16.12.2004
Greatest story ever told
Geza Vermes The authentic gospels of Jesus London 2004, pp446, £8.99
Though such sentiments are understandable, given the orgy of nonsense that surrounds the Christmas festivities, any such atheistic economism which dismisses the Jesus stories as mere myths or inventions is fundamentally misguided. No, instead communists need to approach Jesus and the gospels in a critical, historical-materialist manner, as we would any other subject of scientific inquiry.
In some respects, of course, this is easier said than done. We are dealing with a shadowy figure, who operated some 2,000 years ago in a society which is now dim and distant to us, unlike the recently deceased Soviet Union. What is more, Jesus is no VI Lenin, LD Trotsky or JV Stalin - that is, there are absolutely no known independent, secondary or contemporaneous source materials which can unequivocally affirm that such a person ever existed. Indeed, leaving aside a few obviously ‘forged’ interpolations in texts such as Josephus’s Jewish antiquities, the only near contemporaneous material is to be found in the New Testament - which, you could argue (if you wanted to), is a case of ‘Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?’
So, uncovering the ‘real’ Jesus is akin to an archaeological dig, where we have to hack our way through seemingly endless layers of falsehoods, lies, istortions, hearsay, half-truths before coming upon the odd glint of historical veracity. Luckily, to help us in our dig, we have professor Geza Vermes, one of the world’s foremost experts on Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus - not to mention ancient Hebrew and Greek, and the Dead Sea scrolls. By studying the works of Vermes one can start to learn how to actually read the gospels, as opposed to either dogmatic acceptance or rejection. However, Vermes is always at pains to remind us that, when it comes to gospel research, certainty is a very scarce thing amidst an ocean of probabilities. Furthermore, he argues, that for a relatively successful quest for the authentic nature, sayings and teachings of Jesus, we must discover new principles and devise a fresh procedure. Interestingly, and this may well partly help to explain Vermes’s approach, he was born in 1924 into an assimilated Hungarian Jewish family, and was originally ordained as a catholic priest shortly after World War II. However, not long after his ordination, he returned to his Jewish roots and adopted what you could call a ‘critical’ or ‘modernistic’ form of Judaism.
Vermes is primarily known for his thematic trilogy, Jesus the Jew (1973), Jesus and the world of Judaism (1983) and The religion of Jesus the Jew (1993), and these works were summated in The changing face of Jesus (2000). He is also author of The complete Dead Sea scrolls in English (1997). As the titles of these books alone indicate, Vermes has consistently, and insistently, emphasised Jesus’ Jewishness, in complete contrast of course to the mainstream christian tradition, which sees the ‘universalisation’ of the Galilean, thus robbing him of any historicity. Quite deliberately, the founders of the primitive christian church wanted a Jesus who was not anchored in time and space. Consequence, they introduced a qualitative distinction between the New Testament and the non-biblical Jewish writings. Bluntly, the primary purpose of the gospels was propagandist and didactic, not historical.
On the other hand, we have Vermes’s historical approach. In a sort of mission statement, Vermes has written: “A particular slant characterises my approach to the study of Jesus: I envisage the New Testament not as an independent and autonomous literary composition standing apart from the Jewish world, but look at it through the prism of contemporaneous Jewish civilisation, the matrix of the primitive christian church” (The changing face of Jesus London 2000, p2).
More specifically still, Vermes here is referring to the Jewish writings from the Bible (c1000 to 200BC); the inter-testamental literature (200BC to AD200); and the rabbinic writings, especially the Talmud (AD200 to 500). We need a few brief contextual details here. The main branches of the intertestamental literature are the Apocrypha (‘hidden’ writings), the Pseudepigrapha (‘falsely entitled’ writings), the Dead Sea scrolls and the writings of the Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, and the Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus - both active in the first century AD.
The Apocrypha (c200-100BC) begin with 1 and 2 Esdras and finish with 1 and 2 Maccabees, and are included in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint. The Jews of the Hellenistic diaspora venerated them as holy, and the catholic church continues to regard them as holy scripture. However, the Palestinian Jews excluded them from their canon at the end of the first century AD, and so, under Jewish influence, did protestants in the 16th century.
The Pseudepigrapha is the umbrella term applied to a collection of Jewish non-canonical religious books which have been preserved in various ancient translations (Greek, Latin, Syriac, Ethiopian, etc) in christian churches. The most notable works in this collection are the Books of Jubilees (basically an enlarged version of Genesis) and the apocalyptic First Book of Enoch.
