Geza Vermes offers a portrait based. In contrast to depictions of Jesus as a wandering Cynic teacher, Geza Vermes offers a portrait. Jesus the Jew: a. Professor Geza Vermes (Oxford University). The Religion of Jesus the Jew (1993); and (with M. Goodman) The Essenes According to the Classical Sources (1989). Vermes was a prominent scholar in the contemporary field of historical Jesus research. The contemporary approach, known as the 'third quest,' emphasizes Jesus' Jewish.
This now classic book is a significant corrective to several recent developments in the study of the historical Jesus. In contrast to depictions of Jesus as a wandering Cynic teacher, Geza Vermes offers a portrait based on evidence of charismatic activity in first-century Galilee. Vermes shows how the major New Testament titles of Jesus-prophet, Lord, Messiah, son of man, This now classic book is a significant corrective to several recent developments in the study of the historical Jesus. In contrast to depictions of Jesus as a wandering Cynic teacher, Geza Vermes offers a portrait based on evidence of charismatic activity in first-century Galilee. Vermes shows how the major New Testament titles of Jesus-prophet, Lord, Messiah, son of man, Son of God-can be understood in this historical context. The result is a description of Jesus that retains its power and its credibility.
This book was incredible. Vermes is an outstanding academic who charts out the historical context of the man that was Jesus, how he fit into the Judaism of his day, and what exactly is it that he was doing.
Vermes then goes on to outline the gross distortions that have ensued over the centuries, starting with the so-called gospels (in actuality treatises on Jewish Oral Law) all the way to the image of the man himself, now deified, removed from the Judaism he so fervently practiced. As a conv This book was incredible. Vermes is an outstanding academic who charts out the historical context of the man that was Jesus, how he fit into the Judaism of his day, and what exactly is it that he was doing. Vermes then goes on to outline the gross distortions that have ensued over the centuries, starting with the so-called gospels (in actuality treatises on Jewish Oral Law) all the way to the image of the man himself, now deified, removed from the Judaism he so fervently practiced. As a convert to Judaism coming from a Catholic background, books like this are excellent ways to understand the gap between the religion in which I grew up, and the way of life I now lead. This is a must-read for anyone with a curiosity for the historical Jesus, and his ties to Judaism, past and present. “Your God was a jew.
Christ was a jew like me.” –Leopold Bloom to a group of hecklers, in Ulysses. This book is another suggestion from my friend Laurie, the mysterious woman from New Zealand who wrote a number of fascinating reviews on Amazon in 2008 then disappeared from view. About Jesus the Jew she says, “Nobody who hasn’t read it should utter even a single sentence containing the word ‘Jesus’.” I wouldn’t go quite that far (the woman tends to go over the top). But it’s a compelling book. Abou “Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.” –Leopold Bloom to a group of hecklers, in Ulysses. This book is another suggestion from my friend Laurie, the mysterious woman from New Zealand who wrote a number of fascinating reviews on Amazon in 2008 then disappeared from view.
About Jesus the Jew she says, “Nobody who hasn’t read it should utter even a single sentence containing the word ‘Jesus’.” I wouldn’t go quite that far (the woman tends to go over the top). But it’s a compelling book. About Jesus, Martin Buber said, “We Jews know him in a way—in the impulses and emotions of his essential Jewishness—that remains inaccessible to the Gentiles subject to him.” (That’s an interesting phrase, “subject to him.”) Before Jesus became the focus of a huge world religion, he was a wandering teacher and healer. Vermes thinks he fit firmly into a tradition, that of a Galilean Hasid, or holy man.
Vermes doesn’t hazard a guess at his appearance, but the great Guy Davenport, in his book The Logia of Yeshua (a translation of the sayings of this wandering teacher) did. “The falsest myth about him may be the Romantic and Sunday school pictures of him as a pious matinee idol with a woman’s hair, neat beard, and flowing robes. History can tell us that he wore trousers of the kind we call Turkish, that he most certainly had oiled sidelocks and a full beard. A man so out-of-doors would have worn a wide-brimmed traveler’s hat, a caftan, or coat. His sandals are mentioned by Yohannan.” Vermes devotes much of the early book to the fact that Jesus was a Galilean.
