Jesus the Jew

By Geza Vermes

In this, Geza Vermes' best known book, there emerges perhaps the closest portrayal that we have of a genuinely historical Jesus. Freed from the weight and onus of Christian doctrine or Jewish animus, Jesus here appears as a vividly human, yet profoundly misunderstood, figure, thoroughly grounded and contextualised within the extraordinary intellect

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Jan 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9780334048206

Book preview

These pages are dedicated to the memory of a friend, the leading Jewish New Testament scholar of his generation, whose outstanding achievement in the field of Gospel research is justly celebrated, and whose death on 9 October 1969 created a large gap in the world of learning and left a perceptible emptiness in the lives of the few who loved him.

PAUL WINTER

1904–1969

IN PIAM MEMORIAM

© Geza Vermes, 1973, 1983, 1994

Preface © Stefan C. Reif 2001

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.

0 334 02839 6

First published in 1973 by

William Collins Sons & Co.

Second edition published 1983 by

SCM Press Ltd

This edition first published 2001 by

SCM Press

9–17 St Albans Place, London N1 0NX

Second impression 2006

Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd,

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

Contents

Preface by Stefan C. Reif

Preface by the Author

Introduction: from Christianity to Jesus

PART I: THE SETTING

1 Jesus the Jew

2 Jesus and Galilee

3 Jesus and charismatic Judaism

PART II: THE TITLES OF JESUS

4 Jesus the prophet

Excursus: prophetic celibacy

5 Jesus the lord

Excursus: ‘lord’ and the style of the Gospel of Mark

6 Jesus the Messiah

Excursus I: Jesus, son of David

Excursus II: the metaphorical use of ‘to anoint’

7 Jesus the son of man

Excursus I: the cloud, a means of heavenly transport

Excursus II: debate on the circumlocutional use of son of man

8 Jesus the son of God

Excursus: son of God and virgin birth

Postscript

List of abbreviations

Notes

Acknowledgements

Reference index

Index of names and subjects

Preface

A thousand years ago, the image that people had of Jesus of Nazareth was not the result of a complex challenge to their knowledge, intellect and faith but depended to a great extent on whether they were Christians or Jews. For the former, Jesus was the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, who was sent into the world to preach his message and to suffer crucifixion and who was resurrected on the third day after his death and then reunited with God at his right hand. For the latter, Jesus was born as a result of his mother’s illicit relations, was a brilliant student who rebelled against his teachers and used the power of the divine name to perform sorcery, for which activities he was put to death. The precise Christian theology might vary from sect to sect and the Jewish folklore could take on different forms but the essential point of controversy remained the same, namely, whether Jesus was human or divine.

Once the seeds of modern thinking had been planted among Christians and had sprouted Protestant interpretations and humanist viewpoints, the intellectual blossoms took on a different hue. As Isabel Rivers has pointed out in the first volume of her Reason, Grace and Sentiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991 p. 83), Edward Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester, could, in his The Design of Christianity of the 1670s, describe Jesus as the most balanced, charming and attractive of men, nothing short of a model Anglican gentleman. As the episcopal view put it,

he was a Person of the Greatest Freedom, Affability and Courtesie, there was nothing in his Conversation that was at all Austere, Crabbed or Unpleasant. Though he was always serious, yet he was never sowr, sullenly Grave, Morose or Cynical; but of a marvellously conversable, sociable and benign temper.

For the German orientalist, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, who died in 1768, Jesus was a Jewish political leader who attempted to rid his country of the Roman occupation and marched into Jerusalem in the hope of being proclaimed the newly anointed leader (Hebrew: mashiaḥ; English: ‘messiah’). He was put to death for his efforts, and his supporters stole and hid his body. They then explained their hero’s reverse of fortune by promoting the idea of his resurrection and a more theological notion of his messianic activity.

