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Weekly Worker 557 Thursday December 16 2004
Greatest story ever told
Geza Vermes The authentic gospels of Jesus London 2004, pp446, £8.99
Christmas
poses serious questions, or dilemmas, for communists. Do we just bark
‘humbug!’ and declare a revolutionary boycott of all yuletide-related
activities? Perhaps, in a fit of rationalistic zealotry, we boldly declare
that the man-god Jesus portrayed in the New Testament is simply an invention
of spaced-out religious fanatics and thus deserves nothing but communist
contempt.
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.
Eddie Ford
