A Circular Book

When did Geza Vermes’s Jesus and the World of Judaism find its way onto my bookshelves? It dates to 1983, has some loose pages (more since I actually tried to read it) and however long it is since it appeared in the library I have never really consulted it. As it turns out, its outlook makes it of very limited use and I have seldom come so close to simply abandoning a book!

Geza Vermes’s personal history is illuminating: he came from a Jewish background and spent time as a Roman Catholic priest (a member of an order specifically dedicated to praying for the conversion of the Jews) before renouncing Christianity and turning to a non-religious sort of Judaism later in life, and teaching at Newcastle followed by Oxford. At the time Vermes was writing, it was easy enough when reading any sort of Biblical exegesis to ignore the fact that Jesus was a Jew; he was part of shifting that perception, but it was pretty clear that he came to the conclusion that Jesus was only a Jew.

I say ‘came to the conclusion’, but it wasn’t a position drawn from evidence: it was a belief derived from Vermes’s own conflicts and then read into the texts he knew so well. His work was part of the ‘quest for the historical Jesus’ movement that tried to uncover what we could know for certain about him; all very well, but there is an unavoidable circularity: the evidence you deem admissible in this search is already pre-determined by who you think Jesus is. So for Vermes, Jesus is a 1^st-century Jewish reformer and nothing more; anything which suggests otherwise (the Gospel of John, the Epistles) is ‘Hellenic’ influence imposed on his original, and very limited, message, and should be discounted. Even material in Matthew, Mark and Luke which tends to hint at a divine significance to Jesus’s acts is also to be excised as representing later impositions by Christians. Once you’ve done this, you examine what’s left to find your ‘historical Jesus’ and, wonder of wonders, you get a Palestinian preacher with nothing groundbreaking to say at all: you wonder why anyone got so excited about the man. Again and again, Vermes says in various ways ‘we can trust that this passage or saying is authentic because it conflicts with the doctrine of the Church’. You can see the point of that, but its inverse – that anything in the New Testament which coincides with the doctrine of the Church must therefore be a false imposition – leads to the dismantling of the very texts you claim to investigate. The trouble is (as scholars have pointed out increasingly over the last few decades) that all our evidence about Jesus is already part of the Church’s proclamation, part of the kerygma, and you can’t disentangle him from the doctrinal presentation of him. Vermes recognises this objection, even in 1983, but swipes it away as it tends to undercut his entire project and leave him with nothing to say.

I didn’t entirely give up on Jesus and the World of Judaism because I realised there are chapters which usefully talk about the contribution of Jewish texts to understanding his context; but I did, at one point, literally shut the book in frustration and put it to one side. It was here, as Vermes discusses the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. For him, any hint of patience, or waiting, of readiness or preparation for the Judgement, indicates a later interpolation by a Church facing up to the indefinite delay of the Parousia. It can’t come from Jesus, it just can’t:

The parable of the ‘wise’ virgins – supposedly wise, but to my mind cunning and selfish – reflects an insistence on the part of the church to be constantly ready; it contributes nothing to an active participation in the work for the kingdom of God … Did Matthew or his later editor not realise that this parable is a travesty of Jesus’s teachings on generosity and confident prayer contained in the same gospel?

And so this approach leads you not to try to work out what Jesus’s teachings were from the texts, but to judge the texts by the version of Jesus you want to believe in. The writers of the texts are fools, who know Jesus so much less well than you do. I'm afraid I can see little reason for me spending time on this.