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a pioneer in the field of emphasising the Jewishness of Jesus), however, it is surprising and disappointing just how out-of-date Vermes’ comment now looks.