The Real Jesus
How a Jewish reformer lost his Jewish identity
To be sure, since the Reformation, a growing number of clerics, theologians, and scholars have worked hard to recover the historical Jesus. To Protestants, this effort was part of the struggle to throw off the "corrupted" misreadings of the Roman Catholic Church and return to the real Jesus. Yet even in the midst of such attempts, a combination of church politics, deeply ingrained prejudice, and limited evidence impeded a full or fair examination of Jesus's Jewishness well into the 20th century.
That has changed during the past 50 years. Aided by finds like the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars have made great strides in reconstructing the centuries surrounding the Crucifixion. In addition to restoring the fully Jewish context of Jesus's career, they have also shown how some early Christians attempted to distance their founder and his movement from their Jewish roots.
Geza Vermes, emeritus professor of Jewish studies at Oxford University, is arguably the dean of this recent scholarly enterprise. Three decades ago, with his book Jesus the Jew, he led the way by reading the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke as part of what he calls a "continuously evolving Jewish religious and literary creativity." Among other things, Vermes showed how these three narratives drew on many of the same sources that later rabbinical writings would draw on. In one such source, the first-century B.C. Psalms of Solomon, for example, the psalmist evokes the coming kingdom of God and anticipates a "Jewish savior-king establishing divine rule over the gentiles." Vermes's reading yields a figure who "fits perfectly into the first-century Galilee," an exemplar of the "charismatic Judaism of wonder-working holy men" of the time. The Gospels can be read in many ways, Vermes acknowledges, and he does not disparage orthodox Christian interpretations. "But if you read them literally," he cautions, "without knowledge of what they describe in terms of institutions and politics, then suddenly the Jews can become different, the enemies, the opposition. What is really going on in them is a family quarrel within Judaism."
This is not strictly an academic matter for Vermes. In his view, a willful disregard of the Jewishness of Jesus and his teaching has been partly responsible for "all the nasty things" that are associated with Christian anti-Semitism. And it is not only Jews who share that concern. New Testament specialist Margaret Mitchell, a professor of religion at the University of Chicago and a Roman Catholic, worries that Gibson's movie, like all uncritical, ahistorical readings of the Gospels, will potentially "flatten what ought to be a curriculum for each generation of Christians to struggle with, including this strange fact of a religion starting in Judaism and then moving away from it."
Trigger finger. What, then, are some of the highlights of the corrective "curriculum" that recent scholarship has provided? The first, certainly, is a fuller understanding of the politics of ancient Palestine. The conquest of that land by Pompey in 63 B.C. inaugurated an era of shared Roman-Jewish governance, during which time able and compliant local leaders such as Herod the Great (37-4 B.C.) enjoyed considerable autonomy. Less adept leaders such as Archelaus, who inherited a third of Herod's lands (namely, Judea and the city of Jerusalem), fared less well. After tolerating 10 years of his incompetence, Roman prefects took over Archelaus's territory, though they continued to share the running of Jerusalem with the high priests of the Temple. The two other portions of Herod's former lands, including Jesus's state of Galilee, remained under Jewish rule. This arrangement lasted until a major Jewish revolt brought on a harsh Roman reaction and the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70.
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