Jesus in the right context !
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I can't help but feel that the previous reviewer has missed the point of this book. What Geza Vermes has achieved here is to separate the modern-day, Christian interpretation of Jesus's words and actions from the first century, Jewish point of view, i.e. the rightful context of Jesus's ministry. In the process he succinctly demonstrates the evolution and mythification of the life of a charismatic Galilean preacher. A must-read before attending the next Alpha course!
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Vermes fails in methodology, exegesis
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The Changing Faces of Jesus, partly an update of Jesus the Jew, goes into all the New Testament writings, whereas Jesus the Jew concentrated on the Synoptics, Matthew, Mark and Luke. The Changing Faces of Jesus is a sad book, and often a bad (because unscholarly) book. Vermes many times abandons scholarship to make belittling comments. For example (1) on p. 215, discussing the twelve-year-old Jesus debating with the Temple teachers `in his Father's house', where Luke is presenting Jesus as the Son of God, His Father, in a quite unique way, Vermes sees no more than a family story such as every Jewish family tells about its precocious son. (2) When Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey (in the gospel writers' view showing Jesus as fulfilling Zechariah's messianic prophecy), Vermes' understanding is (in Jesus the Jew) - that was the least tiring way. (3) The crucial issue in the split between Christians and Jews was the question of the Messiah. This is reflected in chapter 9 of St John's gospel, where the man who accepts Jesus as Messiah is `put out of the synagogue'. Vermes says (page 30, n.1) that all that that means, as any good `contentious' Jew will understand, is - if you don't like your local synagogue you just go down the road to the next one. (4) Again, speaking of the commandment to love one another, but missing the point of the special Johannine resonances (`as I have loved you'), Vermes says (page 44): "John's Gentile Christians required a course for primary school pupils in which the simplest details had to be spelt out". (5) Vermes tells us that if he were Jesus, things wouldn't have turned out as they did; he would have written his own story, instead of leaving it to his followers, and so on (e.g. pp. 264,269,270). He ends (p. 270) by having Jesus say, "You've been told to expect everything from me. I say, you must save yourselves". This is totally false to the NT, and no less so to the Old Testament. Vermes calls his whole Epilogue (pp 269,270) a Dream. It is simply a triviliazed childish fantasy. The above issues hardly need scholarly refutation. As a serious New Testament scholar, I object to this parody of scholarship.
Even when he attempts serious exegesis, Vermes' interpretation of the New Testament is continually at fault. On page 118, he dismisses the title of `Servant' given to Jesus as being of no significance. Yet throughout the NT the Servant Songs of Isaiah and many other Isaianic themes are key sources from OT times for the Person and role of Jesus. Again, on p. 78 Vermes repeats arguments, against the scholarly consensus, that the hymn in Philippians 2.6-11, explicitly attributing to Jesus the text which Isaiah 45.23 addresses to Yahweh, must be a late insertion into Paul's letter. On every count this is unlikely. In Philippians itself the idea occurs again, and it is also equally strongly suggested in the text of Romans 10.9 (probably another pre-Pauline confession): "if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord (kyrios) ... you will be saved". Will we be saved by believing merely that Jesus is greater than Caesar? Must not `kyrios' here, applied to Jesus, mean `Yahweh'? See also, in the same sense, Romans 10.13, 1 Cor 12.3, Col 2.6, etc.
Vermes simply will not accept that to understand the person and the role of Jesus one has to go back to the typology, the prophecies and the history of the Old Testament (including the Apocrypha), as every New Testament author does, and not forward for between two hundred and six hundred years after the life of Christ to the rabbinic teachings which are conditioned by their explicit rejection of the New Testament witness to Jesus as Son of God, Messiah, God. His references back to the Old Testament in Jesus the Jew are less numerous and less significant than his forward references to this much later rabbinic literature. The Changing Faces has no index of biblical references. Vermes' relative neglect of the OT, from which the NT Jesus springs, is indefensible. For some idea of the massive OT sourcing of the Jesus story, see the Index of `Loci Citati vel Allegati' [textual quotations, references, and influences from the Old Testament used in the NT] in Nestle-Aland's Novum Testamentum Graece, which can be expanded indefinitely.