One of the results of the liberation of Christians from their theological confines was, of course, the emancipation of the Jews from the narrowness of their ghettos. As a consequence of this greater freedom, intellectual Jews of the early nineteenth century in central and western Europe sought to replace their folkloristic view of Jesus with one that could occupy a more convincing place in the new Jewish history that they were composing. Both Christians and Jews were therefore at that time enthusiastically uncovering layers of legend, literature and theology as they searched for the ‘historical Jesus’ that might lie at the core of their traditions. What they found in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not one modern figure to replace their medieval notions but a rich kaleidoscope of differing images. Jesus had been an inspired teacher whose religious life had been simple but sublime; or an ascetic who had rejected the community and the present in favour of the individual and the future; or a popular hero whose humanity deserved the greatest adulation. For some scholars, he was a humble Pharisee who told superb parables and subscribed to a brilliant code of ethics while for others he was a Galilean revolutionary zealot, or an Essene who favoured poverty, esotericism and celibacy. He was even made to take on the guise of a modern Reform Rabbi.

But, as is well recognized by contemporary historians, it is virtually impossible to remove all traces of personal bias and tendentious interpretation from the treatment of such a sensitive subject. Inevitably, the majority of modern Jewish scholars continued with their tendency to dwell on the human aspect of Jesus while many of their Christian counterparts persisted in stressing his theologically unique character. While the former made efforts to reclaim Jesus for the Jews, the latter preferred to draw a distinction between Jesus of Nazareth and the Divine Christ of their religious commitment. It thus became almost commonplace for leading Protestant academics to disclaim the possibility of recovering any authentic details about the life of the founder of their faith and to characterize the personal information provided in the Gospels as nothing more than religious myths. What remained important and authentic were the Jesus of faith, the divine revelation represented by the New Testament, and the teachings of the Church. Paradoxically, those Christians who still sought to identify the real Jesus who lived and taught in Roman-occupied Judea looked progressively more towards Jewish scholars who could reconstruct that world for them, particularly if such specialists could be seen to be untrammelled by commitments to more traditional forms of Jewish belief and practice. No less paradoxically, these Jewish specialists themselves could respond to the challenge of Jesus’ religious message and devise for themselves, and indeed for any progressive interpretations of Judaism that required it, a sympathetic response that they could justify on what they saw as historical grounds.

It is against the whole academic and religious background just described that one has to understand historical books about Jesus written in recent decades, one of the most prominent of which has undoubtedly been Jesus the Jew, first published by Geza Vermes in 1973. Vermes had been born in Mako, Hungary, between the two World Wars into an assimilated Jewish family that decided to convert to Catholicism when he was seven years old. According to his own account in an autobiography entitled Providential Accidents (London: SCM Press 1998), the motivation for this, at least on his father’s part, was an attempt (sadly unsuccessful) to spare the family the disabilities and the persecution to which Jews were at that time prone. Bright and industrious as he was, the young Geza successfully progressed through a thorough Catholic education and, almost inevitably, found himself in the priesthood. As his autobiography tragically and poignantly makes clear, his status in the Roman Catholic Church did not save his family from the Holocaust and he himself barely escaped with his life. After the War, he studied and researched in the fields of Hebrew and Aramaic in Louvain and Paris and was among the first to apply his learning to the decipherment and interpretation of the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls. Having left the priesthood, he abandoned Catholicism, married and reverted to his Jewish roots. He enjoyed a successful tenure as lecturer in divinity in the University of Newcastle from 1957 until 1965, when he was appointed Reader in, and subsequently Professor of, Jewish Studies in the University of Oxford.

In addition to his important researches on early Jewish Bible exegesis and on the Scrolls, Vermes had an intense desire to study Jesus, the world in which he lived, and the religion which he taught. To that end, Vermes resolved to compose a trilogy of studies, and the book that appeared in 1973 under the title of Jesus the Jew was the first of these, the others being published in 1983 and 1993. As he himself put it in his introduction, that first volume was ‘prompted by a single-minded and devout search for fact and reality and undertaken out of feeling for the tragedy of Jesus of Nazareth’ and by a conviction that he ‘was in fact neither the Christ of the Church, nor the apostate and bogey-man of Jewish popular tradition’. Closely familiar as he was with the history and culture of the Greek and Roman worlds, with the Scripture and teachings of the early church, and with the Hebrew and Aramaic literature of the late Second Temple period, he was able to examine the major sources and discuss the central problems concerning the figure of Jesus and the manner in which it related to the hopes and aspirations of those who knew and followed him and to the earliest development of the Christian church.

