Jesus the Jew. Geza Vermes

      Preface by the Author

      With the publication of The Religion of Jesus the Jew, 1993 saw the completion of my Jesus trilogy, but the year was deeply saddened by the death of Pamela Vermes who, during a life of dialogue extending over three and a half decades, contributed so much to what I used to describe as ‘our common labour’.

      The first part of the trilogy, Jesus the Jew, celebrated its twenty-first birthday on 20 August 1994. It has passed through a number of British and American editions (Collins, Fontana, and SCM Press in the UK – Macmillan, Collins & World, and Fortress Press in the USA), and has appeared in Spanish, French, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, German and Hungarian translations, and others are at present in the making. With the exception of supplements or improvements due to the progress in our knowledge of the Dead Sea Scrolls which have been appended to this Preface, the book has been kept unchanged. Some of the details have been re-examined and refined in Jesus and the World of Judaism (1983) and in last year’s final instalment, The Religion of Jesus the Jew. Two major claims, the association of Jesus with ‘charismatic’ (prophetic) Judaism and my ‘unorthodox’ understanding of the ‘son of man’ problem in the Gospels, have become part of the general problematic of New Testament scholarship but still continue to provoke argument. This is mostly due, I fear, to German-based North-American methodological dogmatism, alluded to in The Religion of Jesus the Jew (p. 7), which is not able to cope with my pragmatic approach to patterns in the first case or, in the second, with the distinction between what Jesus might or might not have said and meant in Aramaic and the significance of the ‘son of man’ passages in their Greek form, inherited, transmitted and developed by the Gentile church.

      This is not the place to report on the reception of Jesus the Jew and the two further volumes of the trilogy; those interested may find accounts elsewhere.¹ However, I would like to record recent Jewish reactions to it which signal that the era of the primitive taboo on Jesus is over, and that even the less learned are openly encouraged to think again by the enlightened.² Equally pleasing is the realization that the Roman Catholic Church has taken a firm stand both on the recognition of the Jewishness of Jesus and on the need for a serious attention to be accorded by Christian theologians to relevant research by Jewish scholars.³

      The reconstruction of the portrait of the historical Jesus has been greatly facilitated by the use of the evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Since our knowledge of the Qumran texts has been substantially improved during the last two decades, and especially after the so-called ‘liberation’ of the Scrolls in 1991 when the ban on all the unpublished material was lifted, a general topic and two particular passages in Jesus the Jew require updating.

      To begin with the general topic, the recently published Messianic Apocalypse (4Q521) has shed valuable sidelight on charismatic Judaism (pp. 40–66). The fragmentary poem runs as follows.

      . . . [the hea]vens and the earth will listen to His Messiah, and none therein will stray from the commandments of the holy ones.

      Seekers of the Lord, strengthen yourselves in his service!

      All you hopeful in (your) heart, will you not find the Lord in this?

      For the Lord will consider the pious, and call the righteous by name.

      Over the poor His spirit will hover and will renew the faithful with His power.

      And He will glorify the pious on the throne of the eternal Kingdom,

      He who liberates the captives, restores sight to the blind, straightens the b[ent].

      And the Lord will accomplish glorious things which have never been . . .

      For He will heal the wounded, and revive the dead and bring good news to the poor . . .⁴

      These few lines bind together the concepts of the Messiah, the Kingdom of God, healing, resurrection and the proclamation of good news to the poor, representing the same charismatic-eschatological pattern as the Gospels’ announcement of victory over devil and disease.

      If it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, the Kingdom of God has come upon you (Luke 11: 20).

      Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them (Matt. 11: 4–5).

      The two particular passages in need of reconsideration concern the ‘son of God’ title; both occur on pages 171–3. The first deals with the interpretation of the Messianic Rule or 1QS^a2: 11–12 where the editio princeps reads ‘when [God] shall beget (ywlyd) the Messiah’. Although this phrase may refer metaphorically to the public appointment of the Anointed Son of David, following the prototype of Psalm 2: 7, ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you’, most scholars including myself hitherto preferred a different reading. However, a computer-enhanced image of the text appears to confirm ywlyd, resulting in the translation: ‘When God will have engendered the (Priest) Messiah, he shall come [at] the head of the whole congregation of Israel’. This would signify that at Qumran the Messiah of Aaron was known as ‘son of God’.

      The second passage, the so-called ‘Son of God fragment’ or ‘An Aramaic Apocalypse’ (4Q246), only partly available until recently, is in my opinion irrelevant to the New Testament issue. The person alluded to in the phrase, ‘The son of God he will be proclaimed (or: proclaim himself) and the son of the Most High they shall call him’, is not the Messiah, but most probably the last historico-apocalyptic sovereign of the ultimate world empire who, like Antiochus Epiphanes in Dan. 11: 36–37, is expected to declare himself god, and be worshipped as such.⁵ These examples indicate that continued research on the Scrolls and cognate sources is likely to fill further gaps in our patchy portrait of Jesus the Jew.

      Martin Buber, one of the foremost religious thinkers of the twentieth century and a great admirer of Jesus, wrote: ‘We Jews know him in a way – in the impulses and emotions of his essential Jewishness – that remains inaccessible to the Gentiles subject to him.’ (‘Christus, Chassidismus, Gnosis’, Werke, vol. III, Kösel and Lambert Schneider, Munich-Heidelberg, 1963, p. 957.) I trust that those who accompany me on this voyage of exploration will recognize the truth of Buber’s words.

      G. V.