There was no indication in his early years that Martin Hengel would become the most learned scholar of his generation in the interacting fields of early Judaism, early Christianity and the world of classical antiquity. On the contrary, circumstances seemed set against him.

He was born in Reutlingen, south of Stuttgart, in 1926 and grew up in nearby Aalen. In 1943 he was conscripted from school into the German Army and served in an anti-aircraft battery on the Western Front, but in 1945, after one of the final battles of the Second World War, he discarded his weapons and uniform and walked home, completing his schooling the next year.

He went to Tübingen and Heidelberg universities, passing the first qualifying examination for the Lutheran ministry and serving as an assistant minister in Calw and Heilbronn. However, after the next examination in 1954 his father insisted that he should join the family textile business and so began a struggle that was to last for ten years. Further study had to be snatched in working hours, and this put a severe strain on his health; he suffered a serious breakdown. He always talked of these ten years as “wasted years” and seemed to have almost an inferiority complex about the amount of study he had missed. In August 1957 he married Marianne Kistler, and this gave him strength. All his life his wife showed deep love for “mein Mann”, as she always called him, and expressed that love in devoted care and support.

Despite everything, in 1959 he completed a doctorate on the Zealots under the supervision of the Tübingen New Testament Professor Otto Michel and began his Habilitation thesis, the passport to academic teaching. He did a lot of work on it while working as a manager in a factory in Leicester; he completed it in 1967.

He had at last broken away from the family business, though it never left him. Hengella, based in Aalen, still thrives as an up-market brand of women’s underwear and lingerie, and Martin Hengel was a director. Even quite late in life he would talk to close friends about the problems of manufacture and transportation, as the economic situation forced the company to move farther and farther east to compete in price.

In Judentum und Hellenismus (1969), he argued that the influence of Greek culture on the Middle East after the conquests of Alexander the Great in 333BC was far greater than was generally realised, affecting Judaism not only negatively, for example in its rejection by the Maccabees, but also positively, as witnessed by the many works of Hellenistic Judaism. He expressed delight in finding a good English translator and publisher, John Bowden, who played a key role in introducing him to the English-speaking world. Judaism and Hellenism was awarded the respected Schlegel-Tieck prize for the best translation from German in 1974, and their friendship and collaboration lasted to the end of his life.

In 1968 Hengel had been made professor in Erlangen but in 1972 he replaced his teacher Otto Michel and took up the chair in Tübingen, where he was to remain. As a series of further studies appeared in English — on the Crucifixion, the period between Jesus and Paul, the Apostle Paul, the Gospel of John, the formation of the canon of the four Gospels, and the Acts of the Apostles — his name became internationally known, and he attracted students from all over the English-speaking world, notably Britain, the US and Israel. He had particularly close links with Durham and Cambridge universities, which included exchange programmes. He promoted his students' work through two institutions that he not only founded but also financed, the Philipp Melanchthon Foundation — to promote the study of historical theology and its ancillary philological disciplines among senior university students, and the Institute for Ancient Judaism and the History of Hellenistic Religion — to promote scholarship and hold conferences. But he also made his students his friends and the Hengel home offered warm hospitality and showed great generosity to his friends.

The Hengel home was also notable for its library. Bookcases, covering not only the walls of the main rooms but also the hall and landings, were filled with original Jewish, Christian and classical texts so that to substantiate a point he had only to stretch out a hand. His own writings are even more impressive: ten large volumes averaging 500 pages each. However, there was one big disappointment here: after Judaism and Hellenism he did not complete another magnum opus until 2007 when Judentum und Jesus (not yet translated) appeared. This not only displays the learning of 40 years but also showed his unbounded optimism for his future writing: it was to be the first volume of a four-volume history of earliest Christianity.

Hengel worked right to the end. Many regret that he spent so much time on shorter monographs, which he then rewrote at greater length and with far more footnotes but with the findings unchanged.

He postponed larger works until it was almost too late. But digging the foundations ever deeper was characteristic of the man. In contrast to the more radical approaches to the New Testament shown by his predecessors in Germany and the US, he was conservative.

Hengel received honorary doctorates from Uppsala, St Andrews, Cambridge, Durham, Strasbourg and Dublin. He was a corresponding member of the British Academy and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. He is survived by his wife, Marianne.

Professor Martin Hengel, historian of religion, was born on December 14, 1926. He died on July 2, 2009, aged 82