Searching for the Real Jesus. Geza Vermes

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Palestinian Jewish members of the Jesus movement, a small Judaean sect in Roman eyes, continued to exist after the destruction of Jerusalem. Church fathers refer to them as Ebionites or Nazoraeans. They were treated as heretics for resisting the developed Christian doctrines of the divinity of Jesus and his virginal conception, and strictly observing the traditional Jewish way of life. Little evidence has survived concerning them, but occasional anecdotes preserved in rabbinic literature, such as the offer of the Jewish-Christian Jacob of Kefar Sekhaniah to heal a rabbi in the name of Jesus and the legendary admission of the noted Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus of having accepted a teaching of Jesus suggest that the two groups were still on rather unfriendly speaking terms.

      If Christian tradition handed down in the fourth century by Eusebius can be trusted, Roman search for Jewish revolutionaries from the time of Vespasian until Trajan affected also the family of Jesus, suspected of propagating hopes in the return of the Messiah. No doubt the cooling down of the expectation of an imminent Second Coming soon removed the threat of Roman retaliation, though not before the grandsons of Jude, the grandnephews of Jesus, were put on a political blacklist under Domitian and Symeon son of Clopas, the cousin of Jesus and the successor of James the brother of the Lord as bishop of Jerusalem suffered a martyr’s death under Trajan in the first decade of the second century CE.

      The outlook for the non-Jewish Christians of the churches founded by Paul in the Roman world was equally gloomy. Already under Nero they were seen as members of a pernicious superstition and many of them were crucified in Rome and, while membership of the church was not held to be a sufficient ground for prosecution under Trajan, it carried a prima facie suspicion of criminality. In the course of the two centuries following the defeat of Bar Kokhba the situation of the Jews in the Roman Empire quietly improved while that of the Christians subject to successive persecutions, if anything, worsened. However, the victory of the emperor Constantine at the Milvian Bridge in 312 CE reversed the process and gave Christianity the upper hand.

      This survey of Jewish and Judaeo-Christian history in a nutshell from the annexation of Judaea as a Roman province in 63 BCE to the end of the second Jewish rebellion against Rome in 135 CE, and the Who’s Who itself, are intended to advance a dynamic understanding of Jesus in his time. He stands in the middle of 200 eventful years: he died roughly 100 years after Pompey’s entry into Jerusalem and 100 years before the defeat of Bar Kokhba at the battle of Bether.

      It is my sincere hope that the historical perspective opened up through these vignettes will enable the reader to grasp the historical reality of the leading figures of the New Testament and to understand better their link with the Jewish and Roman protagonists of the society of their age.

      Note

      2

      Jesus the Jew

      Jesus the Jew, which has now become an SCM Classic, was not the fruit of subjective religious preoccupations, but of detached scholarly concerns. Its writing was prompted – as I stated in the preface to the first edition – by a single-minded search for fact and reality undertaken out of feeling for the tragedy of Jesus of Nazareth, distorted by Christian and Jewish myth alike. The book made an impact and can now be read, in addition to the original English, in seven languages, and an eighth translation into Polish is in the making under the auspices of a publishing house which is also responsible for bringing out several of the previous Pope’s writings! What John Paul II would have thought of it, I prefer not to speculate on.

      As for future plans, readers of the literary gossip column of the Daily Telegraph may have come across the following snippet on 24 February last: ‘Geza Vermes, author of several other books on Jesus, is preparing another manuscript. “My publishers told me that I am free to choose any subject provided that I put the word Jesus in the title”,’ he says with a shrug of the shoulders. The columnist then added, ‘A senior executive at Penguin whom I asked about it confided cheerfully: “We are trying to get him write one just called Christ!, but he won’t wear it.”’ So, though not under that short title, work is proceeding.

      After these preliminaries, all that remains for me is to present in a nutshell what we know about the historical Jesus, Jesus the Jew.

      The New Testament, which is our chief source, contains two very different pictures. For the author of the Gospel of John, who wrote at the beginning of the second century, Jesus was a heavenly being who in time became incarnate and briefly took up residence among men before returning to heaven. For Saint Paul, on the other hand, he was the universal saviour of mankind whose impending triumphant return was eagerly awaited by Paul and by the first Christians.

      Against these majestic portraits stands the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels. Mark, Matthew and Luke were written between 70 and 100 CE, but reflect considerably older traditions. These Gospels do not depict him as divine; on the contrary, he is even quoted there as objecting to be called good because only God is good. This very human person, who is the subject of Jesus the Jew, was a carpenter in the village of Nazareth. He lived with his parents, Joseph and Mary, his four brothers, James, Joseph, Judas and Simon, and his several sisters in the Galilee governed by Antipas, son of king Herod the Great (d. 4 BCE).

      What can a historian say about Jesus? The main body of the story relating to him is recorded in Mark, the earliest of the Gospels. It includes no introduction dealing with the birth of Jesus, nor a conclusion recounting the apparitions following the death of Christ, as do Matthew and Luke. Mark begins with the public career of Jesus, and is silent on his childhood, youth, and early manhood. We learn nothing about his education. When Jesus began to teach, people apparently wondered how this untrained man had acquired such wisdom.

      We are nowhere told that Jesus was married. Celibate life was unusual among Jews, except among the monkish Essenes described by Flavius Josephus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yet the Gospels contain no hint that Jesus was an Essene; indeed his religious outlook contradicts theirs. His choice for the unmarried state may have been motivated by his conviction that he was a prophet, a vocation which demanded total renunciation of worldly pleasures to ensure incessant spiritual alertness.

      Jesus emerged from 30 years of obscurity when he answered John the Baptizer’s appeal to baptism and repentance. He remained in his company until John was imprisoned by Herod Antipas. Jesus then decided to continue John’s mission in Galilee. He called for repentance and proclaimed the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God, symbolizing a new age in which God would rule unopposed by forces of darkness. He preached in village

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