Book reviews
The Authentic Gospel of Jesus
Geza Vermes and the Quest for the Historical Jesus
Some fifty years ago or so, Rudolph Bultmann, in many ways the most influential New Testament critic of the Twentieth Century, made a fairly down-beat assessment of the task he had set himself. He said in effect that it was a waste of time hoping that one day we would be able to paint an accurate portrait of Jesus of Nazareth. The best we could hope to do would be to ‘demythologise’ the Christ of Faith , the Jesus Christ of Christian orthodoxy and popular piety.
Why would we want to reconstruct the profile of someone who has been dead for two thousand years? For me, the reason is that the Jesus Christ of the Churches is an unbelievable, pasteboard figure – a cardboard cut-out- an
unsatisfactory composite construction who, as the saying goes, walked six inches off the ground – that is, when he wasn’t walking on water. I guess there are many, many
regular churchgoers who feel similarly ill at ease and
frustrated – let alone all those for whom Church no longer
has much relevance at all. For all those of us who feel like this, the Church’s Jesus is religiously, spiritually of little
help.
And down through the centuries this is how it has obviously been. Until comparatively recently, however, most folk kept their dis-ease and doubts to themselves. It wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that any Christian academic ventured to raise the matter in public ; the problem was the whole question of the gulf between the Church’s Jesus and the strange figure one just catches a glimpse of here and there in the first three Gospels. In 1835 David Friedrich Strauss published his bombshell of a book, “The Life of Jesus”. The book made him famous but destroyed his career at the age of twenty seven, and he never really recovered .
A lot of water flowed under the bridges during the next seventy years, affecting not just the academic communities in Germany, Britain, France and the USA,but also the educated public. The discoveries in geology, archaeology and
,above all , Darwin’s “Origin of the Species “ in 1858 shook the foundations of confidence in an orderly world with God at the helm.
Albert Schweitzer’s “Quest for the Historical Jesus” appeared in 1906, and had a profound effect on New Testament scholarship. Schweitzer maintained that Jesus was in fact an eschatological prophet (a prophet proclaiming the imminent end of the world and the apocalyptic breaking in of the Kingdom of God). Jesus believed that God’s reign would come in his lifetime and that his ministry was to usher in this Kingdom. Previous Protestant theology had largely held that the Kingdom was a this-worldly affair brought into being by moral living and social progress.
This eschatological interpretation of Jesus became a sort of critical orthodoxy for the next fifty years or so. It was Bultmann’s position, notwithstanding his scepticism with regard to any sort of certainty. Influential scholars during this period included C.H.Dodd and Joachim Jeremias, both of whom made a major contribution by focussing on the Parables of Jesus as being the most fruitful way to locate the authentic Jesus. All these scholars owed a great deal to Schweitzer.
Geza Vermes now comes on the scene, at first in his capacity as a first –rate scholar who played large part in making the Dead Sea Scrolls available for all to read.
Vermes is a fascinating character. He was born in Hungary of Jewish parents in 1924. The whole family was baptised into the Roman Catholic Church; some ten years later Geza’s parents died in the Holocaust. Geza eventually came to Britain after studying in Budapest and Louvain. Having gained a doctorate on his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, from 1953 to 1991 he taught at the Universities
of Newcastle and Oxford where he became the first professor of Jewish Studies . During that time Geza re-assumed his Jewish identity, and subsequently produced the books that have placed him at the forefront of New
Testament scholarship – in Europe at least.
Vermes follows the Schweitzer tradition of seeing Jesus as an eschatological prophet who believed that the Parousia –
the apocalyptic arrival of the Kingdom of God – was imminent. He parts company however with most historians who preceded him and with many of his contemporaries when it comes to Jesus’ attitude towards non-Jews. God’s Kingdom was strictly for Jews: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Mt.15.24 ). Jesus could be harsh to non-Jews: “It isn’t good to take bread out of the children’s mouths and throw it to the dogs!” (Mk.7.24), although prepared with some reluctance to heal a Gentile child.
