The Work
Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels was first published by Collins (London) in 1973, with an American edition by Fortress Press the same year. It is approximately 286 pages and is organized in two parts: Part One examines the titles given to Jesus in the Gospels (Prophet, Lord, Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God) in their Jewish context; Part Two examines the charismatic Galilean healer tradition in which Jesus stands, comparing him to contemporaries like Honi the Circle-Drawer and Hanina ben Dosa.
The book is widely credited with initiating what scholars call the 'Third Quest' for the historical Jesus - the movement in New Testament scholarship from the 1970s onward that placed Jesus firmly in his first-century Jewish context rather than abstracting him from it or reading him against it. Earlier 'Quests' - the Liberal Quest of the nineteenth century (Schweitzer's summary in The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1906) and the 'New Quest' of the 1950s (Bultmann's demythologizing program) - had both tended to detach Jesus from his Jewishness in various ways. Vermes's insistence that Jesus can only be understood within the world of Galilean Judaism was methodologically revolutionary.
Biblical Engagement
Matthew 6:9 - 'Our Father which art in heaven' (the opening of the Lord's Prayer) - is central to Vermes's argument about the distinctiveness of Jesus's prayer style. Vermes compares the familiar address 'Abba' (the intimate form of 'father' used by Jesus, attested in Mark 14:36 and implied throughout the Lord's Prayer) to similar intimate address forms in the prayers of Galilean charismatics like Honi and Hanina. The conclusion is not that Jesus's relationship with God was undistinctive, but that it was distinctively Jewish - not a departure from Judaism but an expression of a particular Jewish tradition of intimate relationship with God as Father.
Matthew 11:27 - 'All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him' - is one of the 'Johannine thunderbolt' passages (as Schweitzer called them) in the Synoptic Gospels, where Jesus speaks in the elevated theological register usually associated with the Fourth Gospel. Vermes's analysis of such passages in their Galilean Jewish context argues that they are best understood not as early church projections but as authentic expressions of the intimate filial consciousness of a Galilean charismatic whose relationship with God was distinctively intense.
Mark 1:27 - 'And they were all amazed, insomuch that they questioned among themselves, saying, What thing is this? what new doctrine is this? for with authority commandeth he even the unclean spirits, and they do obey him' - is the response to Jesus's exorcisms that Vermes analyzes in his account of the charismatic tradition. The authority of Jesus's commands over demons is compared to the authority of Hanina ben Dosa, whose prayers for the sick were described in similar terms. Vermes argues that this comparison is not reductive but illuminating: it shows that the earliest Jewish response to Jesus was wonder at a form of power that had Jewish precedents and categories.
Luke 7:16 - 'And there came a fear on all: and they glorified God, saying, That a great prophet is risen up among us; and, That God hath visited his people' - is the response to Jesus's raising of the widow's son at Nain. Vermes's argument is that the title 'prophet' - specifically 'the prophet like Moses' of Deuteronomy 18:15-19 - is the most historically plausible of the titles applied to Jesus in the Synoptic tradition, because it has the most direct Old Testament grounding and because the Galilean charismatic prophets were precisely the type of figure that Jewish expectation anticipated.
Author and Context
Geza Vermes (1924-2013) was born in Mako, Hungary, into a Jewish family that converted to Catholicism when he was a child (apparently to protect the family from anti-Semitism). He was educated at the Catholic seminary in Budapest and later at the University of Louvain (Belgium), where he was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1950. His doctoral thesis was on the Jewish historical background to the Qumran scrolls. He left the priesthood in 1957 and reconverted to Judaism, subsequently building a distinguished academic career at Oxford, where he became a Reader in Jewish Studies and a Professorial Fellow at Wolfson College.
Vermes's unusual biography - born Jewish, raised Catholic, ordained as a priest, returned to Judaism - gave him an unprecedented combination of scholarly competencies for the study of Jesus: he was fluent in the Aramaic and Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, deeply familiar with both Christian theology and Jewish rabbinic tradition, and personally invested in understanding the relationship between Jesus and his Jewish world.