The Dead Sea scrolls (c200BC to AD68) are over 800 original manuscripts - some of them including Pseude-pigrapha literature. A quarter of them represent the Hebrew scripture and the rest are biblical translations into Greek and Aramaic, as well as religious writings of various kinds (rules, hymns, biblical exegesis, etc). These writings reveal many similarities with the New Testament and thus significantly contribute to an understanding of Jesus and his teachings.
As for the rabbinic writings, they are legal and interpretative. Legal includes the Mishnah (teaching) and the Tosefta (supplement) - ie, legal rulings not directly associated with the Bible, which are credited to Palestinian rabbis called Tannaim or Mishnah teachers of the 1st and 2nd centuries. The Talmud (doctrine) is a further development of the laws of the Mishnah by rabbis in Israel in the 3rd and 4th centuries and by rabbis in Babylonia from the 3rd to the 5th century. The former collection is known as the Palestinian or Jerusalem Talmud and the latter as the Babylonian Talmud.
Of course, the significance of the rabbinic writings is that they comprise many religious traditions which stem from, or even antedate, the age of the gospels. These writings have survived in Hebrew and Aramaic and thus help to bring us near to the ideas of Jesus, and to their expression in words and images. In the eminently reasonable opinion of Vermes, without a detailed study of these rabbinic writings, “it is often impossible to catch the nuances or even the basic meaning of the sayings, parables and Bible interpretation handed down by the evangelists in the name of Jesus” (G Vermes The authentic gospels of Jesus London 2004 pxiv).
That has not prevented legions of biblical scholars - especially the christians, naturally - from concluding that the time gap between the gospels (dating from AD70 to 110) and the rabbinic writings (AD200 and 500) rules out the use of these writings as comparative study in the sayings of Jesus. But for Vermes this is not a serious line of argumentation: “In other words, they adopt the simplistic view that the date of a tradition transmitted in a work is the same as the date of the redaction of that work” (ibid).
For churchmen, the Jewish literature, at best, forms the background against which they make the New Testament stand out in all its presumed grandeur and glory. By contrast, Vermes describes his procedure as more “democratic”. Jesus, the primitive church and the New Testament are “part and parcel” of first-century Judaism. This leads, given his expertise in linguistics, to intensely scrutinise the words and ideas of Jesus and the gospel writers in their original language. Then the fundamental question is directly posed - what did the original speakers actually mean and, just as important (if not more so), what would the original listeners have understood, or gleamed, from what they were hearing? This is the life-long task that Vermes has set himself, most concretely in The authentic gospels of Jesus.
Obviously, no easy task, especially as all translations - especially of ancient and ‘dead’ languages - have an inherently subjective quality to them. As another biblical scholar, Robert Eisenman, writes, “It should be remembered that translations are simply one’s person’s view of the sense of the given passage, as opposed to another’s. What is crucial is a firm historical grasp and literary-critical insight” (R Eisenman James, the brother of Jesus London 1997).
What is so easy to forget is that the language of Jesus and his disciples was Aramaic, a Semitic language akin to Hebrew, then spoken by most Palestinian Jews. It was in Aramaic that Jesus taught, argued and preached. It is also essential to understand that the linguistically authentic form of his teaching has long since disappeared, with the exception of a dozen or so Aramaic words preserved in the gospels. Examples of these remaining original Aramaic words and phrases are Abba (Father); Talitha cum (Little girl, get up), and the heart-rending Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? (My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?).
There is scholastic unanimity - and there seems no good reason to dispute it - that the four gospels of the New Testament were directly composed in Greek. In other words, they are not translations from a Semitic original source or book (now, if such an Aramaic-Semitic source-book were ever uncovered, that would be the greatest discovery of all time - forget the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant!). So the Greek New Testament is not a ‘translation’ of the thoughts, ideas, hopes and aspirations of the Aramaic-thinking-and-speaking Jesus and his immediate followers, but rather, as Vermes points out, a “transplantation” (The authentic gospels of Jesus London 2004 p3).
Therefore, Vermes hopes - as an historian and exegete - to find a way back to the Jewish Jesus, speaking to his Jewish followers in his Jewish mode of communication and in his familiar Semitic tongue. Then the next step is to examine the words attributed to Jesus, and teachings about Jesus, in the Greek New Testament in order to discover changes or developments in meaning, and even potential deformations, arising through their Hellenisation.
