This review first appeared in The Catholic
Herald
A Looking Glass God
By Dwight Longenecker
The Changing Faces of Jesus
by Geza Vermes,
Allan Lane The Penguin Press,
£18.99
In 1926 the Protestant scholar
Rudolf Bultmann admitted, 'I do indeed think that
we can
now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality
of Jesus.' Bultmann’s pessimism has done nothing
to stem the flow of books about the historical Jesus.
Each author believes he can explain the eternal enigma
of Jesus the Man, but too often each scholar’s portrait
of Jesus ends up looking more like the scholar than
Jesus. This tendency to draw self portraits has caused
a more recent scholar, John Dominic Crossan to remark,
'It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical
Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology
and call it history or to do autobiography and call
it biography.'
One of the
more fascinating writers in this field is Geza
Vermes. Well-known for his
translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Vermes was born
into a Hungarian Jewish family that had converted
to Catholicism. The young Vermes was ordained as
a Catholic priest, only to return to the faith of
his fathers in the 1960s. He is now Professor Emeritus
of Jewish Studies at Oxford, and has written a trilogy
of books which explore the first century Jewish background
of Jesus of Nazareth. Crucial to his work has been
his comparison of Jesus to two other charismatic
Jewish teachers: Honi (first century BC) and
the Galilean Hanina ben Dosa (first century AD).
The Changing Faces of Jesus is
Vermes’ attempt to look behind the ‘divine Christ’ developed
by the Hellenistic church to glimpse Jesus the charismatic
Jewish preacher. To do this Vermes ventures into
the wonderland of New Testament scholarship. The
problem with modern New Testament scholarship is
there are so many theories about authorship of particular
books and crucial passages, that one can salvage
or jettison texts to prove almost any thesis. A phalanx
of scholars can then be chosen to buttress your selection.
Unfortunately, those with opposing views are busy
assembling their own band of scholars and arguing
just as persuasively for their particular texts.
A good example of this is the authorship of the
Epistle to the Colossians. The New Jerusalem Bible
says, ‘the balance is now in favour of Paul with
good justification.’ Vermes however claims, ‘most
scholars consider’ Colossians to be written ‘not
by Paul himself but by his disciples and heirs.’ Colossians
includes the famous passage in which Jesus is called
the ‘image of the unseen God.’ If this is by Paul,
then it doesn’t fit Vermes’ thesis that all ideas
of a divine Christ are later Hellenistic concepts.
One therefore can’t help suspecting that Vermes chooses
those scholars who reject the Pauline authorship
of Colossians since that better supports his view.
A more blatant example
of special pleading is Vermes’ treatment
of Philippians 2 where Paul says Jesus is ‘in very
nature God’. It is virtually universally accepted
that St Paul, writing around the year 60, is quoting
an even earlier Christian hymn. Vermes simply asserts, ‘The
hymn makes much better sense if it is taken as an
existing liturgical composition inserted into the
letter… not by Paul himself, but by a later editor.’
Vermes has said he is
simply trying to get beyond 2000 years of Christian
interpretation to understand
how a sympathetic first century Jew would have responded
to Jesus. He seems to forget that in the New Testament
we have a document telling us exactly how sympathetic
first century Jews thought about Jesus. One of them
called Peter thought Jesus was the ‘spotless lamb
which existed from before the foundation of the world
(I Pt. 1.20) and another called Paul thought he was ‘the
image of the unseen God.’ (Col. 1.13)
The underlying problem
with Vermes’ New Testament
scholarship is the same as that of Protestant-ism.
Neither of them accept an authentic interpretative
authority for Scripture. Although they can’t stand
one another, the conservative Protestant and the
liberal academic both cling to a kind of sola
Scriptura, and that lack of an external authority
means they both end up in the same quicksand of contradictory
interpretations, all of which express not much more
than the writer’s personal opinion.
In saying that, Vermes
is a genuine scholar. He writes well and his seminal
work on both the Dead
Sea Scrolls and the first century Jewish background
to the gospels is indispensable. His charismatic
Jewish teacher is not alien from the Jesus of the
synoptic account, and his work sheds valuable light
on Jesus the Man. Indeed, in 1984, in its authoritative
declaration on Christology, the Papal Biblical Commission
said Vermes is one of those Jewish historians whose
work must be accorded ‘serious attention by Christian
theologians’. Vermes’ books on Jesus are important,
and if Vermes’ Jesus is taken with all the others,
despite Bultmann’s pessimism, a fascinating mosaic
portrait of the human Jesus can be pieced together.
