2002 - Chris Knights - Jesus’ Changing Faces. A Response to Geza Vermes

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http://ext.sagepub.com/The Expository Times

http://ext.sagepub.com/content/113/6/203.citationThe online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/001452460211300611

2002 113: 203The Expository TimesChris Knights

Jesus' Changing Faces: A Response to Geza Vermes

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A READERS RESPONSE

Jesus Changing Faces:A Response to Geza Vermes

By REVD DR CHRIS KNIGHTS

Whitley Bay, England

avingread the previous editors warm, but

not uncritical, review of Geza Vermes TheJL Changing Faces of Jesus (Allen Lane,

Penguin, zooo)in the

Septemberzooo issue of this

Journal, I was pleased to obtain a copy of this

important book soon after - from the second-handbookstall of a church fair, of all places!

I have always appreciated Vermes writings, andI believe that he has done biblical scholarship agreat service in his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, onthe new Schurer, and on the historical Jesus. Indeed,I regard myself as something of an academic grand-son of Vermes - my doctoral research on the

Rechabites, carried out in Durham in the mid-198os,was supervised by Robert Hayward, who had beenone of Vermes research students in Oxford a decadeor so earlier.

Nevertheless, I believe that some of Vermes

arguments in The Changing Faces of Jesus invite aresponse from a Christian perspective, and I offersuch a (personal) response here.

I

The context in which I read The Changing Facesmakes me ask whether it is a book I could recom-

mend to my students. It is certainly a mine of infor-

mation, written with Vermes characteristic lucidity,but three things, two already noticed by Dr Rodd,limit its use as a text for students. The first of theselimitations noticed by Rodd is the lack of an index,which makes finding anything in the book infuri-

atingly difficult, all the more so since the table ofcontents limits itself to the bare chapter headings. Ifthe subheadings had appeared on the contents page,

locatingdiscussions of

particularissues would have

been eased somewhat - but full indexes of subjectsand biblical references are also really needed, and Iam pleased to say that, in conversation with DrRodd, Vermes has indicated that such indexes willbe provided as and when the book runs to a reprint.

The second limitation, also noted by Rodd, is theoccasional inconsistency. Was the Epistle of Judewritten by a brother of Jesus or much later andpseudepigraphically? Vermes says both (pp. 100,i 3 2)! Of deeper significance than the authorship ofone of the shorter New Testament Epistles is thestatus of Philippians z:6-i i, which Vermes in oneplace dismisses as a later insert, not by Paul, but inanother calls an already-existing composition,inserted by Paul into Philippians. If the passage isthe latter, then it has important consequences forVermes whole theory of the development of NewTestament Christology, for which it is crucial thata passage like Philippians z:6-1 i is late, and hencea distortion. But what if it is earlier than Paul?

This fundamental question of the dates andchronological order of the New Testament traditions

is one to which I wish to return, but there is a thirdlimitation on The Changing Faces suitability forstudent use. This is the way in which Vermes refersto the Jewish literature of the inter-testamental andrabbinic periods. I am familiar with this literature,but many an ordinary reader would not be, yetVermes quotes from it largely without explanation,which again limits the books usefulness for students.

This actually raises the whole question of whothe book is written for. Is it a popular work, or is itfor scholars? Only scholars would be fully familiar

I I have to say at the start that I am not a New Testament

scholar. My academic training is in Old Testament and earlyJudaism, and I work as anAnglican Parish Priest. However,my encounter with The Changing Faces occurred at the sametime as I switched from teaching Old Testament to part-timecandidates for ordained and lay ministry to teaching NewTestament - so I have recently been studying the NewTestament texts more closely than I have done for years!

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with the Jewish literature, but they would want

proper referencing, which The Cbanging Faces doesnot have. Scholarly readers would also no doubtwant an approach to Josephus and Philo, and to theQumran, inter-testamental, and rabbinic literature,

thatwas

quite as critical as the approach to the NewTestament texts taken by Vermes, but he does notseem to offer this same critical rigour when dealingwith Jewish writings.

These are not my fundamental misgivings, how-ever. What most concerns me is Vermes sequencingof the documents (or, rather, traditions) of the New

Testament, and his view that the Christologies ofPaul and John are late, and hence a distortion. I amalso concerned by the fact that Vermes fails to offerany satisfactory explanation for the origin of these

high Christologies.It is axiomatic for Vermes argument that there isa clear, logical and chronological development ofChristology in the New Testament. The SynopticGospels, despite being later than Paul and notwithout embellishment, represent the earliest stage,followed by Paul and finally by John, writing around

AD 100.

But, it seems to me, this clear sequencing doesnot do justice to the complexity of the textsthemselves. Vermes himself acknowledges (p. 25 )that there may be items of historical accuracy in

Johns Passion narrative, a point already made byVermes friend and colleague Fergus Millar in P. R.Davies and R. T. White (eds),A Tribute to GezaVernres (Sheffield, 199, pp. 3 ~ S-384)~ and JohnRobinson, for instance, in The Priority of Johl1(London, 198$) has argued for an early date forJohn..

So, it already appears that Vermes starting-pointis on less sure ground than he makes out. What ifJohn is earlier than the turn of the first century? Imyself actually do think that a date of 90-100 is

most likely for John, but I also think that thetraditions John contains must predate this period.This is significant, as Vermes believes that the gapbetween John and Jesus is large: Since Johns accountpostdates Jesus by at least seventy years, the chancesof hearing the genuine voice of the Galilean masterare minimal (p. 38). But I think he overstates hiscase.

