In one sense, the final
chapters of Geza Vermes’ book
The
Changing Faces of Jesus[i]
are unnecessary.
Chapters one and two
dealt with the Jesus described in the Gospel of John,
chapters three and four with the Jesus of Paul,
chapter five with the portrait of Jesus found in the Acts
of the Apostles, and
chapter six covered the Jesus described in the synoptic
gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke.
Finally now in chapters seven and eight, Vermes describes the Jesus he
believes to be the ‘real’ and ‘historical’ Jesus.
But he’s been doing
this all along – holding this portrait up against the various portraits of
Jesus he describes in the different parts of the New Testament. The only new thing in these chapters is that
Vermes is grounding this portrait of the ‘real and historical’ Jesus in “the
realities of the Jewish world of his day.” This way, explains Vermes, is the only chance we have to “transform Jesus into a lifelike character.”
In
another section Vermes describes the job of the historian as “to reconvert the
Christ of the Gospels…into the real tangible, flesh-and-blood person who once
used to walk on the rocky dusty paths of the first century rural Galilee.”
[ii] In these chapters Vemes quotes extra-biblical
sources like the writings of the historian, Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and
the writings of the rabbis in the Mishnah to recreate the milieu of Jesus’ time
and place, to retrieve the atmosphere that he breathed, so that we can “catch a
glimpse of what he really was.”
[iii]
I think his choice of
verbs here is particularly illuminating.
According to Vermes, we must “
transform”
Jesus and “
reconvert” Jesus because
the gospel writers have
“concealed”
and “
disguised” him.
[iv] Though
Vermes has described himself as an objective and neutral historian,
[v]
it’s apparent that he does have an agenda.
This isn’t a criticism or fault. But he should be open and up front about it.
Pretending to be unbiased is bad form and bad history. It is
true that the gospel writers have not written unbiased objective histories or
modern biographies of Jesus. We do need to
read the gospels carefully, keeping in mind the Jewish context of Jesus’ life, but
I am not convinced by Vermes’ arguments that primitive Christian church so
completely obscured the historical Jesus.
The historical portrait
of Jesus that Vermes finds compelling is that of a Hasidic Holy Man like Honi
the Circle Drawer and Hanina ben Dosa.
The lives of these charismatic rabbis and healers are brought to life by
Vermes to illustrate their similarity to the Jesus he believes lies beneath the
gospels. They were pious teachers and charismatic
healers who spoke and acted as God’s men in turbulent and changeable times. And, indeed there is much similarity to be
found between them and Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth. The description of these men and of the culture
and religion of Galilee during the first century A.D. is (in my opinion) the
best material of the book.
Seriously. It’s worth plowing
through the rest of the book to get to this material.
But (and there’s always
a “but”, right?) I do have some quibbles.
I have in my previous comments on Vermes’ book accused him of cherry
picking facts, and of exaggerating differences and dismissing similarities in
order to make his arguments. And I think
he does more of that in these chapters.
For example: in previous chapters Vermes has been extremely
critical of the separation of time between the life of Jesus and the writing of
the New Testament, in particular he is reluctant to admit any historicity in
the gospel of John because it is so far removed in time from the historical
life of Jesus. But here in these final
chapters where he is laying out what he believes to be the most trustworthy
portrait of Jesus he is perfectly willing to accept the testimony sources
written as late as or even later than the Gospel of John.
“The Mishna and the
rest of the writings of the rabbis post date the period of Jesus and their testimony
cannot be automatically applied to the situation prevailing in the first
century A.D. yet historical circumstances point in the
direction of the relative reliability of
stereotypes regularly repeated.”
[vi]
He is aware that the sources
he quotes concerning the lives of these Hasidic holy men were written several centuries
after the fact
[vii],
but Vermes offers none of the critical dissection he performed on the New
Testament sources. This is an
inconsistent criticism of late (and therefore, unreliable…) sources.
Another slight but
telling example is found in his use of the “long ending” of Mark’s gospel in
order to highlight the similarities between the New Testament Jesus and his
portrait of the historical Jesus. Vermes
tells the story of Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa who, when bitten by a venomous snake,
was unharmed – in fact it was the snake who died, prompting the rabbinical aphorism
“
Woe to the man bitten by a snake, but
woe to the snake which has bitten ben Dosa.” [viii] This, Vermes says, provides context for Jesus’
“certainty that a man of faith could safely step on, or pick up, serpents
without being harmed,”
[ix]
and supplies Mark 16:17 as the source.
So, even though scholars believe the long ending of Mark’s gospel to be
a much later addition to the gospel, because it dovetails with his own portrait
of Jesus, Vermes is willing to accept it.
[x]
If I have been critical
of Geza Vermes’ book The Changing Faces
of Jesus, it is not because I dislike him or his work. Indeed, I am deeply impressed by his portrait
of Jesus as a Jewish ish ha-Elohim
(man of God) who performed miracles and exorcisms and taught about the imminence
of the Kingdom of God. His description of
Jesus is marvelous:
“[Jesus] inherited the strength,
the iron character, and fearlessness of his predecessors, the prophets. Like Amos facing up to the priest of Bethel
(Amos 7: 10 – 17) and Jeremiah prophesying doom in the face of King Jehoiakim
(Jeremiah 36), Jesus was not afraid to stand up to the powerful. He showed love to children who he proposed as
models for those who sought to enter the Kingdom of God. He welcomed women and felt pity for the sick
and the miserable. He surpassed the
prophets. They embraced the weak, the
poor, the widow, the fatherless; Jesus went further and bravely extended the hand
of friendship to the social outcasts, the unclean prostitutes and the despised
publicans who were kept at arm’s length by his hidebound, pious contemporaries. He is depicted as capable of demonstrating extreme
emotions. He could be moved by pity and
by anger; he let his fury fly and strike opponents and critics. Slowness in comprehension, let alone lack of
understanding, especially on the part of his chosen disciples, often made him
indignant. …. Jesus was a man of steel
and warmth at the same time, and a total devotee of God whose perfection and mercy
he set out to imitate.”
[xi]
But he plays with inconsistent
rules (late sources are bad – except when they agree with his presentation) and
he makes no acknowledgment of opposing interpretations – even to refute them. The Jesus that he finds seems to be the Jesus
he wants to find. And this could be a criticism leveled at all of us. Even myself.
But, then again, I’m not pretending to be a “detached historian.”
At the end of it all, I
like the very Jewish Jesus that Vermes presents, but this stripped down version
of Jesus isn’t compelling. The portrait
of Jesus that Vermes presents is of a Jewish holy man – acceptable to, but not
worshiped by Jews of the first century, and he derides the Jesus of the New
Testament as an “otherworldly Christ” -
worshipped by Gentiles who had no real understanding of the Jewish roots of the
man Jesus. The problem is the gap
between them. Between the historical
life of Jesus the Jewish holy man and his worship and adoration by Gentile
believers – are the original followers (and worshippers) of Jesus who were
themselves, Jewish. In order to bridge
that gap, Jesus must have been something
more than what Vermes presents.
[i]
Vermes, Geza
The Changing Faces of Jesus, Viking Compass, New York, NY.
2000.
[x]
Granted – this idea of picking up serpents is also in Luke 10:19, and Vermes
cites it as well, but it’s his inconsistent criticism of late (and therefore-as he says- historically unreliable) sources that bothers me.
In the past couple of years I have intentionally been reading books about the “Historical Jesus,” books by scholars like Geza Vermes, John Dominic Crossan, Willie Marxsen, John P. Meier, Raymond E. Brown, and etcetera… Some I have appreciated. Others I have rejected.
