Pompey’s entry into Jerusalem and 100 years before the defeat of Bar Kokhba at the battle of Bether.
It is my sincere hope that the historical perspective opened up through these vignettes will enable the reader to grasp the historical reality of the leading figures of the New Testament and to understand better their link with the Jewish and Roman protagonists of the society of their age.
Note
1 Geza Vermes, 2006, Who’s Who in the Age of Jesus, London: Penguin.
2
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