In this ambitious vein, The authentic gospels of Jesus sets out to collect, thematically classify and succinctly comment on - in an historico-literary analysis - every word attributed, or ascribed, to Jesus in the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. These are the writers of the Synoptic gospels, so called because they reflect the same general point of view, and can be set out in three neat, parallel columns in a gospel synopsis. Mainstream scholastic opinion to date - and once again there is no particular reason to object - holds that Mark is the oldest, addressed to a non-Jewish audience shortly after the fall of Jerusalem in AD70. Matthew and Luke are slightly more recent and may be placed between 80 and 100. Mark and Matthew were probably thoroughly Hellenised Jews; Luke, an associate of Paul, was Greek. This, the second half of the first century AD, is known as the apostolic age.
With regards to the actual physical texts themselves, preserved in Greek manuscripts, the oldest papyrus fragments date from 125-150 and the most ancient codices (the Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus) to the 4th century. As for John, the fourth (or later) gospel (c100-110), this is ruled out of the equation by Vermes and others, on account of its violently anti-Semitic nature; it is patently penned by an educated man immersed in the culture of Hellenistic and Gnostic mysticism. Whatever the case, it is certainly not the apostle John who is described in the Acts of the Apostles as an “uneducated, common man” (Acts iv, 13 - all biblical quotes from the revised standard version).
We also have the thorny question of literary-philosophical lineage and derivation - who came first and said what in which order? The classic solution is the ‘two-source’ theory: that is, that Mark draws upon and adds to the ‘Q’ document or source (from Quelle, the German for ‘source’). This hypothetical compilation, so the theory goes, has seen the least amount of doctrinal manipulation and it is believed that, in turn, Matthew and Luke rely on, or crib from, Mark, inserting their own comments and literary-theological accretions as they see fit.
After all this, can we get a glimpse of the real, historical Jesus - Yeshua, son of Joseph - concealed beneath the accounts of Mark, Matthew and Luke? Yes, says Vermes, once you start to grapple with and strip away the thick skin of superimposed meanings, you can bump up against the parameters of authenticity. It is possible to distinguish the genuine, or probably genuine, from those unlikely to be authentic, and an approximation of his real teachings emerge. Vermes stakes out what he views as the quintessence of Jesus’ authentic eschatological gospel - what Jesus and his contemporaries thought to be the final period of the present era and all matter relating to it. All interpretations of Jesus’ teachings, as constantly stressed by Vermes, must be viewed in this light: that the kingdom of god was imminent.
In this short review there is not space to undertake an in-depth examination, or description, of Vermes’s endeavours - after all, every expression ascribed to Jesus is put under the historico-literary microscope. However, to use Vermes’s own words, this is a voyage of “discovery”, not “instruction”. The objective of the mission is to make the reader see the old texts afresh and to open up the mind to radically new interpretations and possibilities.
We shall look at a few of the more famous gospel passages - those stories that deal with what Vermes calls “narratives and commands”: that is, those episodes which quote direct speech by Jesus when reporting episodes in his life. These mainly relate to healing or exorcism, which, alongside teaching, constitute the main features of Jesus’ public life. A study of these well known stories acts to throw light on the peculiarities of the society of the time.
Everybody who attended school assembly - at least if you are of a certain age and educated in Britain - probably remembers the parable of the fishermen and the net. So we read: “And passing along the Sea of Galilee he saw Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, Follow me and I will make you fishers of men. And immediately they left their nets and followed him” (Vermes’s emphasis, Mark i,16-18).
Vermes’s succinct analysis is intriguing He observes that the phrase, “fishers of men”, is not the invention of Jesus or the gospel writers. It appears in Jeremiah xvi,16, where sinful Jews are delivered by god to “many fishers”, and those who escape them will fall prey to “many hunters”. Such imagery also appears in Habakkuk, where god transforms men into fish and allows their enemies to drag them out with nets (i,14-15), and a very similar story can be found in Amos iv,2.
What is different, if anything, in Mark? Well, argues Vermes, in the above biblical imagery both the fishermen and the hunters are essentially hostile figures sent by god to punish the guilty and wicked. However, in the words of Jesus the “fishers of men” are emissaries dispatched to rescue men and the overall metaphor and imagery is far more complex, or nuanced. How can being caught in a net be beneficial to a fish? Vermes ventures the following idea: “The image could be a church creation at a time when the reality of fishing was no longer part of the everyday experience of urban christians in Syria, Asia Minor or Greece, living far away from the Sea of Galilee. For them, ‘fishers of men’ simply meant saviours” (G Vermes The authentic gospels of Jesus London 2004, p11-12).