Further, Vermes himself concedes that thesynoptic Gospels are later in composition than thePauline letters, but claims that they represent largely

traditional materiil(P- Sg n. i ). But he then proceedsby way of excluding anything that remotely hints ata high Christology from this traditional material.But on what criteria? Even Mark contains implicitassertions of the divinity of Jesus, not least in 2:1-12

and 4:35-4 1, passages treated rather lightly byVermes (cf. p. i dz). In fact, Vermes seems toexonerate Mark from the charge of misrepresentingthe historical Jesus by deifying him (p. 207), but thepassages I have just cited both ascribe to Jesus tasksascribed to God in the Old Testament, and if that isnot deifying Jesus, what is?

It is the age of traditions such as these within the

synoptics that is crucial here, for if they are earlierthan Paul, say, then they point to a belief in the

divinity of Jesus within a couple of decades of thelife of

Jesushimself. To claim that the

synopticevangelists would have had the cold shivers (p. 46)at Johns claim of the oneness of the Father and theSon seriously downplays the extent to whichMatthew, Mark and Luke do contain Christologicalstatements not so very far removed from John.Whatever we may now make of Matthews use of

Isaiah 7 in his infancy narrative, we have to concedethat he was trying to say something about the divinenature of Jesus.The Pauline corpus also contains explicitly

Christological statements that may not be originalto Paul. This is where Vermes confusion over

Philippians 2:~-m (pp. 78, 8z) is so significant, forit fits his case for the hymn to be a post-Paulinecomposition inserted into Philippians, but if it was apre-Pauline hymn adopted by Paul himself, then ittestifies to a belief in the pre-existence, incarnationand glorification of Jesus again within a few decadesofJesus himself.And that would do Vermes case no

good at all!While not as explicit, there are other passages in

Paul that do point in the same direction, such as

Galatians 4:4-7 and z Corinthians 8:9, that need tobe accounted for. For all of this to be dismissed as a

distortion sounds to me like special pleading.Vermes is determined to think consecutively, that

John is later than Paul is later than Matthew/Mark!Luke - but is it not more likely that the ideas in eachwere more or less concurrent, perhaps espoused indifferent places, or perhaps by the same people, whoviewed the various traditions as complementary,rather than contradictory? We are dealing with a

relatively short length of time here - only seventy

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years at an absolute maximum. In any case, I havesaid enough to make the point that there are goodarguments for all the Christological traditions of theNew Testament being earlier and more connectedthan Vermes suggests.

All this leads us to my second area of concernabout Vermes thesis.And that is: if Paul and

John and even the Synoptic evangelists tvere sowrong about Jesus, where did they get their ideasfrom?

Vermes argues that the New Testament writershave obliterated the Jesus of History, and that theswiftness of the obliteration was due to a premature

change in cultural perspective (p. ~63 ), from Jewishto Greek. But this view, it seems to me, under-estimates the extent to which Palestine was alreadyHellenised in the time of

Jesus,and fails to answer

the question why the Jesus message proved souniversal.

There is no doubt that the historical Jesus wasdifferent from the Christ of Faith, proclaimedalready by the New Testament writers, but itseems to me that there is actually a very easyexplanation for this, one from which Vermes shiesaway.

The explanation is the Resurrection. Vermeshimself recognizes the centrality of the topic of theresurrection of Jesus for the whole of the NewTestament, and concedes that the Judaism ofJesus day was unaccustomed to handling theproblem of a &dquo;historical&dquo; resurrection (p. 171). Buthis explanation of the Resurrection on pp. 174f.,following Paul Winter, does not offer a sufficientlyfull reason why either the followers of Jesus were so

dramatically turned round so soon after the

Crucifixion, or why the New Testament writers

universally attest to the Resurrection of Jesus. If itdid not really happen, where would they have gotthe idea from?

The key to the Christology of the New Testamentis what happened on Easter morning. If, as all theNew Testament writers assert, Jesus was physicallyraised from the dead and subsequently glorified, thenthat offers an adequate explanation of the origins ofall the Christological reflections offered by John, Pauland the others - including Matthew, Mark and Luke.In this sense, Paul is quite right in what he says inthe opening verses of Romans i: it is the

Resurrection, as historical event, that makes Jesusthe Christ.

Vermes seems to a

priori excludethis

possibility,but it seems to me that this exclusion, in favour ofthe impact of Jesus living on in the hearts of the

disciples, actually raises more questions than itanswers. I cant help recalling Mark Tullys TVseries and then book, The Lives of Jesrcs (BBCBooks, 1996), and not only because its title issuggestively similar to The Changing Faces ofJesus. Tully is a journalist, and wrote his series andbook as a journalist, not as a theologian. Properjournalism and proper historical research are, itseems to me, very close to each other, and Tullyconcluded that some-thing concrete happened afterJesus death that caused his followers to believe thathe was divine.

This is the nub of it, and it is here that readers of

Vermes (and of the New Testament) have to maketheir own decision. I know what mine is.

Christian Quotations

hose who regularly preach, write or speak in public may like to note the publicationj of The ZY~estminster Collectioiz of Christia1l Quotations (compiled by Martin-i~ Manser. Louisville/London/Leiden: Vlestminster/John Knox, 7-ooi. HB. 20. pp.

497. ISBN o--~6q.-zzz58-7~. It is a handsome volume, containing over 6,000 quotationsarranged thematically. It is ecumenical in its treatment, drawing from the Bible and allmajor Christian traditions. Examples taken more or less at random are Caring, Devil,Happiness, Marriage, Neighbours, Righteousness, Women and ~~omanhood. It isnot a technical work of scholarship but a highly professional product, beautifully set out,easy to read and fully indexed.

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