Galilee was surrounded on all sides by other peoples and separated from Judea. It was a kind of isolated outpost. Political radicalism was common there, so that when Jesus later came up for trial among the Romans, the fact that he was a Galilean was a strike against him (although one person said, “Surely the Messiah does not come from Galilee, does he?”). Galilee was a rural area of small towns, so Jesus’ imagery tends to be pastoral (“Consider the lilies of the field”), and when he went to Jerusalem later he was like a rube going to the big city. Similarly, Galileans tended to be less learned and less “people of the book,” so devoted to the Torah that they ignored human feeling. They were more likely to be intuitive teachers rather than great scholars. It was characteristic of a Galilean Hasid that he would heal people on the Sabbath rather than being strict about the law.
Taking care of human beings was more important than rigidly following some code. One thing that struck me when I recently reread the Gospel of Mark was how much of the early part of it was devoted to healing, not teaching. According to Vermes, most diseases, if not all, were considered the work of demons—what we might call psychosomatic illness today—so a great deal of Jesus’ healing involved speaking directly to demons, ordering them out of a person’s body or telling them to quit tormenting this person. Jesus reserved hands-on healing for illnesses that were strictly physical, like blindness or deafness, and he used saliva as a healing aid.
It was believed to have medicinal properties.1 But the wandering healer, casting out demons and healing in other ways, was not unheard of in Jesus’ day. And there are instances of other healers doing all the things that he did, including—in the Old Testament—Elisha and Elijah raising people from the dead.
Vermes devotes over half of his book to the various designations that people applied to Jesus: prophet, lord, messiah, son of man, son of God. He places all of these terms within the Jewish tradition, and mentions places where other men were called the same things. This is not the most exciting part of the book, but Vermes does the work of a historian, methodically making his case. The word messiah, for instance, meant many things to many different people; Vermes names a number of possibilities, several of which involved the messiah being a military or political figure.
People weren’t expecting a person like Jesus, with his kind of message (“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”). Vermes feels—as most scholars do—that Mark is the most historically reliable Gospel, and that some of the stories in Matthew and Luke, especially the birth narratives, were invented by the writers. It was common in ancient times to attribute virgin birth to a remarkable individual, and of course Matthew tries to have it both ways, saying that Jesus was born of a Virgin but is descended from David through Joseph. The birth stories seem to Vermes tacked on and obviously legendary. That leads, of course, to the ultimate designation for Jesus, Son of God. If we dismiss the Virgin birth—as Vermes does—the question is, what does that expression mean?
That was a koan for me when I was trying to practice Christianity; I couldn’t get my head around it. That Jesus had a special relationship with God I have no doubt. It seems to me to be the same relationship that all the great saints and mystics had, not just in Christianity but in all faiths. Jesus was at one with God. We are all, it seems to me, at one with God in reality, but we turn away from that fact, deny it, are afraid of it, do anything to get away from it.
We can’t really get away. In Him we live and move and have our being, as Paul said.
If we realized that—by which I mean made it real—our lives would be much different. Jesus did realize it, perhaps as no one else ever has.
His wish was for us to realize it too. 1 My father was a dermatologist in the Pittsburgh of my youth. We patronized a couple of Italian barbers named DeMaria, and they let my father know that, back in Italy, barbers were also doctors. My father was very concerned with ringworm of the scalp, and would not let those barbers use clippers on my brother and me. One time the elder barber—big Jerry—told him that back in Italy barbers treated ringworm with spit. It now seems very strange that I have not come across this author before.
I may have seen his name in some footnotes here and there, but I knew nothing of him. Only after I had read an article about him in a Polish political magazine, I took interest in his work. A Jew, a former Catholic priest, a sceptic, a historian - his personage alone was very promising. And this book lives up to that promise!
It is a clear and thorough discussion of the historical Jesus, the evolution of his cult and how i It now seems very strange that I have not come across this author before. I may have seen his name in some footnotes here and there, but I knew nothing of him. Only after I had read an article about him in a Polish political magazine, I took interest in his work. A Jew, a former Catholic priest, a sceptic, a historian - his personage alone was very promising.
And this book lives up to that promise! It is a clear and thorough discussion of the historical Jesus, the evolution of his cult and how it related to his actual teaching.
Presented in an unbiased way, faithful to the historian's craft, this book is a real intellectual feast.
