Searching for the Real Jesus: Jesus, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Religious Themes by Geza Vermes/The Story of the Scrolls: The Miraculous Discovery and True Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Geza VermesThe focus is on the Jesus book; the DSS book only gets part of a paragraph at the end.
The Sunday Times review by Christopher Hart
Geza Vermes, arguably the greatest “Jesus” scholar of the 20th century, was born into an assimilated Hungarian Jewish family in 1924. At the age of seven he was baptised into the Roman Catholic Church. He lost both his parents in the Holocaust, joined the order of Notre Dame de Sion, and for six years was a Catholic priest. But in middle age, “without a spiritual storm”, he left the Church and found himself “back at my Jewish roots”, though not a practising Jew.
The author’s biography is relevant, in this case, since it has been Vermes’s bifocal vision, Christian and Jewish, which has given us such a startlingly vivid image of the historical Jesus. Searching for the Real Jesus is a welcome collection of 29 essays, lectures and newspaper articles, in which he offers portraits of Jesus the Jew from a number of angles, although all are derived from a method of extraordinary simplicity: reading the New Testament closely and without prejudice. As well as bringing Jesus powerfully to life, this also throws up some rather overlooked details, such as that Simon Peter (the first Pope, traditionally) was married.
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Earlier Vermes review here.