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Preface

In years gone by, not a few university colleagues of mine have considered it below their dignity to engage in what the French call haute vulgarisation, the presentation of complicated issues of scholarship to a broad readership avoiding the use of technical jargon and requiring no prior familiarity with the subject. This attitude, in which obscurity parades as profundity and lack of perspicacity is assumed to indicate advanced learning, often derives from the inability of specialists to express themselves with clarity and simplicity. I would like to think that I was born with the gift of easy communication, being the son of a life-long journalist. The smell of the printer’s ink is among my early childhood memories and, at the age of 12, during the Berlin Olympics, I ran the sports column of my father’s paper. In 1971, when I began to edit the Journal of Jewish Studies, I felt I was reviving the family tradition tragically interrupted in 1944 by the murderous lunacy released on the innocent in Hitler’s empire. This background will explain why even my most creative works, like Jesus the Jew, were meant to be easily accessible to any educated person interested in the subject. Indeed, on retiring from my Oxford professorship, I expressly vowed to dedicate myself to sharing with the widest possible circles the insights gained through half a century of wrestling with ideas springing from the interaction between Judaism and Christianity.

After my early apprenticeship in the 1930s, I decided in the 1980s and 1990s to try again my hand at writing for the press, but most of my journalistic activity, my addresses at literary festivals as well as my participation in radio programmes and television documentaries date to the twenty-first century. The various bits that follow were originally published in dailies, weeklies and monthlies, especially in The Times, the Independent, the Guardian, the Daily and the Sunday Telegraph, and Standpoint. I must admit that I found journalism’s constraint to express myself quickly and in an easily readable style highly exciting and enjoyable.

Friends and above all my wife have prevailed on me to include a selection of them between the covers of a single volume together with lectures and talks which have never appeared previously in print. I am deeply indebted to SCM Press, publishers of my first Jesus trilogy – Jesus the Jew, Jesus and the World of Judaism (renamed Jesus in his Jewish Context) and The Religion of Jesus the Jew – for undertaking the publication of the present miscellany of essays. I sincerely hope that their admirable courage in these days of financial squeeze will prove worthwhile.

The articles and lectures assembled in this volume, like my preceding scholarly publications, reflect the views on religious matters of a liberal thinker, free of the constraints of churches, synagogues and their secular equivalents, who has tried throughout his life to separate reality from myth. The topics treated in these pages converge on the main themes of my previous academic research: the historical Jesus, his real life and authentic teaching, and the sketching of the genuine portrait of this holy Galilean Jew liberated from the religious images superimposed on it by theological speculations of his non-Jewish followers over two millennia.

Readers familiar with my writings will not be surprised to discover that the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ‘my first academic love affair’, is still firmly represented in this volume, anticipating The Story of the Scrolls, a truthful account of Qumran to appear early in 2010. In the present volume will also figure a variety of reflections on Jewish/Christian subjects, ranging from tax-collectors in the age of Jesus to the conclave electing the successor of Pope John Paul II and from the great Da Vinci distraction, to use the headline of The Times, to an analysis of the implications of the visit by the son of a Tehran Jewish school caretaker (the president of the State of Israel) to the son of a Bavarian policeman (Pope Benedict XVI) amid all the pomp and ceremony associated with a Vatican state event.

The reaction of the British press to a TV documentary on Jesus produced by the infant Channel 4 in 1984 may both amaze and amuse readers today. Also they may find appropriate in 2010, the year following the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the sesquicentenary of On the Origin of Species, some thoughts on the evolution of religious ideas accompanied by lighthearted comments on the constant preoccupation with sex on the part of the elderly celibate clerical leaders of the Roman Catholic Church.

Geza Vermes

Oxford, June 2009