Geza Vermes: Questions arisingThe piece goes on to summarize Professor Vermes's life story. The University of St. Andrews gets a brief, but key, mention.
John Crace meets the professor of Jewish studies whom many dub the greatest Jesus scholar of his generation
Tuesday March 18, 2008
The Guardian
For Geza Vermes, retirement seems to have concentrated the mind. Since giving up the day job as professor of Jewish studies at Oxford University in 1991, he has been writing books at a faster rate than he ever did when he was meant to be working. And now, aged 83, he shows no sign of letting up. For the past eight weeks he has been taking seminars for a former Oxford colleague on study leave and in May he's off to Switzerland to speak at a rather grand interdisciplinary conference on The Truth. In between, his most recent book, The Resurrection, is published this week.
The Resurrection is the final instalment of Vermes's Jesus trilogy, which began with The Passion and The Nativity. Vermes again adopts his trademark forensic textual analysis to separate fact from myth: "I wanted to explain exactly what the New Testament does tell us about the resurrection. People usually rely on others to interpret the gospels for them and St Paul's assertion of the physical resurrection has become a cornerstone of Christianity for many people. If Jesus didn't rise from the dead, then faith is rubbish.
"Yet if you look at what Jesus actually said, then you get a different picture. If he did talk about the resurrection, he forgot to write it down; so it's more likely he didn't. And if he did, then why did his resurrection come as such a surprise to the apostles? No one said, 'Of course, Jesus said it would be like this' when his tomb was found to be empty; even Mary Magdalene assumed that someone must have moved the body. Nobody's reactions correspond to the expectation of a resurrection."
Vermes goes on to argue that subsequent sightings of Jesus are best understood as visions in which the apostles felt his charisma working as it had done when he was alive. "Jesus had promised to be with them and he was," he argues. "It's a resurrection of the spirit in the hearts of believers. The idea of an afterlife predates the Christian era and the preaching of eternal life is well attested; a physical resurrection is not essential to a belief in spiritual survival."
[...]
Also, A. N. Wilson has a very negative review of The Resurrection in the Telegraph which contains this remarkable observation:
At least 100 years ago, the quest for the historical Jesus was shown to be a wild goose chase. Vermes's beguiling attempt to revive it has not yielded one jot of new information.I don't think even Bultmann would have said that it had been shown to be a wild goose chase by 1908. As for, say, Käsemann, Taylor, Dodd, Brown, Meier, Crossan, Kloppenborg, Dunn, Bauckham, and, of course, Vermes (an incomplete list off the top of my head), I guess they all have just been wasting their time. Now we know.
Seriously, I haven't read the book and can't comment on it, and Wilson is right to say that Paul is central to any accounting for the idea of the resurrection of Jesus. But that said, Wilson is too confident that he knows the answers to difficult and debated areas such as the quest for the historical Jesus or the question of the historicity of Acts.
The Resurrection has also been reviewed by Frank Kermode in the London Review of Books, but the review hasn't shown up yet online.
UPDATE: Chris Brady comments on the Guardian article over at Targuman and James Crossley comments on the Wilson review at the Earliest Christian History blog.