengel

2019 | 790 pages

Earliest Christian history

history, literature, and theology: essays from the Tyndale F...

Jason Maston, Martin Hengel +1 more

2012 | 681 pages

Conflicts and Challenges in Early Christianity

C. K. Barrett, Donald Alfred Hagner +1 more

1999 | 103 pages

His first academic appointment came in 1968 at the University of Erlangen. Four years later, in 1972, he was called back to Tübingen to occupy the very chair that Otto Michel, his doctoral supervisor, had held. He stayed for the remainder of his career. His eventual title was professor emeritus of New Testament and early Judaism, the designation he used when he published in Christianity Today in October 2001.

The work that established him internationally was Judentum und Hellenismus, published by Mohr Siebeck in Tübingen in 1969. Its central argument was blunt: Alexander the Great’s campaigns into the Middle East from 333 BCE onward had Hellenised the Jewish world far more thoroughly and far more productively than anyone had previously mapped. The Maccabees resisted Greek culture, yes, but Hellenism also generated whole new forms of Jewish religious thinking, texts, and institutions that wouldn’t exist without the Greek encounter. Hengel documented all of this across hundreds of densely footnoted pages. The English translation, Judaism and Hellenism, was made by John Bowden, who became a close friend and a long-term collaborator, and it won the Schlegel-Tieck prize in 1974 as the year’s best translation from German. Hengel was openly pleased to have found Bowden. Good translators are rare, and the two worked together until the end of Hengel’s life.

What’s worth sitting with, here, is what that argument actually means at its deepest level. Judaism and early Christianity weren’t formed in separate containers. They were produced in the same world, saturated by the same Greek language and Roman power, shaped by the same Near Eastern religious inheritance. What later generations took to be firm boundaries between them were often retrospective constructions, drawn after the fact by communities that needed to define themselves over against a neighbour. Hengel didn’t think this was a problem to be managed. He thought it was the most interesting thing about the period. Two traditions that would spend centuries insisting on their difference were, at their historical origins, participants in a shared argument. That the sharing was sometimes violent doesn’t make it less real.

A sequence of substantial monographs followed through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, most reaching the English-speaking world through Bowden’s translations. Hengel wrote on Roman crucifixion practices, anchoring his analysis partly in the case of Yehohanan Ben Hagkol, a Jewish man who had been crucified somewhere between AD 50 and 70 and whose heel bone, excavated near Jerusalem in 1968, was still penetrated by the nail used to fix him to the cross, the only physical evidence of crucifixion yet confirmed by archaeology. He wrote on the gap between the death of Jesus and the letters of Paul, on Paul himself, on the Gospel of John, and on the Acts of the Apostles. Each study pressed the same methodological insistence: what looks like Greek influence on early Christianity usually turns out, on examination, to have arrived through the mediation of Hellenistic Judaism, not through direct borrowing from pagan mystery cults or Gnostic speculation. This was a conservative position by the standards of mid-twentieth-century German New Testament scholarship, and Hengel meant it as an intellectual claim, not merely a confessional one.

The year 2000 brought The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ, a study of how four distinct accounts came to function as a single authoritative testimony within the early church. Canon formation, the process by which communities decide what counts as scriptural, had interested him since Judentum und Hellenismus, and this book is where it became the explicit subject. His essay in Christianity Today in October 2001 offered a wider survey of the manuscript tradition: Tischendorf’s edition of the Codex Sinaiticus in 1869, the Westcott and Hort critical text of 1881, Eberhard Nestle’s Novum Testamentum Graece, and the 112 New Testament papyri then known to scholars, some of them from the second century. His argument in that essay was that the New Testament is the best-attested text collection from classical antiquity, and that the temporal gap between the original documents and the earliest surviving witnesses is far shorter than popular scepticism about the Bible typically assumes. He noted that the earliest manuscript evidence for Matthew and John dates from only two or three generations after the originals. He also pointed to the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered from 1947 onward, as having permanently redrawn the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament: their oldest Old Testament manuscripts are 1,200 years earlier than anything previously available, and they push both testaments into a closer mutual proximity than earlier scholarship had seen.

He can be summarised, if one must, as follows: the Jesus movement is inexplicable as anything other than an expression of Second Temple Judaism. It can’t be read from the outside inward, as a response to Hellenism or an adaptation of mystery-cult practice. It has to be read from the inside outward, as something that grew within the diverse, politically pressured, and theologically inventive Judaism of Roman Palestine. Jesus, in Hengel’s scholarship, is a first-century Galilean Jew, shaped by the geography of the north, formed by the proclamation of John the Baptist, and making claims that his contemporaries could only have heard through specifically Jewish categories of thought. Where John announces, Jesus enacts. That distinction, within the framework of Jewish messianic expectation, is what differentiates them in Hengel’s reading. He never found this historical precision reductive. He found it clarifying, and he devoted his career to demonstrating why.

