Pieter Willem van der Horst

Pieter Willem van der Horst (born 4 July 1946) is a scholar and university professor emeritus specializing in New Testament studies, Early Christian literature, and the Jewish and Hellenistic context of Early Christianity.

Van der Horst was born in Driebergen, the Netherlands. He studied classical philology and received a doctorate in theology in 1978. From 1969 to 2006, he was a research assistant, junior and senior lecturer, and full professor at the Faculty of Theology of Utrecht University. He is an editor of the series Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature, published by Walter de Gruyter, and is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.

In 2006, van der Horst became embroiled in a controversy over his retirement lecture, "The Myth of Jewish Cannibalism," which traced the development of this antisemitic theme from the Hellenistic period through the Middle Ages to Nazism. He planned to conclude by examining the resurgence of the cannibalism myth in contemporary Islamic media, including cartoons, television programs, and sermons, particularly in Iran, Syria, and Palestine.