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Since his ground breaking Jesus the Jew (1973), Geza Vermes has produced a steady stream of approachable scholarship on the life of Jesus within the context of his own Jewishness and the conditions in which he lived.
The Changing Faces of Jesus is by far his most comprehensive and challenging synthesis.
He says that the initial "historical Jesus" has been obscured by layers of later interpretation:
- The Historical Jesus was a: "Prophet-like holy man, mighty in deed and word, a charismatic healer and exorcist, and a teacher whose eyes were fixed on the present task envisaged from a practical-existential rather than an abstract and philosophical viewpoint". He resembles other Hasidic Galilean preachers, e.g. his prayer: "Ask and it shall be given to you" (Matthew 7:7; Luke 11:9). Yet even though the similarities are plain, the disparity is equally obvious; none of his contemporaries left more than a handful of sayings; he is: "an incomparable charismatic who showed not only the nearness but sometimes the real presence of The Kingdom." Without the miscarriage of justice by Pilate, however, he might have disappeared from history.
- The Jesus of The Synoptic Gospels (Study Sheet 87) is a teacher, healer and eschatological enthusiast whose emphasis on the immediacy of The Kingdom has been obscured by interpolations from the Evangelists, not representing his authentic voice, taking advantage in particular of the opportunities afforded by the destruction of The Temple (70 AD).
- The Jesus of Acts (Study Sheet 88) is a figure of reverence, bearing the title of Lord, following the development of a theology of Resurrection; he is imbued with The Spirit and is the source of salvation but never identified as equal with The Father.
- The Jesus of Paul (Study Sheet 89) acquires a unique theological character absent in all the other New Testament writings; his death and Resurrection are given peculiarly salvific significance through what became the doctrine of "Justification", the primary point of contention in the Western Christian churches.
- The Jesus of John (Study Sheet 90) is a supernatural figure which owes much of its construction to the author's contact with the Hellenic world; he is characterised as divine and equal to The Father, the primary point of contention in the Eastern Christian Churches. Vermes begins with John and progressively works backwards in a fashion analogous to the restorer of an old master, removing layers of accretion to reveal the initial, vivid canvas but the paradox is that the writings under his microscope become decreasingly dense and engaging so that his portrait of Jesus The Jew is much less engaging than the portrait of Jesus through John. In some ways that is his point but he might have been more effective using the conventional, Chronological process.
There are two major problems for the impartial critic:
- First, the chronological approach does not work, as the more highly developed theology of Paul was written before the Synoptics and Acts
- Secondly, the comparison between the Vermes portrait of Jesus and that in the Synoptics depends on Vermes identifying certain passages as "Interpolation" when in an important sense the whole of the New Testament is interpolation.
The Christian critic will have two over-riding observations:
- Vermes, necessarily, takes no account of the out-working of the Holy Spirit in the early Church
- The often contradictory accounts of teaching and events, not to mention Christology, present 'fundamentalists' with considerable challenges.
Vermes notes, in conclusion, the sad history of anti Semitism in Christianity and how it took Hitler's atrocities to moderate it so that Jesus could be re-considered as Jew after almost two millennia of first Greek and then Latin clouding.
Partly taken from
Vermes, Geza: The Changing Faces of Jesus, Allen Lane, 2000, ISBN 0 713 99193 3 (commission earned)
KC iv/08
Related Study Sheets…
Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus - Acts
Added: 15th July 2008
Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus - John
Added: 15th July 2008
Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus - Paul
Added: 15th July 2008
Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus - Synoptics
Added: 15th July 2008