Thiede's ambition was to lay the intellectual foundations of what he called a "new paradigm" in Gospel scholarship, as simple in its arguments as it was provocative to the academic establishment. He was fond of quoting the distinguished classical scholar of late antiquity, George Kennedy: "Ancient writers sometimes meant what they said, and occasionally even knew what they were talking about."

Thiede felt that the Gospel authors deserved to be read in a similar spirit. In this context, his most influential book was The Jesus Papyrus (1996), co-written with Matthew d'Ancona, which examined the evidence of the earliest surviving New Testament papyri and argued that these fragments - of St Mark and St Matthew - could be dated, using revolutionary forensic technology as well as traditional techniques, to the early Sixties AD, and perhaps earlier. It followed that the so-called "tunnel" separating Jesus's life from the work of the Gospel writers was short - possibly years, rather than generations. This radical analysis meant that the recollection of the Evangelists could no longer be assumed to be faulty or folkloric, and that the first readers of the Gospels could, quite conceivably, have heard the sermons recorded in them.

To advance such claims was to threaten a long-established orthodoxy: that the Gospels are late creations, that two or three generations stood between them and the events they portrayed, that the texts were, in fact, the collective work of Second Century Christian communities, rather than the accounts of individual authors, and that they have almost no claim to historical authenticity.

The Jesus Papyrus, which was a bestseller around the world, caused a firestorm of debate; it was reported in a Time cover story and inspired a lengthy television documentary. Perhaps uniquely, a book responding to Thiede's argument appeared before his own was actually published.

Four years later, he re-entered the scholarly lists with The Quest for The True Cross, an exploration of the holy relics and sites of early Christianity, which focused on the Titulus, or crucifixion headboard, at the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, Rome. This largely-forgotten artefact, allegedly unearthed in the fourth century by Constantine's mother, Helena, had long been dismissed as a quaint forgery. Thiede showed that the more the Titulus was analysed, the less reason there was to suppose it was the work of a Constantinian or medieval fraudster. This book - which also led to a Channel 4 documentary - sought to demonstrate the critical importance in early Christianity of sacred sites.

Thiede's final major project was his most secret, and probably his most important: the location of Emmaus, the ancient village mentioned in Luke Chapter 24, where the resurrected Christ dines with two of His followers and reveals His true identity ("their eyes were opened and they recognised Him"). The site of the village has foxed biblical detectives for centuries, and the trail had run cold until Thiede's remarkable excavations in the Holy Land with his students from the Independent Academy of Theology in Basle, where he held a chair in papyrology. The full fruits of this archaeological work will be published next year in a book he completed shortly before his death.

Carsten Peter Thiede was born in West Berlin on August 8 1952, and studied Comparative Literature at university in the city of his birth. In 1976 he went as a German National Scholarship Foundation Research Fellow to Queen's College, Oxford, and forged a life-long connection with the university.

In 1978 he became a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Geneva, beating 200 other candidates, and was inspired in his new post by his fellow "comparativist", George Steiner. He was drawn to the subject of early Christianity as a linguist and an expert in medieval Latin philology, and the study of the origins of the faith became his life's work.

Having entered the field by this route, rather than as an academic theologian, he was dismayed by what he found - in particular, what he regarded as the closed-minded refusal by historians of early Christianity to import the methods of other disciplines, especially the forensic techniques of the laboratory. He was as much at home with an electronic microscope analysing a letter from a manuscript found at Masada as he was trawling the most ancient archives in the world (he even invented a new kind of laser microscope in collaboration with George Masuch, professor of biology at Paderborn, which enabled him to examine manuscript writing in three dimensions).

Although much of his academic life was consumed by work on papyri, Thiede did not describe himself as a "papyrologist", regarding this as only one of the many intellectual hats he wore.

He was director of the Institute for Basic Epistemological Research, in his home town of Paderborn, Germany, and then professor at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheba, southern Israel, a chair he held in addition to his professorship at Basle. For the last seven years of his life, he oversaw the analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls for the Israeli Antiquities Authority.

He seemed perpetually itinerant, firing off e-mails to friends and colleagues from all over the world, and worked astonishingly long hours. He wrote many articles for The Church of England Newspaper, and was invariably at work on several books, including texts on Europe and other themes that he was commissioned to write by the German Government. Weeks before he died, yet another book, The Cosmopolitan World of Jesus, was published by SPCK.

In his youth, he had been an outstanding volleyball player, playing in the national league, and gave it up only when it was clear that he could not combine the demands of athletic training with his scholarly research.

One television crew was so impressed by Thiede's industry and resilience that they nick-named him "Cast-Iron". That was typical of the affection he inspired. Even those who took issue with his scholarly claims often became his friends.

A walk through an ancient city in his company was a rare and unforgettable experience, so great was the range of his knowledge: he was happy to play Virgil to another's Dante.

Instantly recognisable with his shock of silver hair and ready smile, he would know where to find a church in Jerusalem, where Assyrian - a close relative of ancient Aramaic - is still spoken, and how to get a table at the best Jewish restaurant in Rome. His genius for companionship has left his many friends shocked at his sudden death from a heart attack.

Faith was at the heart of Thiede's life - ever the Anglophile, he was a member of the Church of England - and none who knew him well was surprised when he was ordained priest by the Rt Rev John Kirkham, Bishop to the Armed Forces, in 2000. His pastoral work with British troops at Paderborn and the 14,000-strong British community in the town long preceded his ordination, and he and his family devoted countless hours to this task, especially when soldiers from the garrison were in the line of fire in the Balkans.

Thiede's personal beliefs were profoundly practical in their application. Even so, he was adamant that faith and scholarship were separate, and he rejected attempts by Christian fundamentalists to recruit him to their cause. When he was promoting the American version of one of his books, he was amused during an interview with a Christian cable channel to find that the reporter had brought cue cards with the answers he wanted read out.

The most powerful emblem of his Anglophilia - and the most important thing in his life - was his marriage to Franziska Campbell in 1982. He is survived by her, a daughter and a younger twin son and daughter.

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