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Jesus the Jew

When I had the honour of being the cast-away on Sue Lawley’s Desert Island Discs on Radio 4, she introduced me as the author of Jesus the Jew,1 a book which, to quote her words, I ‘wrote for fun’. The more exact truth is that around 1970 I decided, after years of hard labour on a history of the Jews in the age of Jesus, to do something enjoyable and use the technical expertise acquired in preparing the history volumes for approaching the figure of Jesus from the vantage point of the Judaism of his time.

Jesus the Jew, which has now become an SCM Classic, was not the fruit of subjective religious preoccupations, but of detached scholarly concerns. Its writing was prompted – as I stated in the preface to the first edition – by a single-minded search for fact and reality undertaken out of feeling for the tragedy of Jesus of Nazareth, distorted by Christian and Jewish myth alike. The book made an impact and can now be read, in addition to the original English, in seven languages, and an eighth translation into Polish is in the making under the auspices of a publishing house which is also responsible for bringing out several of the previous Pope’s writings! What John Paul II would have thought of it, I prefer not to speculate on.

First published in 1973, Jesus the Jew was followed at ten-year intervals by Jesus and the World of Judaism2 and The Religion of Jesus the Jew,3 both by SCM Press. In 2000 another volume was issued by Penguin entitled The Changing Faces of Jesus.4 Those who wish to know the inside story of my work on Jesus will find the essentials, as well as some amusing tit-bits, in Providential Accidents,5 my autobiography which saw the light of day in 1998.

As for future plans, readers of the literary gossip column of the Daily Telegraph may have come across the following snippet on 24 February last: ‘Geza Vermes, author of several other books on Jesus, is preparing another manuscript. “My publishers told me that I am free to choose any subject provided that I put the word Jesus in the title”,’ he says with a shrug of the shoulders. The columnist then added, ‘A senior executive at Penguin whom I asked about it confided cheerfully: “We are trying to get him write one just called Christ!, but he won’t wear it.”’ So, though not under that short title, work is proceeding.

After these preliminaries, all that remains for me is to present in a nutshell what we know about the historical Jesus, Jesus the Jew.

The New Testament, which is our chief source, contains two very different pictures. For the author of the Gospel of John, who wrote at the beginning of the second century, Jesus was a heavenly being who in time became incarnate and briefly took up residence among men before returning to heaven. For Saint Paul, on the other hand, he was the universal saviour of mankind whose impending triumphant return was eagerly awaited by Paul and by the first Christians.

Against these majestic portraits stands the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels. Mark, Matthew and Luke were written between 70 and 100 CE, but reflect considerably older traditions. These Gospels do not depict him as divine; on the contrary, he is even quoted there as objecting to be called good because only God is good. This very human person, who is the subject of Jesus the Jew, was a carpenter in the village of Nazareth. He lived with his parents, Joseph and Mary, his four brothers, James, Joseph, Judas and Simon, and his several sisters in the Galilee governed by Antipas, son of king Herod the Great (d. 4 BCE).

What can a historian say about Jesus? The main body of the story relating to him is recorded in Mark, the earliest of the Gospels. It includes no introduction dealing with the birth of Jesus, nor a conclusion recounting the apparitions following the death of Christ, as do Matthew and Luke. Mark begins with the public career of Jesus, and is silent on his childhood, youth, and early manhood. We learn nothing about his education. When Jesus began to teach, people apparently wondered how this untrained man had acquired such wisdom.

We are nowhere told that Jesus was married. Celibate life was unusual among Jews, except among the monkish Essenes described by Flavius Josephus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yet the Gospels contain no hint that Jesus was an Essene; indeed his religious outlook contradicts theirs. His choice for the unmarried state may have been motivated by his conviction that he was a prophet, a vocation which demanded total renunciation of worldly pleasures to ensure incessant spiritual alertness.

Jesus emerged from 30 years of obscurity when he answered John the Baptizer’s appeal to baptism and repentance. He remained in his company until John was imprisoned by Herod Antipas. Jesus then decided to continue John’s mission in Galilee. He called for repentance and proclaimed the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God, symbolizing a new age in which God would rule unopposed by forces of darkness. He preached in village synagogues by the Lake of Galilee, and accompanied his teaching with charismatic acts of healing and exorcism. He was known as ‘the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee’.

Jesus was a captivating teacher and attracted to himself 12 apostles, largely from among the local fishermen, and a small group of close disciples. During his itinerant ministry he hardly ever left Galilee, venturing no farther than the close-by districts of Tyre and Sidon (in present-day Lebanon), Caesarea Philippi (in Syria), and the territory of the pagan cities of the Greek Decapolis, mostly in Jordan. In his heart he was a countryman who felt at home in villages, vineyards and orchards, and in the cornfields where lilies grew. He shunned cities. He is never said to have set foot in Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee only a few miles distant from his own Nazareth. The first three Gospels bring him only once to Jerusalem from where he did not return.

