The Changing Faces of Jesus

This is a clear, approachable and instructive work that wears its learning quite lightly, wastes few words and keeps within comfortable bounds of length - very English. Penguin provides a useful description of it by Vermes himself, at http://www.penguin.co.uk/Book/BookFrame/0,1007,,00.html?id=0140265244 . The following assumes you have read this.First, some dates to keep in mind. Jesus died about 30. The authentic epistles of Paul begin early in the 50s and end in the mid-60s. Outside the Pauline domain, all we know of Christianity at the time was centered in Jerusalem and led first by Peter, then by James, Jesus's brother, who was killed in 62. Peter and Paul were executed in Rome in the mid-60s. In 66 an uprising began in Judea which led to the razing of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, in 70. The three synoptic Gospels were written in the 80s and early 90s, Mark first, then Matthew and Luke in debatable order. Around 100 were written the Acts of the Apostles, perhaps by the same hand as Luke. The gospel of John comes later, about 110, and the Revelation later still. All of the NT (New Testament) was written in Greek. Despite the traditional attributions, none of the authors had met Jesus. The author of Luke was not Jewish, and that of John may well not have been. The other writers generally were. All of this is a moderate stretch from, say, the notes in the pre-Vatican-2 Catholic Bible of Jerusalem. Only fundamentalists should be shocked (and they will not read Vermes)."The changing faces of Jesus", then, are the earlier and earlier pictures of him that emerge when we begin scraping away layers of scriptural overpaint. The Jesus in question is the Galilean charismatic who, according to the synoptics, first acknowledged John the Baptist and probably joined him, then lived for less than a year after John was arrested.The top layer is the gospel of John, and in the scraping we notice that almost all our christology was in there and in no prior layer. All of the NT prior to John is centered on the Kingdom of God, and none of it treats Jesus as God. John, for whom Jesus is God, only mentions the Kingdom once.Vermes then jumps to Paul, who is explicit that he did not see Jesus and (not being the most agreeable man on earth) avoids reporting whatever the Christians in Jerusalem may have known. Paul affirms only two beliefs regarding Jesus, first of all redemption (the Cross), second resurrection - the disappearance of Jesus's body and his reappearance in the form of apparitions, the last of which occurred to Paul in Damascus. Paul's doctrine is that the man Jesus became the Redeemer (not God) on the Cross, and will return in Paul's generation as the Messiah at the end of the world, in universal redemption on the basis of faith, not respect for the Jewish Law. This is the Kingdom of God.Vermes's next layer is the Acts, which he reads as a report on the beliefs of the church of Jerusalem two generations earlier. Those beliefs quite fit with Paul's, exce

For the past two centuries historicans and scholars have been trying to find the real Jesus behind the Gospels. It is a commonplace that they have found their own assumptions and prejudices. Orthodox Christians find, naturally enough, the Christ of Orthodoxy. 19th century moderate liberals find a moderate liberal Christ. Slightly more left-wing twentieth century scholars find a slightly more revolutionary Jesus. This book by Jewish scholar Geza Vermes is a summary of three books he wrote connecting Jesus to the Judaism of his day. This account is an admirable summary; it is well written, clearly and thoughtfully presented. Not only does it provide a convincing account of the real Jesus, but it shows a convincing reason why Christian orthodoxy is wrong. The way that it does so is ingenious; by using orthodoxy's own sources.The main problem for the historical analysis of Jesus is the limited number of sources. We are basically confined to the Testament; independent evidence (Josephus) tells us littlle more that he existed and was a religious leader killed by the Romans. Christian apologetics naturally emphasize the fact that several hundred people were convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead. They do not consider the 99% of people in Palestine who did not share this high opinion and who did not feel the need to write anything down to refute it. But aren't we apparently stuck with the New Testament?As it happens, we are not. Vermes' procedure is to look through the Bible and unpeel the various accretions of Christian dogma like an onion's layers. First we look at the gospel of John, the gospel which most clearly states that the individual Jesus was in fact God. We then go through the letters of Paul, then the Acts of the Apostles and the synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. Then we get Vermes' own description of the real Jesus. Vermes' previous books emphasized the Jewishness of Jesus. This point should be clarified. Obviously Jesus grew up in the context of first century Judaism. For nineteen centuries Christianity has claimed that Jesus was the fulfillment of Judaism. Vermes means something quite different. Nietzsche once said that the only real Christian died on the cross. What Vermes says is that when Jesus died, he died as a Jew. He was similar to other exorcists and healers of the time, the main distinction being that he was unusually eloquent. He lived in the rural world of Galillee, which was not as literate or sophisticated as Jerusalem, and the gospels do not even mention the cities of Galilee. He believed in the imminent end of the world, but he was not a political revolutionary. His execution was an accident, the consequence of paranoid officials overreacting to Jesus' scourging of the temple.Vermes is excellent at supplementing the New Testametnt with information about first century Judaism. He is useful in explaining the practices of first century Jewish holy men. He helpfully distinguis

