Geza Vermes - The Real Jesus: Then and Now

Preface

In years gone by, not a few university colleagues of mine have considered it below their dignity to engage in what the French call haute vulgarisation, the presentation of complicated issues of scholarship to a broad readership avoiding the use of technical jargon and requiring no prior familiarity with the subject. This attitude, in which obscurity parades as profundity and lack of perspicacity is assumed to indicate advanced learning, often derives from the inability of specialists to express themselves with clarity and simplicity. I would like to think that I was born with the gift of easy communication, being the son of a life-long journalist. The smell of the printers ink is among my early childhood memories and, at the age of 12, during the Berlin Olympics, I ran the sports column of my fathers paper. In 1971, when I began to edit the Journal of Jewish Studies, I felt I was reviving the family tradition tragically interrupted in 1944 by the murderous lunacy released on the innocent in Hitlers empire. This background will explain why even my most creative works, like Jesus the Jew, were meant to be easily accessible to any educated person interested in the subject. Indeed, on retiring from my Oxford professorship, I expressly vowed to dedicate myself to sharing with the widest possible circles the insights gained through half a century of wrestling with ideas springing from the interaction between Judaism and Christianity.

After my early apprenticeship in the 1930s, I decided in the 1980s and 1990s to try again my hand at writing for the press, but most of my journalistic activity, my addresses at literary festivals as well as my participation in radio programmes and television documentaries date to the twenty-first century. The various bits that follow were originally published in dailies, weeklies and monthlies, especially in The Times, the Independent, the Guardian, the Daily and the Sunday Telegraph, and Standpoint. I must admit that I found journalisms constraint to express myself quickly and in an easily readable style highly exciting and enjoyable.

The Age of Jesus

In 1906 Albert Schweitzer solemnly declared the quest for the historical Jesus to be an unattainable task, yet despite his eloquent funeral oration the Jesus of history has refused to lie down or disappear. In fact, with the exception of a handful of inveterate doubters, most present day scholars go to the other extreme and take the existence of Jesus so much for granted that they do not bother to inquire into the meaning of historicity. Yet the truth is that Jesus and the movement which arose in his wake did not exist in vacuo: they were integral parts of first-century Jewish society, a society formed by the forces and influences of previous generations and by the impact of Hellenism and of the political power of Rome. These Jewish and Graeco-Roman influences interacted and created the matrix out of which Christianity emerged.

The purpose of this book is to make the reader aware of the amalgam of ideas, inspirations and impulses that penetrated the age of Jesus.1 To achieve this purpose in a vivid fashion, I have chosen to present a series of biographical vignettes. The wider world will be made tangible through the depiction of individuals, who in their various ways were influential in the making of history. Whos Who in the Age of Jesus portrays personalities from the New Testament, from the works of first-century Jewish writers, from rabbinic literature and from the sources of Graeco-Roman history. These personalities occasionally appear in various records. Rulers of Judaea, Jewish leaders and Roman dignitaries such as Herod the Great, Antipas, Annas and Caiaphas, Gamaliel the Elder, Augustus, Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, etc., are mentioned in the New Testament, and some New Testament characters (Jesus, John the Baptist, James the brother of the Lord) make a fleeting appearance in Josephus and in the accounts of Roman historians like Tacitus. Other Jewish characters like Hillel the Elder, Honi and Hanina ben Dosa, Jesus son of Ananias, who are recorded in Josephus or in rabbinic literature, shed important light on the Gospel story. In consequence, a multi-pronged approach to the age of Jesus promises to open up unexpected fresh vistas.