Jesus the Jew: a Historian’s Reading of the Gospels

"Geza was born a Jew in Hungary in the 1930s. His parents saw what was coming with the German invasion and so they sent him to a Catholic boarding school run by the sisters of the fathers of Zion. He never saw his parents again. They were swept up into the concentration camps and died. Geza became a Catholic. He wasn’t forced to do so, but genuinely wanted to. He became a Catholic priest, joined the fathers of Zion and then through that did his biblical studies, a lot of work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a doctorate on the Pesher on Habakkuk (one of the best preserved of the dead sea scrolls). He became a famous scholar and then met his first wife Pam and left the priesthood as well as religious life. He spent the rest of his life concentrating on early Judaism. He gave up on Catholicism and if he went in any direction, he reverted to a kind of liberal Judaism. He certainly belonged to a London synagogue. He used to pray on his own in the garden quite a lot, as he hadn’t lost any faith in God and actually hadn’t entirely lost faith in Jesus. He used to say things about Jesus that seemed to me to come very close to what Christians would believe, and I think he had a kind of personal relationship with Jesus, although he might not have wanted to say that. But this book is important because with the discovery of the dead sea scrolls, for the first time scholars were able to see how Jesus fitted in to his Jewish background. The dead sea scrolls didn’t disprove anything about Christianity. What they did was to give us the background out of which Christianity emerged, because here you’ve got one Jewish movement at odds with other Jewish movements and we get a fair idea of what it was like to be Jewish in that first century. That he remained a good and faithful Jew. That’s absolutely right. Yes: all 27 documents of the New Testament are written by Jews. There’s no doubt about that in my mind at all. That’s very important. We can’t really understand them unless we understand the Jewish background out of which Christianity emerged. This book is both scholarly and readable, which is amazing considering that English was about Vermes’ fifth language. His command of English was terrific."