His most ambitious project in the final phase of his career was a planned four-volume history of earliest Christianity, Geschichte des frühen Christentums, co-authored with his Tübingen colleague Anna Maria Schwemer. Their collaboration wasn’t new: Hengel and Schwemer had already published Paul between Damascus and Antioch, translated by Bowden and issued by Westminster John Knox in 1997. The first volume of the new series, Jesus und das Judentum, came from Mohr Siebeck in 2007 and was later translated into English as Jesus and Judaism. It was, by the account of at least one reviewer, the last major work Hengel completed during his lifetime. Nearly 700 pages long, it opens with a historical reconstruction of Judaism between Pompey’s capture of Jerusalem in 63 BCE and the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE, works through the modern scholarly quest for the historical Jesus, and then proceeds chronologically through his Galilean ministry, his relationship with John the Baptist, his proclamation of God as Father, his healings and exorcisms, the final week in Jerusalem, the trial before Pilate, and the resurrection testimonies.

On the resurrection, Hengel and Schwemer didn’t hedge. Faith and historical reality can’t be disentangled at the earliest level of the evidence, they argued, and their anchor for this position was 1 Corinthians 15:3, 8, which they treat as the earliest recoverable report of resurrection appearances, antedating the Gospel narratives by decades. For contemporary audiences, they suggested, the resurrection rather than the crucifixion may prove the more scandalous element: the cross, for most modern readers, is at least historically imaginable, but an empty tomb is another matter, and the common assumption that the cross is the harder claim may have it backwards. The New Testament scholar Peter Tomson reviewed the German edition in Journal for the Study of Judaism 40 (2009) and described it as “ein faszinierendes und wichtiges Buch.” The second volume of the series, Die Urgemeinde und das Judenchristentum, was published by Mohr Siebeck in 2019, a decade after Hengel’s death, and was presumably completed or prepared for press by Schwemer.

The Tübingen house was famous among his students for its books. Shelves lined not just the studies and sitting rooms but the hall and the landings as well, and Hengel could check a reference without leaving his chair. Students who arrived in Tübingen expecting the formal distance of a traditional German Herr Professor found something else: a scholar who made them dinner, remembered the details of their dissertations, and whose hospitality was as consistent as his erudition. Exchange programmes with Durham and Cambridge universities brought British students to Tübingen and sent German ones in return. Americans and Israelis came too. He drew them from across the world, and he kept them.

His institutional generosity matched his personal kind. Hengel founded and personally financed two Tübingen bodies: the Philipp Melanchthon Foundation, which supported historical and philological theological study among advanced students, and the Institute for Ancient Judaism and the History of Hellenistic Religion, which ran international conferences and hosted visiting scholars from Israel, Britain, and North America. Both institutions were his money. Both bore his intellectual priorities: close engagement with primary sources, philological rigour, and the conviction that scholarship is a community project.

The formal honours accumulated over the decades. He was elected a corresponding member of the British Academy and a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences on 4 December 1999, a fellowship he held until his death. Honorary doctorates came from Uppsala, St Andrews, Cambridge, Durham, Strasbourg, and Dublin. The list is disproportionately British, which isn’t accidental: it’s a map of where his work had the deepest impact, the English-speaking scholarly community having taken him up with an enthusiasm that parts of continental Europe were slower to match.

Two habits in his working practice sometimes exasperated his colleagues. He revised obsessively: monographs that had begun as short, tightly argued studies would reappear years later as substantially longer books, with greatly expanded footnote apparatus but no fundamental change in the central claims. And the large synthetic works, the broad historical overviews that he was better placed than anyone to write, kept not appearing. Judentum und Hellenismus came in 1969. Jesus und das Judentum didn’t come until 2007. Thirty-eight years, filled with important shorter work but not with another magnum opus. His colleagues found this baffling. But it made a kind of sense from inside his own history: a man formed by ten years in which intellectual work was grabbed in fragments, rather than built steadily across uninterrupted time, doesn’t easily trust a foundation until he’s probed it from every angle. He’d also seen what happened when you moved too fast. He wasn’t going to do that.

He died on 2 July 2009 in Tübingen. He was 82. Marianne survived him.