Waterstones Christian Beginnings

Author: Anthony Campbell

Rating: 5

Review: Geza Vermes, who died in 2014, was an advocate for the view that Jesus can only be properly understood in a Jewish context, something he argued in more than twelve books; see, for example, The Changing Faces of Jesus. He portrays Jesus as a rural Galilean prophet, exorcist and healer who preached the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God but made no claim to divine status. Christian Beginnings, as Vermes explains in his introduction, takes the story further. It is "an attempt to sketch the historical continuity between Jesus portrayed in his Galilean charismatic setting and the first ecumenical council held at Nicaea in AD 325, which solemnly proclaimed his divinity as a dogma of Christianity". Vermes is not the first to describe this extraordinary transformation, of course, but he does so in an unusual way. Naturally he uses the New Testament sources, especially Paul and the Fourth Gospel, but he also draws on other sources that are likely to be unfamiliar or even unknown to most non-specialists. These include, for example, the Didache, or Teaching of the Apostles. Written in the late first century, it describes the initiation of new church members and the organisation of the infant church. It has been said to be one of the most significant literary discoveries in primitive Christianity. A little later than the Didache we have the Epistle of Barnabas, which was nearly included in the New Testament. The two documents present differing views of Jesus. For the Didache, whose author was evidently Jewish, Jesus is the Servant of God but not himself divine. He is a great teacher but not a superhuman being. Barnabas, in contrast, refers to Jesus as Son of God, who is pre-existent from eternity; this is similar to the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel. The author of Barnabas was apparently a Gentile and there is an implied criticism of Judaism in the way the text is framed as a dispute between 'us' and 'them'. Between the end of the first century and the middle of the second century there is a group of writers known as the Apostolic Fathers: 1 and 2 Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Hermas and Diognetus. They provide an idea of how the church was developing at this time and of progressive changes that were occurring in Christians' view of Jesus as he moved towards full divinity. In the late second and early third centuries we find the "Three Pillars of Wisdom": Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen. All made important contributions to Christianity although both Tertullian and Origen were later declared to have been heretical. At this period Christianity faced danger externally, from the hostility of Rome, and also internally, from conflict with Gnosticism. Both problems were addressed by these writers. Origen is particularly interesting because although he was very influential in early Christianity he is little known to non-specialists today except perhaps for having castrated himself for religious motives at the age of eighteen. "The power and the originality of the teaching of Origen were bound posthumously to inspire conflicting attitudes towards the great Alexandrian. His admirers worshipped him and his critics subjected his name to vituperation. Attacks on Origenism, on ideas some of which he actually held and others erroneously attributed to him, continued for centuries. The chief points of controversy concerned the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls, Origen's purported rejection of the literal sense of the Bible in favour of allegorical exegesis and his denial of the eternity of hell. … The greatest mind and most creative thinker of early Christianity was anathematized by the church of second-rate followers. " Like other Christian writers at this time, Origen struggled with the theology of the Trinity. The Trinitarian conundrum is in fact surely insoluble; the modern Roman Catholic church describes it as a Mystery, which seems to mean it resembles a Zen koan (the sound of one hand clapping). The problem is to explain why saying that God contains three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit doesn't imply there are three Gods. "The only escape route away from the trap of suspected formal polytheism was by denying equal status to the various persons within the single Deity. Only the Father was fully the God; the Son was only the second or lower God and the Holy Spirit, something vague and unspecific, floating somewhere below the Son. " This idea, Vermes thinks, was what prevailed in the whole church before Nicaea and was already foreshadowed by Paul and John. It was expressed clearly and logically by Arius, the founder of the Arian heresy. But it "was challenged, attacked and finally overturned by a minority of bishops with the backing of the emperor at the Council of Nicaea". Even so, the arguments continued for over half a century, until the Emperor Theodosius declared Arianism illegal in 381. Divergent opinions were no longer tolerated. "Christianity, as generally understood in the light of its Gentile development, is focused not on the genuine existential spiritual legacy of the Jewish Jesus, but on the intellectual acceptance of the divine Christ and his superhuman existence within the mystery of the church's triune Godhead. " The book provides a readable if rather detailed account of the arguments that shaped Christianity in the first few centuries. Its chief interest will probably be to Christians who are curious about the early years of their faith and are prepared to look at the question through critical but not hostile Jewish eyes. Secularists may well find the whole subject esoteric and obscure, but given the continuing importance of religion in general and Christianity in particular in the modern world, some will probably feel it worth while to explore this unfamiliar territory.