Then there is a possible new twist, suggests Vermes, where the parable of the net applies the metaphor to the situation of the final age - there the fisherman’s job is to separate the good fish from the bad in preparation for the last judgement. In other words they, like the harvesters in the parables of the sower, are the chosen agents of the coming, imminent, kingdom of god.
Then there is the feeding of the five thousand in Mark vi,31-43 (as opposed to the feeding of the four thousand in Mark in xiii,1-9 and xiii,21). This account is clearly modelled on the Old Testament prophet, Elisha, feeding 100 men with 20 loaves of barley bread: “And they ate, and had some left” (2 Kings iv,42-44) - where the surplus food is essential to the gist of the story.
Here, in the gospels version, Jesus, feeling “compassion” for the “great throng” which had gathered to hear his teachings, said to his disciples: “You will give them something to eat. And they said to him, ‘Shall we go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread …?’ And he said to them, How many loaves have you? Go and see … They said, ‘Five, and two fish.’ Then he commanded them all to sit down … by hundreds and by fifties. And taking the five loaves and two fish he … blessed … And gave them to the disciples to set before the people … And they all ate and were satisfied” (a denarii was equivalent to a labourer’s daily wage).
Probably unbeknown to a casual reader, it is the numbers which are significant in the above description. To Vermes, Mark’s “hundreds and fifties” units recall traditional biblical divisions of the people into thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens (Exodus xviii,21). But matters, as always, are a bit more complicated, or dense, than they seem. Matthew does not specify any numbers at all and Luke speaks vaguely of “about 5,000”, which to Vermes demonstrates Luke’s unfamiliarity with Jewish customs.
Or what are we to make of Jesus’ solemn yet triumphant entry into Jerusalem on a donkey - which in the gospels gets an odd write-up. Mark and Luke speak of a colt to be borrowed on which Jesus will make his entry. Nothing unusual here, as the Palestinian Talmud records that before every Passover ass-drivers did a flourishing trade in carrying pilgrims to Jerusalem - indeed, the rich preferred to ride on donkeys to the Temple mount. However, Matthew introduces a laborious and very strained rewrite in his haste to associate the event with a messianic prophecy and manages to introduce a she-ass as well as her colt, so we read: “Tell the daughter of Zion, Behold, your king is coming on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass” (Matthew xxi,5).
This could only have come from a botched and idiosyncratic fusion of Isaiah lxii,11 and Zechariah ix,9 - when surely the poetic imagery of the latter, “a colt, the foal of an ass”, is a mere literary parallelism. But Matthew tries to inject a literalist interpretation, and talks about two animals, imagining garments being placed on “them”, and Jesus somehow sitting on both animals at once! Vermes caustically remarks: “No native Semitic speaker would have made such a mistake” (ibid p22). The effect of reading a scholar like Vermes is to make these old stories breathe with life - what do they mean exactly?
More controversially, there is the issue of taxation and Jesus’s attitude towards the Roman occupational authorities: since the census of Quirinius in AD6 the inhabitants of Judaea and Samaria had to pay tribute to Rome. We have the famous - or notorious - passage in which Jesus says to the Pharisees and Herodians: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to god the things that are god’s. And they were amazed at him” (Mark xii,17). If we are to believe Mark, Jesus must have been some sort of pro-Roman creep, preaching reconciliation with the brutal and murderous forces of Roman imperialism.
This seems staggeringly unlikely. Yet for Vermes this account shows that Jesus was not a member of the Zealot ‘party’, which struggled for the military-physical overthrow of Roman forces, and actually took an “apolitical stand”. The final clause - “and to god the things that are god’s” - indicates decisively that for the evangelists the orientation of Jesus was wholly religious, and in Vermes’s opinion, “The story has an air of authenticity and speaks against the theory of those New Testament scholars who picture Jesus as an anti-Roman rebel” (p59).
Vermes’s contention is problematic, obviously. It is hard to credit the idea that a devout Jew in the Palestine of that day could be anything else but an “anti-Roman rebel”. But certainly for the writers of the gospels their Jesus must be “apolitical”, in the sense that he must be seen to found a new universalist religion which has ‘escaped’ from its Jewish roots and is not concerned with ‘parochial’ issues like Roman exploitation and subjugation. This conception, naturally, clashes full-square with Jesus’ quite explicit statements that he was concerned only with Jews, because in his view citizenship of the kingdom of god was reserved for them alone - his message was strictly “for the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew xv,24), and compares Gentiles (ie, non-Jews) to dogs and pigs (Mark vii,27, Matthew vii,6; xv,26).