The first half of Jesus the Jew, comprising three out of a total of eight chapters, concentrates on presenting a picture of the man, his background, life and message, based on what the author believes may justifiably be gleaned from a historical and literary analysis of a wide range of material relating to the subject. The themes covered include his family details, his Galilean milieu, his relationship with John the Baptist and various Jewish groups, and go on to explain how he died and what happened to his bodily remains. What emerges from the arguments is that Jesus was a nonconformist and charismatic teacher who excelled in a tradition of religious leadership already known in that area of Palestine, preached an outstanding system of ethics, and ministered particularly to Jewish society’s most unfortunate members. In the second half of the volume, Vermes tackles the titles of Jesus and traces their evolution from what, in his view, may genuinely be ascribed to him in his lifetime to what are characteristic of the notions of the early church.

In those five remaining chapters, it is argued that the description that Jesus preferred for himself was that of prophet but that religious and historical circumstances led to the debasement of the concept and its consequent abandonment by the church. The term ‘lord’ is shown to have had a range of meanings extending from the mundane to the divine and the author opts for a sense that is suitable at the outset for a miracle-worker but that ultimately takes on a much grander theological garb. While there are, according to the author, serious grounds for doubting that Jesus claimed messianic status for himself, the Gospels introduced a debate on the topic and the early church used the Jewish rejection of such a claim as part of its religious polemics. Vermes defends his previously published theory about the ‘Son of Man’, pointing to the evidence for the use of the phrase as a circumlocution for the speaker and regarding its occurrence in Daniel 7.13 as a collective term and not a title. As regards the description ‘Son of God’, the earliest use is appropriate for Jesus as a miracle-worker and there is then a steady expansion of its theological significance, culminating in an ascription of divinity that would hardly have elicited a favourable response from the beneficiary himself.

What has made the volume a useful textbook for over quarter of a century is its sober presentation of the relevant texts and the balanced manner in which Vermes argues the possible ways of interpreting these. He applies a light touch and a sense of humour to topics that are by no means uncomplicated and succeeds in engendering in his readers a feeling that they are engaging in a productive dialogue. Powerful challenges are issued by him to those New Testament scholars who believe everything or nothing about the life of Jesus and he is unafraid of categorically stating his own views and slotting them all into place in his systematic reconstruction of the events surrounding the emergence of Christianity. He would undoubtedly be the first to admit that such views must remain speculative and that such a reconstruction cannot be achieved without a significantly subjective input. For some Christian scholars, he has oversimplified the history of the terminology relating to Jesus while for some Jewish ones he has underplayed the role of Jewish religious law in the spiritual activities of Galilean pietists (ḥasidim) of the axial period. His concluding assessment of Jesus as ‘teacher and leader, venerated by his intimates and less committed admirers alike as prophet, lord and son of God’ inevitably raises questions about the nature of his own personal relationship with the Galilean Jew whom he has set out to describe.

What is incontrovertible is that Vermes has followed a long line of Jewish scholars in pointing out that a strong case exists for making historical, literary and religious distinctions between the stories about Jesus, the Synoptic Gospels, the Pauline writings and the teachings of the early church. His kind of approach has made a significant impact on religious as well as scholastic circles, at the institutional as well as the individual level. He has also championed the view that the Qumran Scrolls and Rabbinic literature have much to offer in setting Jesus in his broader religious environment but that they must both be used with caution and with due attention to their own correct chronologies and contexts. This new edition will encourage more discussion of these intriguing and exciting issues.

Stefan C. Reif

Director of Genizah Research

Cambridge University Library

Preface by the Author

With the publication of The Religion of Jesus the Jew, 1993 saw the completion of my Jesus trilogy, but the year was deeply saddened by the death of Pamela Vermes who, during a life of dialogue extending over three and a half decades, contributed so much to what I used to describe as ‘our common labour’.

