Jesus in his Jewish Context (review)

For a man who turned 80 in 2003, Geza Vermes has had in the last few years an academic output to put younger scholars to shame. In the past three years alone, he has released three books, bringing his total over the course of a forty-year career to eleven. Vermes, a Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and a retired Professor of Jewish Studies, brings new vigor to the term "emeritus."

Known primarily for his translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls into English, Jesus in his Jewish Context is Vermes' fifth book on Jesus. The first and most groundbreaking was Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels (1973), which transformed Vermes into a key player in the so-called "Third Quest" for the historical Jesus. No other scholar of Christian Origins so relentlessly insists upon re-drawing the historical Jesus as a man entirely situated in the context of early first-century Judaism. This approach defied German, antisemitic New Testament scholarship that posited a Jesus completely sanitized of his Jewish roots and context. The profound impact of Jesus the Jew on the Academy only underscores the degree to which National Socialism influenced both popular and scholarly views of Jesus for generations after its demise.

This particular book the author intended to be a "replacement" of his Jesus and the World of Judaism (1983). Accordingly, this new volume follows precisely the chapter topics and most of the text of the earlier book word-for-word, diverging from it only in its last four chapters. Vermes adds here more work on Josephus; he also augments and updates two chapters on the Dead Sea Scrolls, including a retrospective chapter, "The Dead Sea Scrolls Fifty Years On." The book's twelve chapters are relatively brief, ranging from historiographical surveys to autobiographical reflections. Readers who already own Jesus and the World of Judaism, though, should note that there is little new material here overall.

For those unfamiliar with Vermes' work, however, there is much here to widen eyes. Vermes boldly defines Jesus as a "Galilean Hasid" ("there, as I see it, lies his greatness, and also the germ of his tragedy") (p. 10), a preacher of teshuvah (p. 11), a "renowned exorcist" (p. 25), and, less radically, a teacher (ch. 3). Still, he cautions against understanding the title "rabbi" through modern lenses; in Jesus' time, he claims, the word meant something like "my great man" (p. 27). Jesus was not like the later Pharisees, known for the skilled understanding of the intricacies of Jewish law (p. 28). This news would undoubtedly unsettle many Christian readers. But Vermes, undeterred, continues to dismantle Christian myths of Jesus' uniqueness. He undermines, for instance, the idea of Jesus as eschatological in a "forward-looking sense" (p. 33), and even takes on the Christian insistence that Jesus' use of the baby-word abba, "daddy," denoted his special relationship with G_d: "abba . . . could be used in solemn, far from childish situations" (p. 38). Knowing well Christian claims that Jesus departed from Judaism in his intensification and spiritualization of the Law, Vermes notes, "where the Law is concerned, the chief distinction of Jesus' piety lies in his extraordinary emphasis on the real inner religious significance of the commandments" (p. 43). But lest Christians claim triumph on this point, he quickly continues, "Needless to say, he was not the only Jewish teacher to insist on symbolism, inwardness and sincerity. Philo and Josephus did the same. So did many of the rabbis, and the Qumran sectaries" (p. 43).

Readers will realize after making their way through Vermes' lengthy refutation of scholars like John P. Meier and Joseph Fitzmeyer that Jesus in his Jewish Context is not so much about Jesus in the context of Galilee or Judea, as it is about Vermes' work on Jesus in the context of other studies on the topic. Vermes is particularly unrelenting toward Christian theologians, whom he accuses of a dangerously partisan tendency to favor reconstructions of the Christ...