Szczepan Szydelski

The chapter presents Szczepan Szydelski as one of the leading representatives of the Lviv school of apologetics and an important scholar of the origins of Christianity. His broad interests included the history of religions, comparative religion, biblical studies, and Church history. Szydelski employed historical-critical methods to defend the historicity of Jesus Christ, the credibility of New Testament sources, and the originality of Christianity in relation to the religions of the ancient world. An important dimension of his work was religious anthropology, based on the assumption of the human person’s natural openness to God and religious truth. The chapter portrays his contribution as an attempt to integrate traditional apologetics with modern methods of historical and comparative research.