Jesus the Jew. Geza Vermes
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searched for the ‘historical Jesus’ that might lie at the core of their traditions. What they found in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not one modern figure to replace their medieval notions but a rich kaleidoscope of differing images. Jesus had been an inspired teacher whose religious life had been simple but sublime; or an ascetic who had rejected the community and the present in favour of the individual and the future; or a popular hero whose humanity deserved the greatest adulation. For some scholars, he was a humble Pharisee who told superb parables and subscribed to a brilliant code of ethics while for others he was a Galilean revolutionary zealot, or an Essene who favoured poverty, esotericism and celibacy. He was even made to take on the guise of a modern Reform Rabbi.
But, as is well recognized by contemporary historians, it is virtually impossible to remove all traces of personal bias and tendentious interpretation from the treatment of such a sensitive subject. Inevitably, the majority of modern Jewish scholars continued with their tendency to dwell on the human aspect of Jesus while many of their Christian counterparts persisted in stressing his theologically unique character. While the former made efforts to reclaim Jesus for the Jews, the latter preferred to draw a distinction between Jesus of Nazareth and the Divine Christ of their religious commitment. It thus became almost commonplace for leading Protestant academics to disclaim the possibility of recovering any authentic details about the life of the founder of their faith and to characterize the personal information provided in the Gospels as nothing more than religious myths. What remained important and authentic were the Jesus of faith, the divine revelation represented by the New Testament, and the teachings of the Church. Paradoxically, those Christians who still sought to identify the real Jesus who lived and taught in Roman-occupied Judea looked progressively more towards Jewish scholars who could reconstruct that world for them, particularly if such specialists could be seen to be untrammelled by commitments to more traditional forms of Jewish belief and practice. No less paradoxically, these Jewish specialists themselves could respond to the challenge of Jesus’ religious message and devise for themselves, and indeed for any progressive interpretations of Judaism that required it, a sympathetic response that they could justify on what they saw as historical grounds.
It is against the whole academic and religious background just described that one has to understand historical books about Jesus written in recent decades, one of the most prominent of which has undoubtedly been Jesus the Jew, first published by Geza Vermes in 1973. Vermes had been born in Mako, Hungary, between the two World Wars into an assimilated Jewish family that decided to convert to Catholicism when he was seven years old. According to his own account in an autobiography entitled Providential Accidents (London: SCM Press 1998), the motivation for this, at least on his father’s part, was an attempt (sadly unsuccessful) to spare the family the disabilities and the persecution to which Jews were at that time prone. Bright and industrious as he was, the young Geza successfully progressed through a thorough Catholic education and, almost inevitably, found himself in the priesthood. As his autobiography tragically and poignantly makes clear, his status in the Roman Catholic Church did not save his family from the Holocaust and he himself barely escaped with his life. After the War, he studied and researched in the fields of Hebrew and Aramaic in Louvain and Paris and was among the first to apply his learning to the decipherment and interpretation of the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls. Having left the priesthood, he abandoned Catholicism, married and reverted to his Jewish roots. He enjoyed a successful tenure as lecturer in divinity in the University of Newcastle from 1957 until 1965, when he was appointed Reader in, and subsequently Professor of, Jewish Studies in the University of Oxford.
In addition to his important researches on early Jewish Bible exegesis and on the Scrolls, Vermes had an intense desire to study Jesus, the world in which he lived, and the religion which he taught. To that end, Vermes resolved to compose a trilogy of studies, and the book that appeared in 1973 under the title of Jesus the Jew was the first of these, the others being published in 1983 and 1993. As he himself put it in his introduction, that first volume was ‘prompted by a single-minded and devout search for fact and reality and undertaken out of feeling for the tragedy of Jesus of Nazareth’ and by a conviction that he ‘was in fact neither the Christ of the Church, nor the apostate and bogey-man of Jewish popular tradition’. Closely familiar as he was with the history and culture of the Greek and Roman worlds, with the Scripture and teachings of the early church, and with the Hebrew and Aramaic literature of the late Second Temple period, he was able to examine the major sources and discuss the central problems concerning the figure of Jesus and the manner in which it related to the hopes and aspirations of those who knew and followed him and to the earliest development of the Christian church.
The first half of Jesus the Jew, comprising three out of a total of eight chapters, concentrates on presenting a picture of the man, his background, life and message, based on what the author believes may justifiably be gleaned from a historical and literary analysis of a wide range of material relating to the subject. The themes covered include his family details, his Galilean milieu, his relationship with John the Baptist and various Jewish groups, and go on to explain how he died and what happened to his bodily remains. What emerges from the arguments is that Jesus was a nonconformist and charismatic teacher who excelled in a tradition of religious leadership already known in that area of Palestine, preached an outstanding system of ethics, and ministered particularly to Jewish society’s most unfortunate members. In the second half of the volume, Vermes tackles the titles of Jesus and traces their evolution from what, in his view, may genuinely be ascribed to him in his lifetime to what are characteristic of the notions of the early church.
In those five remaining chapters, it is argued that the description that Jesus preferred for himself was that of prophet but that religious and historical circumstances led to the debasement of the concept and its consequent abandonment by the church. The term ‘lord’ is shown to have had a range of meanings extending from the mundane to the divine and the author opts for a sense that is suitable at the outset for a miracle-worker but that ultimately takes on a much grander theological garb. While there are, according to the author, serious grounds for doubting that Jesus claimed messianic status for himself, the Gospels introduced a debate on the topic and the early church used the Jewish rejection of such a claim as part of its religious polemics. Vermes defends his previously published theory about the ‘Son of Man’, pointing to the evidence for the use of the phrase as a circumlocution for the speaker and regarding its occurrence in Daniel 7.13 as a collective term and not a title. As regards the description ‘Son of God’, the earliest use is appropriate for Jesus as a miracle-worker and there is then a steady expansion of its theological significance, culminating in an ascription of divinity that would hardly have elicited a favourable response from the beneficiary himself.
What has made the volume a useful textbook for over quarter of a century is its sober presentation of the relevant texts and the balanced manner in which Vermes argues the possible ways of interpreting these. He applies a light touch and a sense of humour to topics that are by no means uncomplicated and succeeds in engendering in his readers a feeling that they are engaging in a productive dialogue. Powerful challenges are issued by him to those New Testament scholars who believe everything or nothing about the life of Jesus and he is unafraid of categorically stating his own views and slotting them all into place in his systematic reconstruction of the events surrounding the emergence of Christianity. He would undoubtedly be the first to admit that such views must remain speculative and that such a reconstruction cannot be achieved without a significantly subjective input. For some Christian scholars, he has oversimplified the history of the terminology relating to Jesus while for some Jewish ones he has underplayed the role of Jewish religious law in the spiritual activities of Galilean pietists (ḥasidim) of the axial period. His concluding assessment of Jesus as ‘teacher and leader, venerated by his intimates and less committed admirers alike as prophet, lord and son of God’ inevitably raises questions about the nature of his own personal relationship with the Galilean Jew whom he has set out to describe.
What is incontrovertible is that Vermes has followed a long line of Jewish scholars in pointing out that a strong case exists for making historical, literary and religious distinctions between the stories about Jesus, the Synoptic Gospels, the Pauline writings and the teachings of the early church. His kind of approach has made a significant impact on religious as well as scholastic circles, at the institutional