Keeping every ordinance of the Torah, the Jewish Law, was also essential for those wanting to enter the Kingdom: “Don’t imagine that I have come to annul the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to annul but to fulfil…not one iota, one serif will disappear from the Law, until it’s all over.”
This hard-line Torah –centred Judaism attributed by Vermes to Jesus marks a major break with most of the historians who preceded him and also with the increasingly
influential work of the Jesus Seminar in the USA. Vermes believes the attitudes reflected above are authentic; Funk, Crossan, Borg and co. hold them to be reflections of the conflicts in the early church about relations with Judaism.
Emphases in the work of some of the Jesus Seminar, Dominic Crossan ,for example, that Jesus was probably from the lowest sections of the Palestinian peasant population and had a vision of Kingdom of God that was all about social justice, freedom from debt and exploitation at the hands of the socially dominant groups, and freedom from poverty and oppression – this is not touched by Vermes. For him, the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus was the ultimate spiritual value and personal piety was paramount, along with perfect compliance with the Law. His mentor was John the Baptist; the ascetic, world -renouncing prophet was, according to Vermes, almost a hero for Jesus. At the same time Vermes grants that Jesus could be ’convivial’, and liked a drink.
What if Vermes’ portrait of Jesus turns out to be basically true? Does it mean that I am going to feel more alienated than ever? Not necessarily. Jesus must have inevitably been, in some respects, “a child of his time”. If not, then he would not have been genuinely human.
No matter how all-pervasive the rigid Torah culture may have been, I feel sure that the underlying dynamic and spirit of the Gospel of the Kingdom – a Gospel of compassion and liberation- would have been able to stay alive. It would have been a matter of faith and trust that it should remain so.
It comes as no surprise that it is hard to find any references to Vermes in the publications of the Jesus Seminar, and none to any of the leading figures of the Seminar in Vermes’ writing. A rather sad state of affairs!
Does it matter that there is a gulf between the two wings of serious research into regaining the historic Jesus? Clearly it is a pity that we have to continue the search without consensus, but is inevitable; biblical scholars just like the rest of us are not immune from being influenced in their choices by their histories, experiences, prejudices, likes and dislikes ;perhaps Vermes and ,in a very different direction
Dominic Crossan are examples of this.
What does matter is that the work of these talented and committed scholars should lift us out of the past, that they have so successfully resurrected for us , into the present day.
Those of us still hanging on in the churches cannot be content with an academic historical exercise, no matter how
Enlightening: we need this misty figure from two thousand years ago to live, to be a new Christ for us, albeit probably very different to the figure we have grown up with – and grown out of!
Vermes work is impressive, full of detail that makes the past seem more real and intriguing comparisons between Jesus and near contemporary healers and wonder-workers like Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa and Honi the Circle Drawer. Vermes’ treatment of the vitally important Parables, however, is disappointing: he seems content to follow the unimaginative, conventional path of seeing the Parables as colourful illustrations for making ‘doctrinal’ and moral
Lessons, and ,where the meaning is not clear, we have to interpret the parable.
Robert Funk, the founder of the Jesus Seminar, has, over the years done a massive amount of work on the Parables,
much of which has been collected in a book of essays :” Funk on the Parables”. In Funk’s words, we don’t interpret the Parables - they interpret us! Jesus’ authentic parables, once they have been dug out from various levels of later church additions, expressed through images of ordinary everyday life, have, to the listener, a discordant note which may shock, intrigue, amuse or mystify him; he goes away, pondering and, if the parable has done its work well, the woman or man who has been listening – who has ears to hear and eyes to see – he or she is ready to act. Jesus’s Parables were not
colourful ways of telling his audience what to do or how to live: They were a challenge to see things in a new light, to be aware of a “beyond to everything”, a different dimension that Jesus called the Kingdom of God.
Vermes work is valuable; we can learn a lot from it. But this latest book, “The Authentic Gospel of Jesus”, although I value it, does not move me – and that is what I need!
Peter Fisher
CRC librarian
June 2009