The first part of the trilogy, Jesus the Jew, celebrated its twenty-first birthday on 20 August 1994. It has passed through a number of British and American editions (Collins, Fontana, and SCM Press in the UK – Macmillan, Collins & World, and Fortress Press in the USA), and has appeared in Spanish, French, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, German and Hungarian translations, and others are at present in the making. With the exception of supplements or improvements due to the progress in our knowledge of the Dead Sea Scrolls which have been appended to this Preface, the book has been kept unchanged. Some of the details have been re-examined and refined in Jesus and the World of Judaism (1983) and in last year’s final instalment, The Religion of Jesus the Jew. Two major claims, the association of Jesus with ‘charismatic’ (prophetic) Judaism and my ‘unorthodox’ understanding of the ‘son of man’ problem in the Gospels, have become part of the general problematic of New Testament scholarship but still continue to provoke argument. This is mostly due, I fear, to German-based North-American methodological dogmatism, alluded to in The Religion of Jesus the Jew (p. 7), which is not able to cope with my pragmatic approach to patterns in the first case or, in the second, with the distinction between what Jesus might or might not have said and meant in Aramaic and the significance of the ‘son of man’ passages in their Greek form, inherited, transmitted and developed by the Gentile church.

This is not the place to report on the reception of Jesus the Jew and the two further volumes of the trilogy; those interested may find accounts elsewhere.¹ However, I would like to record recent Jewish reactions to it which signal that the era of the primitive taboo on Jesus is over, and that even the less learned are openly encouraged to think again by the enlightened.² Equally pleasing is the realization that the Roman Catholic Church has taken a firm stand both on the recognition of the Jewishness of Jesus and on the need for a serious attention to be accorded by Christian theologians to relevant research by Jewish scholars.³

The reconstruction of the portrait of the historical Jesus has been greatly facilitated by the use of the evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Since our knowledge of the Qumran texts has been substantially improved during the last two decades, and especially after the so-called ‘liberation’ of the Scrolls in 1991 when the ban on all the unpublished material was lifted, a general topic and two particular passages in Jesus the Jew require updating.

To begin with the general topic, the recently published Messianic Apocalypse (4Q521) has shed valuable sidelight on charismatic Judaism (pp. 40–66). The fragmentary poem runs as follows.

. . . [the hea]vens and the earth will listen to His Messiah, and none therein will stray from the commandments of the holy ones.

Seekers of the Lord, strengthen yourselves in his service!

All you hopeful in (your) heart, will you not find the Lord in this?

For the Lord will consider the pious, and call the righteous by name.

Over the poor His spirit will hover and will renew the faithful with His power.

And He will glorify the pious on the throne of the eternal Kingdom,

He who liberates the captives, restores sight to the blind, straightens the b[ent].

And the Lord will accomplish glorious things which have never been . . .

For He will heal the wounded, and revive the dead and bring good news to the poor . . .⁴

These few lines bind together the concepts of the Messiah, the Kingdom of God, healing, resurrection and the proclamation of good news to the poor, representing the same charismatic-eschatological pattern as the Gospels’ announcement of victory over devil and disease.

If it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, the Kingdom of God has come upon you (Luke 11: 20).

Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them (Matt. 11: 4–5).

The two particular passages in need of reconsideration concern the ‘son of God’ title; both occur on pages 171–3. The first deals with the interpretation of the Messianic Rule or 1QSa2: 11–12 where the editio princeps reads ‘when [God] shall beget (ywlyd) the Messiah’. Although this phrase may refer metaphorically to the public appointment of the Anointed Son of David, following the prototype of Psalm 2: 7, ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you’, most scholars including myself hitherto preferred a different reading. However, a computer-enhanced image of the text appears to confirm ywlyd, resulting in the translation: ‘When God will have engendered the (Priest) Messiah, he shall come [at] the head of the whole congregation of Israel’. This would signify that at Qumran the Messiah of Aaron was known as ‘son of God’.