Then again, according to Vermes, much discussion of the anti-Pharisee nature of Synoptic gospels is unbalanced, with the implication that the gospel writers were mainly, if not solely, concerned with anti-Jewish mischief-making. In fact, there is a long rabbinic tradition of ‘self-satire’. A noted passage in the Talmud lists seven types of Pharisee, six of whom just do not make the grade: the Sleeve; the Hang-On (who says, ‘Hang on so that I can perform another good deed’); Book-Keeping; Parsimonious (who says, ‘What can I set aside to perform a good deed?’); Fear (as in Book of Job), and then the Pharisee of love who resembles Abraham, who is the only ‘kosher’ Pharisee.
This satirical tone, writes Vermes, “reveals the redactor’s awareness of the fact that the Pharisees of the past, while trying to appear immaculate, were not always paragons of virtue” (p72). In other words, the relationship of the gospel writers, especially Matthew, to the rabbinic Pharisee was complex and involved, for all their attempts to ‘de-Judaise’ Jesus.
The gospel debates over divorce - “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” (Matt ixx,9) - reflects very real historical debates within first-century church between the strict school of Shammai, allowing divorce only for sexual misdemeanour, and the more lenient school of Hillel, which tolerated it on any ground. Additionally, the recurrent and fierce arguments on the lawfulness, or not, of healing on the sabbath, and purity rules like hand-washing, fit well into the parochial setting of rural Galilee.
Any half-sober reading of the gospels reveals a mass of contradictory and conflictual statements and beliefs - self-evidently, they cannot all be true. Thus the only reasonable conclusion to come to, to put it mildly, is that the Synoptic gospels consist of ‘adjusted’, supplemented and ‘corrected’ - or thoroughly ‘revised’ - versions of the original message of Jesus.
All this begs the question: what exactly motivated the gospels writers? Perhaps some may think him too generous, but Vermes is “convinced” that they intended to hand down what they believed was, according to Mark’s opening sentence, “the gospel of Jesus”. If, as Vermes adds, it was to “some extent unavoidable” that the evangelists conveyed or sought to formulate church doctrine, “this was not their primary intention” (ibid p374).
Or, to put it even more clearly, the gospels intended to transmit the teachings which Jesus originally proclaimed to his own disciples and listeners. But these teachings underwent numerous and successive “mutations” - so much so that within three or four centuries the this-worldly Galilean Jewish eschat-ological-preacher, Jesus, has all but vanished from view, to be replaced by the other-worldly figure we are all now so familiar with.
In conclusion, it is important to emphasise - as Vermes does, albeit with caveats and some qualifications - the basic incompatibility between the religion of Jesus and the religion of the Pauline primitive church, let alone its modern epigones. In a memorable metaphor, Vermes tells us that the cosmology of Jesus “resembles a race consisting only of the final straight, demanding from the runners their last ounce of energy and with a winner’s medal prepared for all the Jewish participants who cross the finishing line” (original emphasis ibid p415). By contrast, with “fully evolved” christianity, Jesus’ ‘christianity’, so to speak, belongs to another world - perhaps literally - “with its mixture of high philosophical speculation on the triune god, its Johnannine logos mysticism and Pauline redeemer myth of a dying and risen son of god, with its sacramental symbolism and ecclesiastical discipline substituted for the extinct eschatological passion, with its cosmopolitan openness combined with a built-in anti-Judaism” (p415).
Not that the steady advance of the post-Jesus, primitive church is in any way inexplicable. The founding fathers, inspired by the ever brilliantly inventive Paul, just changed the spin. Instead of the conviction that the arrival of the kingdom of god formed a single and continuous act, it was now regarded as a drama of two acts. The life of Jesus in the recent past (act 1) was to be followed by the inauguration of the kingdom after the Parousia - the second glorious coming of Jesus (act 2). Hence, consequently, spiritual encouragement and security were supplied by the church, a simultaneously maternal and authoritative substitute for the non-appeared kingdom of god. Paul threw open the doors to the pagans - hence diluting and eventually utterly transforming the Jewish heritage of Jesus. This is alluded to, almost triumphantly, in the gospel of the ultra-Hellenite John, where he affirms how the holy spirit was sent by Jesus to hand out new revelation and dispense afresh “all the truth” (John ivx,16-17; xvi,13).
For better or for worse, Pauline christianity is one of history’s greatest success stories.