Searching for the Real Jesus. Geza Vermes
the first century, Christianity had lost sight of the real Jesus and of the original meaning of his message. Paul, John and their churches replaced him by the Christ of faith. The swiftness of the obliteration was due to a premature change in cultural perspective. Within decades the message of the historical Jesus was transferred from its Aramaic-Hebrew linguistic context, from its Galilean-Palestinian geographical setting, and its Jewish religious framework to the primarily Greek-speaking pagan Mediterranean world of classical cultural background. The change took place at too early a stage. The clay was still soft and malleable and could easily be moulded into any shape the potter cared to choose. As a result, the new church, by then mostly Gentile, soon lost awareness of being Jewish; indeed, it became progressively anti-Jewish.
Another twist exerted an adverse effect on the appeal of the Christian message to Palestinian and diaspora Jews. Jesus, the charismatic religious Jew, was metamorphosed into the transcendent object of the Christian faith. The Kingdom of God proclaimed by the fiery prophet from Nazareth did not mean much to the average new recruit from Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth or Rome. During the second and third centuries, the leading teachers of the church, trained in Greek philosophy, such as Irenaeus of Lyons, Clement, Origen and Athanasius of Alexandria, substituted for the existential manifesto of Jesus advocating repentance and submission to God a programme steeped in metaphysical speculation on the nature and person of the incarnate Word of God and on the mutual tie between the divine persons of the Most Holy Trinity. They could proceed freely since by that time there was no longer any Jewish voice in Christendom to sound the alarm.
It is of course true that if Christianity had not taken root in the provinces of the Roman Empire, it would have remained an insignificant Jewish sect with no external appeal. So when the early church decided that non-Jews could be admitted into the fold, it was logical to attempt a ‘translation’ of the Christian message for the benefit of the non-Jewish world. This inculturation or acculturation is valid provided it does not lead to substantial distortion. To avoid such distortion, it is necessary that the process of adaptation remains in the hands of the representatives of the home culture (Judaism in the present case). However, in the case of Christianity the inculturation was handled by Gentiles who were only superficially acquainted with the Jewish religion of Jesus. As a result, within a relatively short period no Jew was able to find acceptable the new incultured doctrines of Jesus presented by the church. In fact, I think Jesus himself would have failed to acknowledge it as his own.
Thereafter the growing anti-Judaism of the church further distanced Christian culture from the world of Jesus. At the beginning of the fifth century Saint Jerome, the only Hebrew expert of Christendom, compared the sound made by Jewish synagogue worshippers to the grunting of pigs and the braying of donkeys.11 His contemporary, Saint John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople, referred to the synagogues of the Jewish Christ-killers as brothels, the citadel of the devil, and the abyss of perdition.12 Later Christian anti-Semites, Luther among them, had such models to imitate. It is worth recording that Julius Streicher, the editor of the notorious Nazi journal, Der Stürmer, claimed in his defence before the Allies’ tribunal that if he was guilty of anti-Semitism, so was Luther. His magazine simply repeated Luther’s slogans.
As is well known the age-old religious anti-Semitism continued largely unabated until after the Second World War. Yet it is to be recognized that the Protestant reformation in the sixteenth century caused a considerable sea change. The reformers, inspired by the spirit of the Renaissance, resurrected the Bible and proclaimed the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament the ultimate sources of divine revelation. So the Protestant scholars and Scripture-reading believers were brought closer to the biblical religion, and indirectly closer to Jesus. Still under the impact of the ideals of the Renaissance, Protestant New Testament scholars began to interest themselves in post-biblical Jewish literature. The seventeenth-century renowned Cambridge divine John Lightfoot recommended to Christians the study of rabbinic literature.13 The Talmud would be useful to them for a deeper understanding of the Gospels although it poisons the mind of the Jews!
The strange bed-fellowship of anti-Judaic attitude and expertise in Jewish studies continued in Christian circles until the middle of the last century. This is scandalously exemplified in the person of Gerhard Kittel, the editor of the classic ten-volume Theological Dictionary of the New Testament14 who was also a regular contributor to official German Nazi anti-Semitic publications. Only the realization of the horror of the Holocaust put this line of ‘scholarship’ beyond the pale.
By then New Testament criticism, begun in the eighteenth century, had made considerable progress and the discovery of many ancient Jewish documents, chief among them the Dead Sea Scrolls, further enriched the field of comparative study. Thus a new era opened in the quest for the original meaning of Christianity. During the last 30 years dozens of books on the historical Jesus began to sprout from every corner of the religious 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