The second passage, the so-called ‘Son of God fragment’ or ‘An Aramaic Apocalypse’ (4Q246), only partly available until recently, is in my opinion irrelevant to the New Testament issue. The person alluded to in the phrase, ‘The son of God he will be proclaimed (or: proclaim himself) and the son of the Most High they shall call him’, is not the Messiah, but most probably the last historico-apocalyptic sovereign of the ultimate world empire who, like Antiochus Epiphanes in Dan. 11: 36–37, is expected to declare himself god, and be worshipped as such.⁵ These examples indicate that continued research on the Scrolls and cognate sources is likely to fill further gaps in our patchy portrait of Jesus the Jew.

Martin Buber, one of the foremost religious thinkers of the twentieth century and a great admirer of Jesus, wrote: ‘We Jews know him in a way – in the impulses and emotions of his essential Jewishness – that remains inaccessible to the Gentiles subject to him.’ (‘Christus, Chassidismus, Gnosis’, Werke, vol. III, Kösel and Lambert Schneider, Munich-Heidelberg, 1963, p. 957.) I trust that those who accompany me on this voyage of exploration will recognize the truth of Buber’s words.

G. V.

Introduction: from Christianity to Jesus

I believe . . . in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father. And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead: whose kingdom shall have no end.

The Creed, especially the Nicene variety from which the quotation derives, is regarded by believers and non-believers alike as a genuine, consecrated, shorthand expression of the quintessence of the Christian faith. Not unexpectedly, three-fifths of the document are concerned with the focus of this faith, Jesus the Messiah, the person thought to be the link between heaven and earth, and between time and eternity. The remarkable feature, however, of the resulting portrait of the Jesus of Christianity is its total lack of proportion between history and theology, fact and interpretation. In formulating her profession of faith, the Church shows passionate interest in Christ’s eternal pre-existence and glorious after-life, but of his earthly career the faithful are told next to nothing, save that he was born and died. For its historical anchor, the Creed relies, not on Jesus of Nazareth himself, but on the second-rate and notoriously cruel Roman civil servant, Pontius Pilate.

Yet according to basic church doctrine, Christianity is a historical religion in which knowledge of the divine Christ and the mysteries of heaven springs from the words and deeds of a first-century AD Galilean Jew, a man firmly situated in time and space. Everything told about him originates, not in the Creed, but in the Gospels, and specifically – from the point of view of history – in the earlier Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. Admittedly, not even they were conceived as an objective record of events, nor even as popular chronicles. Nonetheless they are generally less remote from the Jesus of history in time and style of presentation than the last of the four, the spiritual Gospel of John the Divine.¹

The believing Christian is convinced that the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are one and the same. For him there is coherence – identity even – between the Gospel picture and that offered by the Creed: though he may concede that the former is a first sketch preceding the artist’s final masterpiece, an imperfect portrayal leading to the perfect by means of an inward, direct and legitimate development.

By contrast to these imperatives of faith, the issues which writer and reader will explore together are concerned with the primitive, genuine, historical significance of words and events recorded in the Gospels. What they are believed to signify is the business of the theologian; the historian’s task is to discover the original meaning of their message. In pursuit of this aim, the utmost use will be made of the literary legacy of Palestinian and Diaspora Jews from the last two hundred years of the pre-Christian, and the first few centuries of the Christian era: the Apocrypha, and Pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus and Jewish inscriptions, the manuscript discoveries from the Judean desert and early rabbinic writings. These sources will not be treated merely as a backcloth, however, but as witnesses. They will not be employed simply as aids in answering queries arising from the New Testament, but as independent spokesmen capable, from time to time at least, of guiding the enquiry, either by suggesting the right angle of approach, or even the right questions to ask.

