Searching for the Real Jesus. Geza Vermes

      

      Searching for the Real Jesus

      Searching for the Real Jesus

      Jesus, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Religious Themes

      Geza Vermes

      © Geza Vermes 2009

      Published in 2009 by SCM Press

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      British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

      A catalogue record for this book is available

      from the British Library

      978 0 334 04358 1

      Typeset by Manila Typesetting Company

      Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham SN14 6LH

      Contents

       Preface

       Part One Jesus

      1  The Age of Jesus

      2  Jesus the Jew

      3  The Changing Faces of Jesus in the New Testament and Since

      4  Jesus God in Spite of Himself An Interview with the Parisian Magazine Le Point

      5  When you Strip Away All the Pious Fiction, What is Left of the Real Jesus?

      6  Jesus was a Great Man

      7  Benedict XVI and Jesus of Nazareth: A Review

      8  The Truth about the Historical Jesus

      9  Was Jesus Really Human?

      10  A Television Documentary on Christ and the British Press: Channel 4’s Jesus: the Evidence (April 1984)

       Part Two Christmas – Passion – Easter

      1  The Nativity Narratives Seen by a Historian

      2  Matthew’s Nativity is Charming and Frightening . . . but it’s a Jewish Myth

      3  Celluloid Brutality

      4  The Passion

      5  Caiaphas was Innocent?

      6  Iscariot and the Dark Path to the Field of Blood

      7  The Resurrection

       Part Three The Dead Sea Scrolls

      1  Secrets of the Scrolls

      2  Dead Sea Scrolls

      3  The Qumran Community and the Essenes

      4  Midrash in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament

       Part Four Miscellanea

      1  The Notion of the Covenant in the Dead Sea Scrolls

      2  Tax-Collectors

      3  Christian Origins in a Nutshell

      4  The Great Da Vinci Code Distraction

      5  What’s Sex Got to Do with It?

      6  The Evolution of Religious Ideas

      7  Let’s Hope Vatican Politics Do Not Hinder the Holy Spirit

      8  Moving on from Reproach to Rapprochement The Pope and the President of Israel

       Acknowledgement of Sources

      Preface

      In years gone by, not a few university colleagues of mine have considered it below their dignity to engage in what the French call haute vulgarisation, the presentation of complicated issues of scholarship to a broad readership avoiding the use of technical jargon and requiring no prior familiarity with the subject. This attitude, in which obscurity parades as profundity and lack of perspicacity is assumed to indicate advanced learning, often derives from the inability of specialists to express themselves with clarity and simplicity. I would like to think that I was born with the gift of easy communication, being the son of a life-long journalist. The smell of the printer’s ink is among my early childhood memories and, at the age of 12, during the Berlin Olympics, I ran the sports column of my father’s paper. In 1971, when I began to edit the Journal of Jewish Studies, I felt I was reviving the family tradition tragically interrupted in 1944 by the murderous lunacy released on the innocent in Hitler’s empire. This background will explain why even my most creative works, like Jesus the Jew, were meant to be easily accessible to any educated person interested in the subject. Indeed, on retiring from my Oxford professorship, I expressly vowed to dedicate myself to sharing with the widest possible circles the insights gained