He also argued for the existence in Jerusalem of a sizable community of Greek-speaking Jews (possibly 15 per cent of the population) which had its own synagogue and schools, and from which a group converted to Christianity. This group, he believed, continued to worship in Greek.
While Hengel was responsible for a radically different approach to the New Testament, his conclusions supported a basically conservative view of the Christian Faith in general, and of Christology in particular. He was certainly no fundamentalist. But he could be scathing about the subjectivity of many who apply modern methods of literary criticism to the Biblical text.
His book, The Son of God: The Origin of Christology and the History of Jewish-Hellenistic Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976) is a good entry point to his work.
Earliest Christian history : history, literature, and theology : essays from the Tyndale Fellowship in honour of Martin Hengel (edited by Michael F. Bird and Jason Maston), contains Hengel’s essay “Confessing and Confession”, (translated by Daniel Johansson). This paragraph on unity and diversity in the early Church, is a salutary comment on the approach of modern theological pluralists:
“Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed” (1 Corinthians 15:11). This succinct sentence contradicts the assumption so common today that in early Christianity there was not one fundamental confession of the faith which united all, but all kinds of kerygmas, not one Gospel, but many Christologies contradicting each other, and many churches whose teaching and living were quite disjoined, so that one must speak of a chaos at the beginning of the early Church. The Pauline letters in particular show that the opposite is true. In order to justify itself, modern theological pluralism here projects itself onto early Christianity against the clear statements of the texts. There were of course – considerable – differences in the preaching of individual apostles and missionaries, even contradictions and conflicts. I just remind [you] of the struggle at the apostolic council, the later incident at Antioch, and, what I believe, the permanent conflict between Peter and Paul. There are also, for example, considerable theological opposition between Romans and Galatians on the one hand and the Letter of James on the other. Nevertheless, all early Christian writings agree that eschatological salvation is effected through Christ, the Kyrios, his death and his resurrection. Only on this foundation, the attachment to the one Kyrios, was an agreement such as the one Paul depicts in Galatians 2:1-10 at all possible, and in Galatians 2:15ff. he assumes that Peter too acknowledges justification by faith alone and not through works of the law.