One of Vermes' first books, _Jesus the Jew_, was the seminal work dealing with the historical Jesus through a Jewish perspective. It was an innovative work that took a highly original approach to discovering the true figure of Jesus. Two books later (_Jesus and the World of Judaism_, _The Religion of Jesus the Jew_), Vermes has released another masterpiece. In his previous works, his analysis of the historical Jesus was based solely upon the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke). In _The Changing Faces of Jesus_, he goes a step further in attempting to unravel Jesus' true nature. He commences at the most theologically advanced Gospel (i.e. John) and works back through Paul, Acts and finally the Synoptics.To begin with, Vermes demonstrates to the reader that the Gospel of John is significantly different to the rest of the Gospels as it elevates the figure of Jesus to a divine status that would have been quite foreign to the Jewish way of thinking (even to Jesus!). He shows how influences from Paul and the early gentile church contributed in formulating this divergent account. He illustrates that from a theological point of view, John has been tailored to omit/modify many passages (that were present in the Synoptics) that may have detracted from the portrayal of a divine Jesus. Furthermore John's portrayal of Jesus is that of a self-centred, assertive and transcendent figure which is not present in the Synoptics. In John, Jesus is shown as answering the question "Are you the Messiah?" with a firm positive answer that is unparalleled in the earlier Gospels. Vermes adds that the metaphoric title of "Son of God", that is so prominent in biblical and post-biblical Jewish literature, is taken literally in the fourth Gospel. Vermes argues that this and other details assert that the fourth Gospel is far removed from the historical, Jewish Jesus and instead portrays the gentile vision of a divine God-man whose purpose is to redeem the sins of the world (another foreign concept to Judaism and to Jesus).When Vermes turns to Paul and his writings, it may be seen that Paul, who never met Jesus in the flesh, influenced the nature of the early Church immensely. In fact it is he who is credited with founding the Christian Religion. Vermes demonstrates that Paul's concept of the Messiah was a significantly modified version of the one commonly portrayed in Jewish literature. Paul's messiah offers himself as a sacrifice for humanity and is later resurrected. This portrayal is totally foreign to the notion of a Davidic messiah that would occupy the throne and redeem Israel. From this it is easy to comprehend why the Jews weren't so quick in accepting Jesus as the messiah. Firstly he was not a king and secondly he did not usher in the age of redemption for Israel as promised. It was therefore possible for Paul to preach his "revised" version of Jesus' messianic role to the gentiles as they had no background in Jewish tradition and would not question his story or h

This is a wonderful book. Although I think Ed Sanders's _The Historical Figure of Jesus_ is probably the best single volume on the "Jesus of history," Geza Vermes is perhaps my favorite writer on the subject.In the present work he continues his project of reclaiming Jesus as a (solely) human being and a Jew of his own time. Here he tackles a topic he has not treated in his previous three volumes: the Christian New Testament's presentation of Jesus outside of the three synoptic gospels. He also gives the synoptics themselves another look after he has dealt with John and Paul.His theme here is that Christian understanding(s) of Jesus have been colored heavily by the New Testament's portraits. Vermes wants to recover, as far as possible, the human being behind the theology. The portrait Vermes presents here will hold no surprises for readers of his other works: he regards Jesus as a charismatic Galilean holy man with an emphasis on God as father, a somewhat "individualistic" approach that decentralized the importance (though not the necessity) of the social/communal aspects of Torah observance, and the occasional touch of chauvinism.There is much to accept in Vermes's portrait, and I am in essential agreement with most of it. My worries are about what he omits; as with his earlier work, I am simply unconvinced by his claim that Jesus was crucified simply for doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I also do not see that he has adequately dealt with the possible historicity of Jesus's resurrection. (I would supplement Vermes's account on these points by, respectively, Hyam Maccoby's _Revolution in Judea_ and Rabbi Pinchas Lapide's _The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish View_.)But in its positive aspects, Vermes's portrait is compelling on the whole. And at the end of the volume, he shifts out of "historian" mode to provide a short fantasy about what Jesus might say if he returned today. I will not spoil it by giving away its content, but it's very nicely done. (Okay, I'll give away a _little_ bit. Vermes's Jesus is pleasantly surprised by all the attention he's gotten from non-Jews, especially after the mean things he occasionally said about them. But he suggests that some Christians ought to be a little less devotional and a little more self-reliant.)Beyond strictly historical interest, it has long been one of Vermes's main concerns to present the figure of Jesus as an offer of hope to those outside the fold of organized religion. His previous works have, I think, been successful in this regard; the present volume is, if anything, more so.

This well written work is the capstone book of the author's earlier trilogy on Jesus. Starting with the Gospel of John and then moving to Paul's letters and then to the Synoptic Gospels, Vermes peals away the layers of gospel theological commentary in his attempt to discover the historical Jesus. Vermes is a Dead Sea Scrolls expert, as well as a well-published scholar on First Century Judaica. This is a thought provoking work for believers and nonbelievers. However, excellent scholarship about Jesus still can present only conjecture. Despite his erudite scholarship, Vermes does understand this point.