Searching for the Real Jesus. Geza Vermes

and wonders’ as the Acts of the Apostles informs us.

      What distinguished Jesus from the other holy men of his time was the simple beauty and magnetism of his message. He was not a philosopher and had no liking for abstract ideas. He proclaimed the imminence of the Kingdom of God. He never defined the Kingdom but rather likened it to the rich harvest, or to the tiny mustard seed which mysteriously grew into a tall shrub, or to the leaven which imperceptibly turned flour into bread. All these similitudes hint at a new God-centred world to which Jesus prepared the way. He was convinced that the impending presence of this new reality was signalled by his charismatic activity. Echoing Isaiah, he declared that if the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear and the dead re-awaken, then the Day of the Lord is on the doorstep and the Kingdom of God is at hand. The Dead Sea Scrolls also envisage the age of the Messiah as a time when the captives go free, the blind recover their sight, the bent are straightened, the sick healed, and the dead revived.

      Jesus was clear about the duties of his followers wishing to enter the Kingdom. Repentance, trust and child-like simplicity had to come first, followed by total devotion and a readiness to surrender at once oneself and all one’s possessions for the sake of the Kingdom. The present had to overshadow the future. Forward planning was meaningless: the time of this world and of its institutions could easily run out before tomorrow.

      The religion of Jesus was one of urgency, enthusiasm, compassion and love. If he had any preference, it was for the little ones and the despised. In his view, the return of a single lost sheep, a tax-collector or a harlot would cause more rejoicing in heaven than the secure progress of 99 righteous ones.

      Since the charismatic deeds of Jesus were seen as the signs of the messianic age, it is not surprising that many expected him to reveal himself as the Messiah, the divinely appointed king who would defeat the Romans and establish justice and peace on earth. The first three Gospels suggest that Jesus was not keen on being proclaimed the Christ. He had no political ambitions. Apart from a couple of doubtful passages, he declined to give a straight answer to the question, Are you the Messiah? His usual reply was evasive, like ‘You have said so’, or ‘You say that I am’, implying the tacit ‘but not I’.

      Rumours that nevertheless he might be the Messiah undoubtedly contributed to his downfall, but his tragic end was precipitated by an unfortunate episode in the Temple of Jerusalem. The noisy business transacted by the merchants and money-changers in the courtyard of the house of God outraged Jesus and the indignant rural holy man overturned their tables and threw them out. He thus created a fracas in the overcrowded city in the days leading up to Passover when the Jews expected the Messiah to arrive. So Jesus appeared to the Jewish and Roman authorities as a potential threat to law and order. The authorities had to act promptly and they did so, though the Jewish leaders preferred to pass the responsibility to Pontius Pilate. In short, Jesus died on the Roman cross because he did the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

      However, Jesus made such a profound impact on the mind of his apostles and disciples that they attributed to the power of his name the continued efficacy of their charismatic healing activity and their preaching. Crucified, dead and buried, Jesus rose in the hearts of his disciples who loved him, and so he lived on.

      Notes

1 Geza Vermes, 1973, Jesus the Jew, London: SCM Press.

2 Geza Vermes, 1983, Jesus and the World of Judaism, London: SCM Press.

3 Geza Vermes, 1993, The Religion of Jesus the Jew, London: SCM Press.

4 Geza Vermes, 2000, The Changing Faces of Jesus, London: Penguin.

5 Geza Vermes, 1998, Providential Accidents, London: SCM Press.

      3

      The Changing Faces of Jesus in the New Testament and Since

According to an oft-repeated saying, books on Jesus tell more about their authors than about Jesus himself. I would like to dissent or at least to claim that my case is an exception. If justification is needed, it may be found in my autobiography, Providential Accidents.1 In a nutshell, my interest in Jesus was not the product of my religious toing and froing. I was born in an assimilated and religiously detached Hungarian Jewish family. At the age of six, together with my parents, I was baptized Roman Catholic and remained in that church as a student, a seminarian, the member of the religious order of Notre Dame de Sion and for six years as a priest, until I reached the age of 32 years. Then followed a period of groping at the end of which, by the late 1960s, I found myself quietly, without a spiritual storm, back at my Jewish roots. But my fascination with the figure of Jesus was not the fruit of these wanderings. If personal experience had anything to do with my way of understanding Jesus, it can be located in an insider’s knowledge of both Christianity and Judaism.

During my student days at Louvain in Belgium I was never attracted to the New Testament. My teachers were too theological for my liking. My enthusiasm was first focused on the Hebrew Old Testament, and afterwards on the then newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls which have kept me busy throughout my whole academic life. My doctoral dissertation discussed the historical framework of Qumran and was published in French in 1953.2 A translation of the Scrolls into English followed in 1962;3 the original booklet of 250 pages has grown over the years into a volume of close to 700 pages.4 The Scrolls led me to a study of ancient Jewish Bible interpretation, and there for the first time I had to pay serious attention to the treatment of the Old Testament in the New.5 From the mid-1960s I found myself involved in a 20-year-long collective labour aimed at revising, enlarging and rewriting a nineteenth-century modern classic, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ by Emil Schürer.6 After completing the first of the three volumes of this gigantic monument, I decided to take a little time off, relax and enjoy myself by using the historical knowledge freshly gained for a new approach to the Gospel account of Jesus. To be more precise, I wanted to plunge the New Testament into the sea of the Judaism of its age in order to discover what the figure of Jesus might look like when perceived, not through the distorting lens of 2,000 years of evolving Christian belief and theology, but through the eyes, ears and mentality of Jesus’ own Jewish contemporaries. Out of this endeavour emerged in 1973 Jesus the Jew,7 intended to describe what kind of person Jesus was. The book made an impact and was followed at ten yearly intervals by Jesus and the World of Judaism,8 sketching the message of the Gospels, and The Religion of Jesus the Jew,9 a full-scale endeavour to portray Jesus as a religious man.

The Changing Faces of Jesus10 has much in common with and often relies on the trilogy which preceded it, yet it also greatly differs from it. The approach is broader: instead of depending only on the first three Gospels which are considered closest to historical reality, it investigates also the Gospel of John, the letters of Paul and the rest of the New Testament. Moreover, it is addressed to a wider readership and in particular has a different scenario. In the trilogy the inquiry was essentially historical; here it is both literary and historical. The purpose of The Changing Faces of Jesus is to sketch four different portraits in the various levels of New Testament literature