The book was written in the context of the post-Holocaust rapprochement between Christian and Jewish scholars, the Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate (1965) which repudiated the charge of collective Jewish guilt for Jesus's death, and the discovery and publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1947 onward) which had transformed scholarship on first-century Judaism. Vermes was one of the leading scholars of the Scrolls and his expertise gave him unique access to the world of Jesus's contemporaries.
Structure and Argument
Part One examines the titles of Jesus in the Gospels - Prophet, Lord, Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God - in their Jewish context. Vermes argues that each title makes sense within first-century Jewish categories and that understanding them in that context is essential to understanding what the earliest witnesses meant by applying them to Jesus. His treatment of 'Son of Man' - arguing that in Aramaic, bar nasha is an idiomatic form of self-reference rather than a title - is one of the book's most influential and controversial arguments.
Part Two examines the Galilean charismatic tradition: the holy men of Galilee who prayed with familiar intimacy, performed miracles, and were regarded as channels of divine power. Vermes's comparison of Jesus to Honi the Circle-Drawer and Hanina ben Dosa is the book's most famous argument: these figures, attested in rabbinic literature, provide a Jewish cultural context within which Jesus's practices and the responses they evoked become historically intelligible.
Critical Reception
The book received enthusiastic reviews from New Testament scholars across the theological spectrum. E.P. Sanders, John Meier, and N.T. Wright - who diverge considerably in their conclusions - all acknowledge Vermes as a founder of the Third Quest. The book's insistence on taking Jesus's Jewishness seriously was welcomed by both Jewish scholars (for obvious reasons) and many Christian scholars who felt that earlier Quests had distorted the historical Jesus by abstracting him from his tradition.
Reformed and conservative evangelical theologians expressed some discomfort: Vermes's Jesus is understood primarily as a Jewish holy man, and the high Christological claims of the creeds - the pre-existent divine Logos, the second person of the Trinity - are not addressed by Vermes's historical method. This is not, however, Vermes's failure: he is doing history, not dogmatics, and the relationship between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith is a question for theology that lies beyond his stated scope.
The treatment of 'Son of Man' has been extensively debated: Vermes's Aramaic argument (that it is a self-referential idiom rather than a title) has been influential but is not universally accepted. Maurice Casey and others have developed the argument further; others (including N.T. Wright) have argued for a more complex picture.
Theological Significance
The book's theological significance is its demonstration that taking Jesus's Jewishness seriously - rather than abstracting him from his context or reading him against his tradition - enriches rather than threatens Christian faith. If Jesus is understood as a Galilean Jew praying to his Father, healing the sick, proclaiming the kingdom, and calling disciples, the Christian claim that this man was and is the Son of God takes on greater historical density and more demanding human specificity.
Vermes also demonstrated that Jewish scholarship has indispensable contributions to make to Christian understanding of Jesus - that the Third Quest requires Jewish historians and Aramaists alongside Christian theologians. This methodological contribution has been permanently incorporated into New Testament scholarship.
Legacy
The book initiated the Third Quest that transformed New Testament scholarship. E.P. Sanders's Jesus and Judaism (1985), John Meier's A Marginal Jew (4 vols., 1991-2009), N.T. Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God (1996), and John Dominic Crossan's work - however different their conclusions - all operate in the methodological context that Vermes helped create. The insistence on reading Jesus within his Jewish context rather than against it is now the consensus starting point of historical Jesus scholarship.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Matthew 6:5-13 (the Lord's Prayer), Mark 1:21-39 (a day in Jesus's ministry: teaching, exorcism, healing), Matthew 11:20-30 (the invitation of the gentle teacher), Luke 7:11-23 (the raising at Nain and John the Baptist's question), and Deuteronomy 18:15-22 (the prophet like Moses).
Further Reading
- E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (1985) - the most important single book of the Third Quest, building directly on Vermes's foundation. - John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, 4 vols. (1991-2009) - the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of the historical Jesus. - Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (2006) - an accessible and important development of the Jewish Jesus for a popular audience.