Helmut Heinrich Koester (December 18, 1926 – January 1, 2016) was an American scholar who specialized in the New Testament and early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School.
He served in the Wehrmacht Navy from 1943–1945 and was released from a POW camp in 1945 and studied under Rudolf Bultmann at the University of Marburg.
He served as the president of the Society of Biblical Literature (1991), was member of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas (SNTS) and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
This was an extremely significant observation, and one with which all subsequent scholarship on early Christian gospel traditions would have to reckon.
Among his numerous subsequent publications, his two-volume Introduction to the New Testament has become a standard reference work.