It should be emphasized that the present historical investigation of the Gospels is motivated by no sentiment of critical destructiveness. On the contrary, it is prompted by a single-minded and devout search for fact and reality and undertaken out of feeling for the tragedy of Jesus of Nazareth. If, after working his way through the book, the reader recognizes that this man, so distorted by Christian and Jewish myth alike, was in fact neither the Christ of the Church, nor the apostate and bogey-man of Jewish popular tradition, some small beginning may have been made in the repayment to him of a debt long overdue.

PART ONE: THE SETTING

1

Jesus the Jew

Most people, whether they admit it or not, approach the Gospels with preconceived ideas. Christians read them in the light of their faith; Jews, primed with age-old suspicion; agnostics, ready to be scandalized; and professional New Testament experts, wearing the blinkers of their trade. Yet it should not be beyond the capabilities of an educated man to sit down and with a mind empty of prejudice read the accounts of Mark, Matthew and Luke as though for the first time.

The basic Gospel is presented in the form of a record of the life of Jesus from the time of his appearance in public in the company of John the Baptist till the discovery of his empty tomb, a biographical framework into which are incorporated extracts from sayings attributed to him. This primary structure has survived in Mark. The other two evangelists preface it with stories relating to the birth and youth of Jesus which are on the whole theologically motivated; they are distinct from the main Gospel body, which at no stage pays any regard to them. All three Gospels have also an epilogue elaborating on the apparitions of Jesus to his disciples after his resurrection, an afterthought which failed to make its way into the earliest manuscript tradition of Mark,¹ but was inserted without difficulty into Matthew and Luke.

Since it is always an arduous, and often almost hopeless, task to try to establish the historical value of the Synoptic story, the plan here is not to attempt to reconstruct the authentic portrait of Jesus but, more modestly, to find out how the writers of the Gospels, echoing primitive tradition, wished him to be known. What did they think was important about him, and what secondary? On what did they expatiate fully, and what did they gloss over? Who, in brief, was the Jesus of the evangelists?

Personal Particulars

The main Gospel – that covered by Mark – provides the following personal information.

A death certificate can be filled in somewhat more fully.

Family Background

Apart from the infancy stories,² which in any case inject an element of doubt into the issue of paternity, the name of the father of Jesus appears only in Luke and in a variant reading in Matthew.

‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’³

‘Is he not [Joseph] the carpenter’s son?’⁴

The same passage contains also the Greek form of his mother’s name, Maria or Mariam, and (unless the reader’s judgement is affected by the later belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary) the names of his four brothers, Jacob, Joseph, Judah and Simon, and mention of his several sisters.⁵

The main Gospel, as opposed to the birth stories in Matthew and Luke, does not state where Jesus was born. If anything, it implies that his birthplace was Nazareth, the unimportant little Galilean locality where he and his parents lived. The only indirect evidence on his date of birth is concealed in the verse describing him as being of about thirty years of age when John baptized him in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, probably in AD 28/29.⁶

Although several women were included in his group during his ministry, no wife is ever mentioned. He does not seem to have left one behind at home, as he advised his would-be disciples to do,⁷ or as did certain mature Jewish ascetics, the Therapeutae, according to Philo of Alexandria.⁸ The Gospels do not depict him as a widower either, so one is to assume that he was unmarried, a custom unusual but not unheard of among Jews in his time, as will be shown in a later chapter.⁹

Jesus the Carpenter

His secular profession remains uncertain. Tradition has it that he was a carpenter and learned his trade from his father, but this on the fragile evidence that after his first and last sermon in the synagogue of Nazareth, the townsfolk could not understand how ‘the carpenter’,¹⁰ or ‘the carpenter’s son’,¹¹ could have acquired such great wisdom. Was he a carpenter himself, or was he only the son of a carpenter? The confused state of the Greek text of the Gospels usually indicates either (a) a doctrinal difficulty thought by some to demand rewording; or (b) the existence of a linguistic problem in the expression in Hellenistic terms of something typically Jewish. Here the second alternative applies. The congregation in the synagogue voices astonishment.

‘Where does he get it from?’ ‘What wisdom is this . . . ?’

‘Is not this the carpenter/the son of the carpenter . . . ?’¹²

Now those familiar with the language