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Review Summary: Not One Jot or Tittle |
Date: 2008-11-08 |
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Details: This book should be made compulsory reading in all the high schools of the Western world, including (especially) Christian ones.
Thousands of readers must have shared my experience of startled awakening. Texts from the Gospels which, if you had a Christian background, had been familiar all your life, all at once became visible. You saw what they meant.
Jesus said to his disciples: "Don't go into any Samaritan towns, or any streets where non-Jews live, but go only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel."
And when a non-Jewish woman asked him to heal her daughter, Jesus said: "Bread that was meant for the children is not given to dogs."
Jesus also said: "Not one dot or pen-stroke can be removed from the Torah until the end of the world"... (So I'm like, OMG, Jesus was a Jew!)
Though it was published back in 1973 and naturally looks a little sketchy and tentative beside his (mostly excellent) later books, this is still the first Geza Vermes book to read. Nobody who hasn't read it should utter even a single sentence containing the word "Jesus".
New Testament scholarship is a labyrinth made up of labyrinths: every single scholar intricately disagrees with every other on almost every single question.
Scholars are of various kinds. Some are labourers, doing scholarship the way a bricklayer lays bricks. Others have a personal agenda.
Some, like Marcus Borg, would like to see a new Christianity based on Jesus' teachings, not later theology. I wish them luck, but I'm not holding my breath.
N.T. Wright is continuing Rudolf Bultmann's project of rescuing something Vaguely resembling traditional Christianity from the bombardment of modern scholarship. His great erudition and skill in debate can't conceal the subtle dishonesty behind this.
Only Geza Vermes has an agenda that seems, in one word, correct. Jesus was a faithful Jew who would have been astonished to know that a new religion was founded in his name, which would lead to the vilification, persecution and mass-murder of his fellow Jews.
I'm not competent to comment on the technical details of Gospel scholarship, but I have to say that Vermes' account of the Resurrection appears to me the least convincing part of his work. Not that anyone has come up with anything better. Since all the evidence that we'll ever have is contained in the Synoptic Gospels, most likely we will simply never know. |
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Review Summary: A new look at Jesus |
Date: 2008-06-24 |
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Details: In this ground-breaking 1973 work, an eminent Jewish scholar initiates the third wave of the quest for the historic Jesus. Rejecting all pretensions of Jesus' divinity, Geza Vermes consults Jewish literature for two hundred years prior to the birth of Jesus to two hundred years after, looking for cultural, linguistic and historical complements in the Synoptic Gospels that might put his subject into clearer focus. His discovery is not at all unflattering. Jesus was a Hasidim, one of a line of Galilean miracle-workers. He preached, healed, and exorcized demons, was comfortable with the title of prophet, and as a Jew himself, with "son of God," but not, "Son of God," the Messiah. Vermes' command of his material is overwhelming and novel. His conclusions are conditioned by the available historical evidence without reference to modern theology, but the reader is impressed with his objectivity in establishing only what we can confidently know about the Nazarene, without later accretions. Warning: It is a scholarly work and not casually read. |
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Review Summary: Jesus the Jew; PERIOD |
Date: 2007-12-21 |
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Details: Geza Vermes is an authority on the life and religion of Jesus and this book cements that statement.
If you want to understand Jesus' life and religion in its Jewish context; read this book.
If you want to better understand 2nd Temple Judaism; read this book.
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Review Summary: One of the greatest books of the Twentieth Century. |
Date: 2006-09-11 |
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Details: I read this book following up some references in G. de St. Croix's book "Class Struggles in the Ancient Greek World" (well worth reading itself!); it came up in passing a few times and seemed intriguing.
I was simply blown away by the text itself. It is one of the greatest books I have ever read. I shook the whole time. All the opacity concerning the Gospel and teaching of Jesus, how it could all have come about: it is made so plain. All other treatments I have seen of "the historical Jesus" are dust and ashes by comparison.
I have read some of Vermes' later works - he has taken a few things back and adjusted claims, unsurprisingly. It is worth reading a recent work, then, in conjunction with this one, but the force of the original work is unparalleled in the later ones. For those doubtful of Vermes' greatness, I recommend the discussion of the references of Jesus to himself as "son of man", which have been the source of a sense of mystery in readers of the Gospel, and also of so many vast tomes of theology by writers ignorant of first century Aramaic argot and certain widespread linguistic phenoma. The solution to the Son of Man Problem, as it was called, is sudden, total and of course completely deflationary.
It is amusing that an Amazon reviewer of another of Vermes' books says that Vermes is guilty of comparing Jesus to "someone called Honi the Circle-Drawer", which he says is palpably absurd. There is no absurdity in Vermes' treatment. Honi is one of several characters of the period, in fact, to whom Jesus is compared. It is a question of constituting a type known to Galileans which Jesus was received by them as fitting into. It is as "that kind of guy" that Jesus was in the first instance understood by his hearers. But for Vermes there is also a specific difference from these rustic Galilean holy men and exorcists: the astounding ethical doctrines of Jesus, which anyone who has read the Sermon on the Mount will know.
If only the same work could be done for St Paul and the formation of the early Church, the comprehension of the world we live in would be hugely extended. Vermes tells us what Jesus really was; we must now understand what was made of him. This work would require someone with a total comprehension of the Hellenistic world superadded to Vermes' clearly magisterial comprehension of the Jewish world of this period. And it would require someone devoid of excessive psychological freight connected with the topic. (Vermes is able somehow to triangulate through the shoals here.) I invite an Orthodox Jewish boy of immense brilliance and broad learning - but who has given up the practice - there must be a lot of these guys! - to take on the study of Greek and the hellenistic world - the younger the better - and meanwhile to extend his Jewish learning in the direction of Vermes. A really scientific, dispassionate comprehension of the path from Jesus' wandering preaching to the church circa 150 AD would be an earthquake. It is incredible how hard it is to find truly rational and compelling literature on these matters.
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Review Summary: Vermes, unequalled. |
Date: 2006-04-22 |
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Details: No-one understands Jesus in his (actual) Jewish context better than Vermes. He is uniquely qualified, both by the depth of his scholarship, and by his own personal history, as a Jew who before he came to understand his Jewish heritage was for a while a Catholic priest! Everything he writes is worth reading. Among other things, he is a foremost authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls.
William Nicholls
Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies,
University of British Columbia. |
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out of 13 Reviews
