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Geza Vermes |
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Geza Vermes was born in Hungary in 1924. He studied in Budapest and in Louvain where he read Oriental history and languages and in 1953 obtained a doctorate in theology with a dissertation on the historical framework of the Dead Sea Scrolls. From 1957 to 1991 he taught in England at the universities of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1957-65) and Oxford (1965-91). He is now Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, but continues to teach at the Oriental Institute in Oxford. He has edited the Journal of Jewish Studies since 1971, and since 1991 he has been director of the Oxford Forum for Qumran Research at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Professor Vermes is a Fellow of the British Academy, the holder of an Oxford D. Litt. and of honorary doctorates from the Universities of Edinburgh, Durham and Sheffield.
His first article on the Dead Sea Scrolls appeared in 1949 and his first book, Les manuscrits du désert de Juda, in 1953. It was translated into English in 1956 as Discovery in the Judean Desert. He is also the author of Scripture and Tradition in Judaism (1961, 1973, 1983); Jesus the Jew (1973, 1976, 1981, 1983); The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective (1977, 1981, 1982, 1994); Jesus and the World of Judaism (1983, 1986); The Religion of Jesus the Jew (1993); and (with Martin Goodman) The Essenes According to the Classical Sources (1989). He played a leading part in the rewriting of Emil Schürer's classic work The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (1973-87). One of its volumes (III/I, 1986) includes a detailed introduction to the non-biblical Dead Sea Scrolls.
Charismatic, revolutionary, divine; the legacy of the religious figure of Jesus surrounds us with the rituals, moral codes and practices of Christianity recognized throughout most of the globe. In The Changing Faces of Jesus, Geza Vermes, author, historian and scholar, examines the historical figure of Jesus and presents us with an insightful, engaging and unique account drawing on his background as both a Jew and a Christian.
According to an oft-repeated saying, books on Jesus tell more about their authors than about Jesus himself. I would like to think that my case is an exception. My interest in Jesus was not the product of my religious to-ing and fro-ing (though I had a fair share of that). I was born in a Jewish family, brought up as a Christian, but after years I found myself back at my Jewish roots. My approach to Jesus in the present book and in the previous trilogy: Jesus the Jew (1973), Jesus and the World of Judaism (1983), and The religion of Jesus the Jew (1993) is that of a sympathetic but religiously unbiased observer who is moved by the tragedy of Jesus of Nazareth. The inside story of my personal and scholarly wanderings may be read in Providential Accidents: an Autobiography (1998).
The purpose of The Changing Faces of Jesus is to sketch four different portraits of Jesus in the various levels of the New Testament. In the first, the Gospel of John, he appears as a Stranger from heaven. In the second, the letters of Paul, Jesus is the universal Saviour of Jews and Gentiles. In the third, the Acts of the Apostles, he is a charismatic prophet elevated by God to the dignity of Lord and Messiah. In fourth, the Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, Jesus is a Galilean healer, exorcist and the preacher of the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God. The fifth 'face' lies beneath the earliest layer of Gospel tradition. It can be seen after the Gospel picture has been immersed into the real world of first century AD Palestinian Judaism as known from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings of the first century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, and the rest of the post-biblical and rabbinic literature of the Jews. The face of this 'authentic' Jesus, truly human, wholly God-centred, passionately faith-inspired and under the impulse of the here and now, impressed itself so deeply on the minds of his disciples that not even the shattering blow of the cross could arrest its continued real presence. It was only a generation or two later, with the increasing delay of the expected second coming, that the image of Jesus familiar from experience began to fade, covered over first by the mystical dreamings of Paul and John, and afterwards by the theological speculations of the non-Jewish, soon to become anti-Jewish church.
In The Changing Faces of Jesus I have tried to strip away the layers of early and later doctrinal accretions resulting in the otherworldly picture of the Christ of Christianity to reveal again the 'real' Jesus of Nazareth of first-century Palestine.