It is false methodology to depend primarily on the thinking of the rabbinic writers (for all that they may contribute occasional useful information) as the source of the authentic portrait of Christ, in preference to the Christian NT authors, Jewish to a man (with the possible exception of Luke), believers in the OT as their only scripture, familiar with the world of ideas found in the Dead Sea Scrolls (see Fr Joseph Fitzmyer's The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian Origins, Eerdmans, 2000), contemporaries or first or second generation successors to the immediate hearers and followers of Jesus.
Yet again: Vermes's comparison between Jesus and the Jewish holy men Honi and Hanina ben Dosa simply fails. They may match a St Francis of Assisi, but emphatically not Francis's Master, the Lord Jesus Christ. I quote only one comparison. Vermes (p. 252) sees no difference between the run-of-the-mill `bat qol' to "Hanina `my son'" and the `bat qol's to Jesus at his Baptism and Transfiguration where the heavenly messages are: "You are my Son, the Beloved, the Only-Begotten; with you I am well pleased ... This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him" (Mark 1.11; 9.7, NRSV). These recall Isaiah 42.1, Ps 2.2, Genesis 22.2 (the Aqedah), the Exodus appearances to Moses, Deut 18.15. Is this said to Honi or Hanina? Did they bring in the Kingdom of God? Were they acclaimed as Messiah? Did they rise from the dead? Were they acclaimed as God?
Vermes denies, in the face of the evidence, all of these Christian claims. He is forced to believe this instead: that Jesus, bloodied from the scourging, crowned with thorns, crucified as a deluded messiah/king, dead, "[Jesus] yet rose in the hearts of his disciples who had loved him and felt he was near" (quoting Winter, pp. 174,175). This is incredible and impossible invention on the part of Winter/Vermes by which they seek to explain away the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ and the disciples' devotion to preaching unto their deaths the truth of this resurrection. Winter/Vermes are simply lamentable.
The OT foreshadowings are fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and not in any other Jewish holy man (see the despairing and nihilistic book by Dan Cohn-Sherbok, The Jewish Messiah, T & T Clark, 1997). Judaism has only ever produced one candidate as Messiah, Son of God, God-with-us - Jesus Christ. Both methodologically and exegetically, the Christian position stands.
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Superb scholarly mischief
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When Evangelical Christians tell you to read 'the facts' about Jesus, and assert that having done so there could be no rational denial of His divinity, they do not want you to get the details from books like this... Vermes shows what proper textual scholarship can make of the New Testament, and I defy anyone to read this book and still maintain that the virgin birth and resurrection are beyond reasonable doubt.
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Jewish historian, Jewish Jesus
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With "The Changing Faces of Jesus", Geza Vermes once more promulgates his thesis that the historical Jesus was much more like a Jewish Galilean holy man than an apocalyptic preacher, a messiah or a divine son of God. It is work he has carried on (even overtly in print) for over 25 years now since his publication of "Jesus the Jew" so I don't think we should be too surprised to find him following it through here in his latest offering. As it stands, this book is lucid and informative on the Jewish history acolytes to biblical and Jewish studies will be familiar with. Vermes is well known for his mastery of this material and that mastery shows here. So we have much rich and useful background to the world Jesus most probably knew. One point to note, however, is Vermes's seeming philosophical naivety. His use of the word "real" to describe the Jesus he finds - and which the New Testament, he argues, so interestedly disguises - is both irritating and impulsive on his part. In a world in which many studies of Jesus now devote whole sections to what they are actually finding under the rubric "historical Jesus" Vermes's persistent simplification here is both annoying and misleading. But since this book (without footnotes people!) is clearly written for the general reader we may assume such things are thought irrelevant in such a context even if we admit that as a contribution to "the Quest of the historical Jesus" this book will always fall short of the methodological heights others have reached. So, to cut to the quick, this is a book written by an expert in ancient Jewish texts who uses that knowledge to present an angle of view on the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. It is not a Christianised Jesus that is found, for Jesus was not a Christian but a Jewish "man of God" - hence the Gospels and the New Testament are engaging in creative writing in line with their beliefs - something Vermes finds understandable if not entirely historical. The reader, thus, must judge whether such a Jesus is something they can stomach before they begin to read a book written from the point of view of an expert in Jewish texts. It may be judged, though, that history is rather more than fitting historical figures into the available information - which is Vermes's assumed method. One last point: the Epilogue, of a dream Vermes once had, where Jesus appears and speaks to various religious communities is a priceless piece of hyperbole!
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