Searching for the Real Jesus. Geza Vermes
beneath the earliest layer of Gospel tradition.
The arrangement of the portraits follows their degree of sophistication rather than a strictly chronological line. I begin with the Gospel of John, the Everest of New Testament Christology, a Gospel which happens to be not only the most advanced, but also the latest New Testament representation of Christ, dating to the opening years of the second century CE. John fundamentally departs from the earlier Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke in its religious outlook. Its story telling, too, has little in common with the Synoptics with the exception of the section leading to the crucifixion and death of Jesus. John’s Gospel largely ignores Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God, and replaces the pithy proverbs and vivid, God-centred parables of the Jesus of the Synoptics with long, rambling speeches in which Jesus continuously reflects on himself. In the Fourth Gospel we encounter not a real, flesh and blood Galilean charismatic, but a stranger from heaven, temporarily exiled on earth, who is longing to return to his celestial home. The 252 brilliantly chosen Greek words of the Prologue offer a pellucid abstract of John’s Gospel, the summit of New Testament theology. The eternal and divine Word of God, who took part in the creation of the world, became incarnate in time to reveal to men the face of the invisible God.
The Johannine portrait of Jesus foreshadows and epitomizes later Christianity, as we know it. The great doctrinal controversies of the church in the first millennium of its history mostly revolved around ideas first mooted in the Fourth Gospel. The orthodox doctrine relating to Christology – the one person and two natures of Jesus Christ – and to the Holy Trinity, all spring from the spiritual Gospel of John. John is the father of the theology of eastern Christianity.
Here ends my synopsis of the first two chapters of the Changing Faces, dealing with John. The next two are devoted to the high peaks of the teaching of St Paul.
The letters of Paul chronologically precede John by half a century, but from the point of view of doctrinal development stand only a little below him. As is well known, Paul is held by many to be the true founder of the church and the chief inspiration of the atonement-redemption theology of western Christianity. Closing his eyes to the earthly Jesus whom he never met, and about whom he had nothing original to report, Paul’s gaze was fixed on Christ, the universal Saviour of both Jews and of non-Jews. This superhuman, but not quite divine Christ, reminiscent of the heroes of the mystery religions then so popular in the Graeco-Roman world, played the ultimate lead part in a cosmic drama of redemption. Adam, the first man, left death and sinfulness to posterity, but the last Adam (Jesus Christ) brought to all forgiveness, life and salvation. Paul’s astonishing success in the non-Jewish world, contrasted with the failure of the early Christian mission among Jews, was itself part of this mystery play. The Second Coming of Jesus, fervently expected by Paul and the primitive church, could not happen – he thought – before the gospel had reached all the Gentile nations. He also imagined that its progress among the heathen would kindle the jealousy of the Jews who would not suffer passively the takeover of their spiritual patrimony by non-Jews. And once the Jews decided to enter the race, they would advance by leaps and bounds and soon catch up with, and overtake the leaders. Thus the whole of mankind, both Jews and Gentiles, would enjoy the salvation mediated through Christ.
Paul believed that he himself was commissioned by God to preach Christ to all the nations on the eastern and northern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, starting with Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece. He then planned to travel to Rome and convert Italy, and finally rush to Spain. No doubt, it was in Spain, at the westernmost extremity of the inhabited universe, that Paul expected to hear the trumpet signalling the day of Christ’s return, hailed by the mixed alleluia chorus of Gentiles and Jews.
As is often the case with beautiful dreams, they end before their climax is reached. Paul never arrived in Spain. Jews and Christians are still divided, and two millennia have passed without the Second Coming. But Christianity still endures, and this is largely due to the spiritual vision of Jesus sketched by the odd-man-out among the apostles who never saw him in the flesh.
This takes us to the third portrait of Jesus, the one contained in the first half of the Acts of the Apostles: the Jesus seen and preached by Palestinian Jewish Christianity. It is far distant from John’s mystical vision of the divine Christ and from Paul’s mystery drama of salvation. The Jesus of the Acts is a Galilean charismatic character, elevated by God to the dignity of Lord and Messiah after raising him from the dead. Instead of considering Jesus as God or a temporary expatriate from heaven, according to the Acts (2.22), Peter qualifies him in his first christological statement proclaimed to a crowd in Jerusalem as ‘a man attested . . . by God with mighty works and wonders and signs’, that is to say a Jewish prophet.
Stepping further back, at least as far as the nature of the tradition transmitted by them is concerned, we encounter in chapter 6 the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. He is depicted as still living and moving along the dusty and rocky paths of rural Galilee and comes onstage as an itinerant healer, exorcist and preacher, admired by the simple folk, the sick and the social outcasts – the sinners, the prostitutes and the tax-collectors – but cause of scandal and annoyance to the petit bourgeois village scribes and synagogue presidents. His sympathizers venerated him as a miracle-working prophet and from an early stage, though apparently without his encouragement, his name began to be linked to that of the Messiah, son of David. His beneficial charismatic actions were seen as representing the portents of the messianic age in which the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the lepers are cleansed. He was not a revolutionary, and entertained no political ambition. The main subject of his proclamation was the imminent arrival of a new regime, and he saw himself as the person entrusted by the Father, whom he loved and worshipped, to lead the Jews through the gate of repentance into the spiritual promised land. ‘Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand!’
He fell foul of the high-priestly authorities in a politically unstable Jerusalem because he did the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. The wrong thing was the disturbance which Jesus caused by overturning the stalls and tables of the merchants of sacrificial animals and the money-changers who sold the correct silver coins prescribed for gifts to the sanctuary. The wrong place was the Temple of Jerusalem where large crowds of locals and pilgrims foregathered and formed a potential hotbed for explosive revolutionary activity. And the days leading to Passover, the feast of Liberation and the expected date of the manifestation of the Messiah, was the worst possible time because at that very tense moment the nerves of the guardians of law and order reached breaking point. Hence the tragedy of Jesus. Seen as a potential threat to peace, he was arrested by the Jewish leaders who, however, preferred not to take the responsibility for his death on themselves and handed him over to the secular power. So Jesus was executed on a Roman cross by the notoriously cruel governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilate.
This portrait painted by the Synoptics of a charismatic, messianic healer, exorcist and preacher of God’s Kingdom is what one might call the gospel truth about Jesus. But this picture needs to be immersed into the real world of first-century Palestinian Judaism as it is known from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the works of the first century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus and the rest of post-biblical literature pre-rabbinic and rabbinic, works in which we encounter other prophetic-charismatic characters, albeit of lesser stature than Christ, such as Honi, Hanina ben Dosa or Jesus son of Ananias, with whom he can be compared. It is by looking through that prism that we may discover, concealed beneath the writings of Matthew, Mark and Luke, the shadowy face of the ‘real’ Jesus. I will not give away all the secrets of chapter 7 of The Changing Faces – you will have to read the book to discover them – but I will share with you my summation of the Jesus of history.
Here is the conclusion: the face of Jesus, truly human, wholly theocentric, passionately faith-inspired and under the imperative impulse of the here and now, impressed itself so deeply on the minds of his disciples that not even the shattering blow of the cross could arrest its continued real presence. It compelled them to carry on in his name their mission as healers, exorcists and preachers of the Kingdom of God. It was only a generation or two later, with the increasing delay of the Second Coming, that the image of the Jesus familiar from experience began to fade, covered over first by the theological and mystical dreamings of Paul and John, and afterwards by the dogmatic speculations of church-centred Gentile Christianity.
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