and non-religious scholarly world.
Since 1945 the perspective has changed to an almost unrecognizable extent. Today the Jewishness of Jesus is axiomatic whereas in 1973 the title of my book, Jesus the Jew, still shocked conservative Christians. To accept that Jesus was a Jew means not only that he was born into the Jewish people, but that his religion, his culture, his psychology, and his mode of thinking and teaching were all Jewish. Over the last 50 years, Christian and Jewish scholars have worked together and a significant dialogue has developed between enlightened Christians and Jews.
Jesus the Jew, the charismatic Hasid, meets today with growing recognition, and not just in academic circles or exclusively among professing Christians. With the arrival of the third millennium the time appears ripe for a concerted effort aimed at improving and refining our understanding of the real Jesus and the birth of the Christian movement that arose in his wake.
Notes
1 Geza Vermes, 1998, Providential Accidents, London: SCM Press and Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
2 Geza Vermes, 1953, Les manuscrits du désert de Juda, Paris: Desclée.
3 Geza Vermes, 1962, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, London: Penguin.
4 Geza Vermes, 1997, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, London: Penguin.
5 Geza Vermes, 1961, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism, Leiden: Brill.
6 Volumes I–III, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1973–1987.
7 Geza Vermes, 1973, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels, London: Collins. Republished by SCM Press in 1983.
8 Geza Vermes, 1983, Jesus and the World of Judaism, London: SCM Press.
9 Geza Vermes, 1993, The Religion of Jesus the Jew, London: SCM Press.
10 Geza Vermes, 2001, The Changing Faces of Jesus, London: Penguin and New York: Viking Penguin.
11 In Amos 5:23 (Patrologia Latina xxv, 1054).
12 Homilia I (Patrologia Graeca xlviii, 847).
13 Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae, Leipzig, 1658–1675.
14 Gerhard Kittel, 1933–1976, Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
4
Jesus: God in Spite of Himself
An Interview with the Parisian Magazine Le Point
The real Jesus was to begin with a healer and exorcist endowed with astonishing charismatic power. Devoted to the cause of God till his death, he intended first of all to regenerate Judaism.
What is known about Jesus?
Very little. His life is recounted in the four Gospels recorded between 40 and 80 years after his death. Some factual information has been handed down by later historians, the Jewish Josephus and the Roman Tacitus. One fact is clearly established: he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judaea between 26 and 36 CE. The Gospels describe Jesus as a Galilean who was active around the Lake of Gennesaret. According to Matthew and Luke he was born under the reign of Herod the Great who died in 4 BCE. With the exception of the anecdote of the 12 year-old Jesus teaching in the Temple, the Gospels say nothing about his childhood.
Do we know anything regarding his family and his social circumstances?
He was poor and unmarried. He lived for 30 years in the townlet of Nazareth with his parents, Joseph and Mary, his four brothers and at least two sisters. The Church, which has made a dogma out of the virginity of Mary, asserts that the siblings issued from an earlier marriage of Joseph, who was a widower. The oldest Gospels, the Synoptics (Mark, Matthew and Luke) allude to a tense relationship between Jesus and his family, including his mother. Mark and Matthew report that the family sought to discourage Jesus from accomplishing his mission. In a passage in the Synoptics Jesus rejects his mother and brothers when they tried to interrupt his teaching. The more recent Gospel of John presents a different scenario; Jesus is invited with his mother and brothers to a wedding in Cana. Mary reappears at the foot of the cross. However, the role attributed to her by the Church has nothing to do with the texts.
What was Jesus’ education like?
He was a builder or a carpenter, but his vocabulary and the images he employs make one think rather of a countryman. The famous anecdote of the 12-year-old Jesus instructing the Scripture experts in the Temple is a later invention. Against the divinized picture which started to be formulated by the apostle Paul, Jesus was a simple and modest man. He was a prophet in the tradition of the prophets Elijah and Elisha of the Bible, who were also active in the northern area of Palestine. Like Elijah and Elisha, Jesus also was endowed with outstanding charismatic power. The Gospels act as witnesses: Jesus is a healer able to cure diseases (paralysis, blindness . . . ), an exorcist who expels demons, a wonder worker. This was in no way extraordinary in those days: rabbinic literature refers to other known healers and Flavius Josephus speaks of Jesus as a ‘wise man’ and a ‘performer of prodigies’.
When did Jesus start to preach?
The beginning of his public career coincided with the ministry of John the Baptist, which is dated by Luke to the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, in 29 CE. According to Mark and Luke, when Jesus received baptism from John, a heavenly voice informed him that he was God’s beloved son. Matthew and John advance that it was John the Baptist who heard the voice and announced the election of Jesus. The statements relative to the duration of his ministry are contradictory: in the Synoptics he was preaching only one year while John speaks of three Passover festivals, which imply about three years. Later Church tradition is based on John.
Who formed the audience of Jesus?
The Gospels claim that he recruited 12 apostles and 70 disciples who were to help him with his mission. As an itinerant preacher, he delivered his message in the streets, in various places, on the shore of the lake. Straightaway he encountered much success. The crowds greeted him as ‘the prophet from Nazareth’. It is important to note that only the Gospel of John accuses the Jewish people and the chief priests of having plotted his death before the last (and according to the Synoptics, the unique) visit of Jesus to Jerusalem.
What was Jesus’ message?
Jesus was an eschatological prophet who proclaimed the arrival of the Kingdom of God in the near future, as it were tomorrow. Hence he demanded a total devotion to the cause of God, a renunciation by the faithful of all material possessions and even the abandonment of their families. It is to
