One of the New Testament contexts whose study has deep historical roots in the Low Countries is the context of Graeco-Roman culture and its surviving literature. This paper first focuses on a few milestones in this area of research, embodied by scholars such as Erasmus, Wettstein, and, more recently, contributors to the Corpus Hellenisticum in Utrecht. In the second part of the paper, the endeavour to fruitfully compare New Testament writings to pagan contemporary literature is reviewed critically against Barr’s criticism of different types of illegitimate meaning transferal and Sandmel’s warning against ‘parallelomania’. In answer to these methodological pitfalls, comparative research into the meaning of pistis and cognates in Paul’s letters is used to demonstrate how insights from cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis help to further the study of the New Testament within its Graeco-Roman cultural habitat.