Geza Vermes, a religious scholar who argued that Jesus as a historical figure could be understood only through the Jewish tradition from which he emerged, and who helped expand that understanding through his widely read English translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, died on May 8 in Oxford, England. His death was confirmed by David Ariel, the president of the, where Dr. Vermes was most recently an honorary fellow. Vermes, born in Hungary to Jewish parents who converted to Christianity when he was 6, was among many scholars after World War II who sought to reveal a “historical Jesus” by painting an objective portrait of the man who grew up in Nazareth about 2,000 years ago and emerged as a religious leader when he was in his 30s.
Drawing on new archaeological evidence — particularly the scrolls, which were discovered by an Arab shepherd in a cave northwest of the Dead Sea in 1947 — historians of many stripes agreed on a basic sketch of Jesus, but their religious biases sometimes colored details. The scrolls, written over several hundred years before, during and after Jesus lived, offered new insight into religious, cultural and political life at the time. Vermes became one of the scrolls’ essential translators and a vocal advocate for their broad dissemination.
His 1962 book, has been updated and reissued multiple times and is regarded as the most widely read version of the scrolls. It is often used as a course text.
Vermes had long been frustrated that only a handful of scholars had direct access to the scrolls, and he eventually made his frustrations public. In 1977, he said that their handling was “likely to become the academic scandal par excellence of the 20th century.” More than a decade passed, but the scrolls eventually became more easily accessible in their original form and through photographs. The scrolls helped deepen Dr. Vermes’s interest in Judaism and in how perceptions of Jesus changed as Christianity spread. He argued that the messianic Jesus worshiped by modern Christians was largely created in the first three centuries after he died. In 1973 he wrote the first of several books in which he placed Jesus in the tradition of Jewish teachers. Geza Vermes Credit Geraint Lewis “When it came out, it sounded like a very provocative title,” Dr.
Vermes recalled in 1994 of “Jesus the Jew.” “Today it is commonplace. Everybody knows now that Jesus was a Jew. But in 1973, although people knew that Jesus had something to do with Judaism, they thought that he was really something totally different.” Dr. Vermes’s interest in cultural context echoed his personal history. His family was of Jewish ancestry but had not been practicing Jews since at least the first half of the 19th century.
In 1931, with anti-Semitism rising in Europe, his parents converted to Roman Catholicism. He enrolled in a Catholic seminary in Budapest in 1942, when he was 18, seeking to become a priest but also to protect himself. Two years later, his parents disappeared after being taken to a Nazi concentration camp. He did become a priest — in the late 1940s he joined the Order of the Fathers of Notre-Dame de Sion, in Louvain, Belgium — but he left the priesthood the following decade after falling in love with his future wife, Pamela Hobson Curle, a poet and scholar who was married to another man when they met. Vermes later returned to Judaism. Vermes was born on June 22, 1924, in Mako, Hungary.
His father was a liberal journalist, his mother a teacher. He received his doctorate in theology from the Catholic University in Louvain in 1953; his dissertation was one of the first written about the scrolls. Advertisement He did research on the scrolls for several years in Paris before moving to England, where he initially spent eight years teaching at what is now Newcastle University.
He published the first edition of his English translation of the scrolls while there. In 1965 he moved to Oxford, where he eventually became professor of Jewish studies and a governor of the Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He was named professor emeritus in 1991. Vermes’s survivors include his wife, Margaret, and a stepson, Ian.
Pamela Vermes died in 1993. Vermes’s work challenged some Christian beliefs, he often talked of improving dialogue between Christians and Jews, and he was widely respected among scholars of various beliefs. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Communion, praised Dr. Vermes last year in a review of his final book, “Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea,” which traces the first 300 years of Christianity. Writing in The Guardian, the archbishop called the book “beautiful and magisterial” but said it “leaves unsolved some of the puzzles that still make readers of the New Testament pause to ask what really is the right, the truthful, way to talk about a figure like the Jesus we meet in these texts.” Lawrence H. Schiffman, a leading Dead Sea Scrolls scholar and the vice provost of Yeshiva University, said in an interview that Dr.
Vermes had worked in an academic and religious environment in which “everybody knew Jesus was a Jew, of course.” “But,” he added, “the refusal to acknowledge it — that he truly thought, acted and lived as a Jew — that took a while to get across.” Dr. Vermes, he said, “was a major force in making that happen.”.