MetaCatholic

Today’s Times carries Geza Vermes’ review of Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth. He finds, unsurprisingly, that the Pope has not been adequately historico-critical in his approach. He calls it a “haphazard mixture of life and doctrine.”

Until I’ve read the book myself, I can’t comment on its content. I would, however, make a couple of comments on the review.

First, Vermes outlines a rather commonplace if passé view of Jesus research, setting it in first, new and third quest stages, despite the recent comprehensive demolition of this view by Dale Allison. Second, he continues to insist on the old distinction between the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith. This was never entirely satisfactory, and there are recent arguments against it in e.g. Dunn’s  Jesus Remembered, and Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Of the two, I find more help from Dunn’s emphasis on the way in which positive responses to Jesus (one or another form of faith) are always part of the process by which the stories get remembered, retold, shaped and written down.

Most of all, though, I object to Vermes’ assumption that any one scholar’s reconstruction of the Jesus of History is somehow the “real Jesus.” (Of course, he has his own reconstruction primarily in mind.) Far too much information is missing to believe that this claim is remotely credible. Far too many different portraits of Jesus by careful historical scholars exist for the idea to be plausible.

None of that is to dismiss the scholarship that Vermes and many others since him have brought and continue to bring to the illumination and fresh reading of the gospels. The regained emphasis on the first-century Jewish Jesus, is something I value very highly. I hope I will find that reflected in the Pope’s book.

For a review that gives the criticism of a real New Testament expert (and a pioneer in the field of emphasising the Jewishness of Jesus), however, it is surprising and disappointing just how out-of-date Vermes’ comment now looks.

I was quite surprised to get in the post today a letter from “Freedom Television” together with a DVD called “Panorama Exposed” imprinted with the face of John Sweeney in mid-rant.

The letter was curiously shy of identifying its connection with the “Church of Scientology” – although it didn’t take a minute to put two and two together, and the website mentioned in the letterhead does in fact assign its copyright to them by name.

What was extraordinary was that a general complaint about bias in the BBC is to be illustrated by “154 would-be violations of the BBC and Ofcom Guidelines in the making of a recently produced Panorama story.” Not even at this point to they reference the actual programme or it’s topic by name: apparently I will have to watch the DVD to find out.

I am neither a fan of “celebrity” journalism where the reporter is part of the story: what little I’ve seen and read of this Panorama programme suggests John Sweeney is a kind of poor man’s Michael Moore. Neither am I a fan of celebrity religion. Truth is not guaranteed by enlisting Travolta and Cruise in your ranks.

But as far as I’m concerned Scientology is a meretricious cult based on the deluded writing of a man who confused his own poorly written space opera with the secrets of the universe, and which ties secret knowledge to purchasing power. One doesn’t need to resort to tricks or sloppy personality journalism to unmask this. Old-fashioned careful reporting is quite adequate.

I do find the letter and DVD, presumably (unless I have been exceptionally singled out) sent to every parish priest in the country, a quite astonishing reaction. I’m now more inclined, should I ever sit down to watch either the original Panorama, or this DVD, to give the criticisms made in it  far more credence than I might have done otherwise. When people panic this much, someone has usually hit the nail on the head, and a very uncomfortable thing that can be.