His teaching struck the audience as new because of his emphasis on the deep religious significance and permanent validity of the Law of Moses, and because his teaching style was different from that of synagogue preachers. Unlike these scribes, Jesus felt no need to produce biblical proof texts to support his message. His spiritual authority was revealed instead by his deeds, the curing of the sick and the possessed.

The contemporaries of Jesus held evil spirits responsible for illness and sin. What for them was demonic possession is called today nervous, mental or psychosomatic disease. For instance the young deaf-mute whom Jesus was to exorcize is characterized as having the symptoms of an epileptic fit: convulsion, falling to the ground, rolling about, and foaming at the mouth. For Jesus, and not just for him, healing, expelling demons and forgiving sins were synonyms. The Dead Sea Scrolls also allude to a Jewish exorcist who cured a Babylonian king from a long illness by forgiving his sins.

Jesus usually healed by touch and exorcized by verbal command. Neither of these actions amounted to ‘work’ which might have legitimately been construed as a breach of the Sabbath. Only narrow-minded village lawyers could accuse him of breaking the law of sabbatical rest.

Jesus was not the only charismatic of his age. Some of his fellow saints, the righteous Honi and the much sought-after Galilean healer Hanina ben Dosa, were also famous for their miraculous powers. They were reputed to have brought rain and prevented famine, cured the sick and kept the demons under control. Like Jesus, they were revered as latter-day prophet Elijahs. In sum, Jesus fitted well into the spiritual landscape of first-century Palestine. The uncommitted Jewish historian Flavius Josephus depicted Jesus about the end of the first century CE as a wise man and a performer of astonishing deeds. For his own followers, Jesus was ‘a man attested by God with mighty works and wonders’ as the Acts of the Apostles informs us.

What distinguished Jesus from the other holy men of his time was the simple beauty and magnetism of his message. He was not a philosopher and had no liking for abstract ideas. He proclaimed the imminence of the Kingdom of God. He never defined the Kingdom but rather likened it to the rich harvest, or to the tiny mustard seed which mysteriously grew into a tall shrub, or to the leaven which imperceptibly turned flour into bread. All these similitudes hint at a new God-centred world to which Jesus prepared the way. He was convinced that the impending presence of this new reality was signalled by his charismatic activity. Echoing Isaiah, he declared that if the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear and the dead re-awaken, then the Day of the Lord is on the doorstep and the Kingdom of God is at hand. The Dead Sea Scrolls also envisage the age of the Messiah as a time when the captives go free, the blind recover their sight, the bent are straightened, the sick healed, and the dead revived.

Jesus was clear about the duties of his followers wishing to enter the Kingdom. Repentance, trust and child-like simplicity had to come first, followed by total devotion and a readiness to surrender at once oneself and all one’s possessions for the sake of the Kingdom. The present had to overshadow the future. Forward planning was meaningless: the time of this world and of its institutions could easily run out before tomorrow.

The religion of Jesus was one of urgency, enthusiasm, compassion and love. If he had any preference, it was for the little ones and the despised. In his view, the return of a single lost sheep, a tax-collector or a harlot would cause more rejoicing in heaven than the secure progress of 99 righteous ones.

Since the charismatic deeds of Jesus were seen as the signs of the messianic age, it is not surprising that many expected him to reveal himself as the Messiah, the divinely appointed king who would defeat the Romans and establish justice and peace on earth. The first three Gospels suggest that Jesus was not keen on being proclaimed the Christ. He had no political ambitions. Apart from a couple of doubtful passages, he declined to give a straight answer to the question, Are you the Messiah? His usual reply was evasive, like ‘You have said so’, or ‘You say that I am’, implying the tacit ‘but not I’.

Rumours that nevertheless he might be the Messiah undoubtedly contributed to his downfall, but his tragic end was precipitated by an unfortunate episode in the Temple of Jerusalem. The noisy business transacted by the merchants and money-changers in the courtyard of the house of God outraged Jesus and the indignant rural holy man overturned their tables and threw them out. He thus created a fracas in the overcrowded city in the days leading up to Passover when the Jews expected the Messiah to arrive. So Jesus appeared to the Jewish and Roman authorities as a potential threat to law and order. The authorities had to act promptly and they did so, though the Jewish leaders preferred to pass the responsibility to Pontius Pilate. In short, Jesus died on the Roman cross because he did the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

However, Jesus made such a profound impact on the mind of his apostles and disciples that they attributed to the power of his name the continued efficacy of their charismatic healing activity and their preaching. Crucified, dead and buried, Jesus rose in the hearts of his disciples who loved him, and so he lived on.

Notes

1 Geza Vermes, 1973, Jesus the Jew, London: SCM Press.

2 Geza Vermes, 1983, Jesus and the World of Judaism, London: SCM Press.

3 Geza Vermes, 1993, The Religion of Jesus the Jew, London: SCM Press.

4 Geza Vermes, 2000, The Changing Faces of Jesus, London: Penguin.

5 Geza Vermes, 1998, Providential Accidents, London: SCM Press.