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The religious context of early Christianity: a guide to Graeco-Roman religions, by Hans-Josef Klauck, translated from the German by Brian McNeil, Studies of the New Testament and its world, Ediburgh: T&T Clark, 1999.
In the 1880s a group of young Protestant theologians gathered in Tubingen (Germany) in order to devote much of their research into the influence of the Hellenistic syncretism of the imperial period upon the New Testament. It was the birth of the religions - geschichtliche Schule, or the history of religions school. While the groups influence had already started to fade in the 1920s, having reached its zenith around the turn of the century, it left behind a legacy of fruitful research and questions. The author of this book, Hans-Josef Klauck, now Professor for New Testament Exegesis at the University of Munich (Germany), sees himself in an exegetical tradition in which the concern of the history of religion school is meeting with renewed interest.
The history of religion school created at the time an impasse by splitting the scholarly world into two groups: one the one hand were those who fully sympathised with its approach; on the other were those who reacted critically by engaging in an apologetic overemphasis on the New Testament's Jewish and Old Testament heritage. Klauck acknowledges the historical shortcomings of the history of religion school, which were based mainly on simplification and exaggeration of historically more complicated situations, and seeks to counterbalance these by divorcing his research from the fixation on the question of dependency...