Author: trini

Rating: 2

Review: I have just (August 2014) read Geza Vermes's Christian Beginnings right through, and then immediately re-read the first half of the book, with chapter headings 1) Charismatic Judaism from Moses to Jesus, 2) The Charismatic Religion of Jesus, 3) Nascent Charismatic Christianity, 4) The Christianity of Paul, and 5) Johannine Christianity. The second half of the book takes us outside the canonical New Testament writings, up to and including the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD - the full range of Vermes's book. Vermes's book involves a consideration of the whole of the Old and New Testaments, and the subsequent theological writing up to Nicaea, and it is impossible to critique every statement of Vermes. I shall limit myself to just a few observations, dealing only with the New Testament and its Jewish background. I give this book only a two-star rating, because although it is "A beautiful and magisterial book", as Archbishop Rowan Williams says of it in the last sentence of his review published in the Guardian (and this is quoted on the front cover of the paperback Penguin edition), I also agree very strongly with what Williams immediately adds (but the Penguin edition does not also add): "but it leaves unsolved some of the puzzles that still make readers of the New Testament pause to ask what really is the right, the truthful, way to talk about a figure like the Jesus we meet in these texts." I hope I will be excused if I quote in full the rest of this last paragraph of Williams: "Vermes's account, for all its lucidity, does not quite allow us to see the energy behind such a movement of ideas. Nor, as other commentators have said, are we helped to see why this particular charismatic wonder-worker rather than others attracted the extraordinary claim that he was the vehicle of unconditional creative power and the enabler of a new kind of worship - the paradox that the creed of [Nicaea in AD] 325 enshrined, in words Christians still use." I underline immediately Vermes's insistence on the `charismatic' background to the Jesus story, In the first four chapters he uses the word `charisma/charismatic' more than eighty times, and he ends his first chapter with the statement, "In short, without a proper grasp of charismatic Judaism it is impossible to understand the rise of Christianity". This may be true, but charismatic pre-Christian Judaism (Vermes's Chapter 1) does not explain the WHOLE of the Jesus story. Should we not also have a study of all the rest of Jewish prophecy, from Abraham and Moses through the `mainstream' prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel et al., to see if and how in some way Jesus might have reflected the nature and the ministry of these prophets also? I call attention to the fact that several modern New Testament scholars have written books with titles like Jesus the Pharisee, or Jesus the Zealot, or Jesus the Galilean exorcist, or whatever. I make the general comment, that Vermes is right to quote the texts which he does, but wrong not to quote ALL the evidence. And we are not made aware that he is not giving us all the evidence. The question arises, why did Mark and Matthew and Luke write their gospels? Vermes has a chapter on Paul, and a chapter on John. I need a chapter on each of the Synoptics too. If one considers only the evidence which Vermes puts before us, the Synoptics would have seen Jesus as no more than Honi the circle-drawer and Hanina ben Dosa, Jewish `holy men' from just before and just after Jesus' time. These are Vermes's real heroes. In his present book, Vermes says not a word about why Jesus was crucified by Jewish-Roman agreement. The whole passion narrative is simply wiped out of view, as are the subsequent resurrection narratives. And all the body of the text of the synoptic gospels which look forward or relate in any way to the passion and resurrection narratives are passed over without serious analysis. But we need absolutely to know what was in question, and who was in question, in the last chapters of all the Synoptics, and of John, and in the first chapters of Acts, which deal with the last week and the last days and the first post-Calvary weeks in Jesus' life and in the life of nascent Christianity. If Jesus was just another Honi or Hanina, where is their comparable legacy? Matthew's 28.18-20 matches John: "All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth. Going therefore make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And behold I am with you all days, even to the end of time". (I always point out: the word `all' in this quote occurs all four times in the original Greek.) Mark and Matthew and Luke wrote to tell us about the Risen Christ, not just about Jesus the charismatic miracle-worker. In `The Way of the Lord - Christological Exegesis of the Old Testament in the Gospel of Mark' (T & T Clark, 1992), Joel Marcus finds in Mark the influence of not only the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 52/53 (and the other Servant Songs) but also Daniel 7, Zechariah 9-14, Psalms 2 and 110, and a very large number of the OT Psalms of the Righteous Sufferer. This is the wide OT sourcing for the NT vision of Jesus the Suffering and Rising Messiah. So then, the near-contemporary Hymns of the Dead Sea Scrolls (also adduced by Marcus, and whose influence on the Christian view of the Messiah is often stressed) confirm, but do not originate or create, the NT view of Jesus the Messiah. Jesus did not need the example of some ill-defined 'Qumran Messiah'. His role is already, solidly, in the OT - though of course one welcomes its expectation and further development in the Intertestamental literature. Let me call attention to some other books which directly relate to Vermes's thesis in `Christian Beginnings'. 1) `The Messiah Before Jesus - the Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls', by the Jewish Jerusalem scholar Israel Knohl, Knohl claims that he can identify an actual Qumran sectary called Menahem, who fulfilled the messianic hopes of the Qumran community, but who was killed by the Romans at the time of Herod's death in 4 B.C. This is a truly extraordinary claim, and in order to support it Knohl states boldly that the New Testament claims for the Person and Work of Jesus Christ are not Christian inventions, but were already part of, and were drawn from, the Qumran Essene expectations in the first century before Christ. Knohl's initial synopsis ends thus: "This book should reshape our understanding of Christianity and its relationship to Judaism." It does - but it reshapes it not by supporting Knohl's case for the existence of his Essene Messiah Menahem, but by solidly supporting Christianity's claims for its Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. Knohl quotes Geza Vermes from Vermes's `Jesus the Jew' (1981): "Neither the suffering of the Messiah, nor his death and resurrection, appear to have been part of the faith of first-century Judaism' (Knohl, p. 106, Notes, top of page). But Knohl then devastatingly says (p.2): "In this book [`The Messiah before Jesus'] I intend to counter these claims [quoted in the note just mentioned]. I propose to show that Jesus really did regard himself as the Messiah and truly expected the Messiah to be rejected, killed, and resurrected after three days, for this is precisely what was believed to have happened to a messianic leader [Menahem] who had lived one generation before Jesus". This is a sensational claim. However, while the Church and the New Testament exist as historical authentications of Jesus' messianic claims, one must ask, humbly but bluntly: what is there to authenticate Knohl's claim that his Qumran Messiah was killed but then believed by his followers to have been resurrected after three days and to have risen to heaven in a cloud (p. 45)? Proofs for this belief (Knohl quotes only Revelation 11.12, and Lactantius) and for this resurrection simply do not exist. 2) I also adduce the book `The First Messiah - Investigating the Saviour Before Christ', by the American biblical scholar Michael O. Wise. This mingles scholarship and guesswork, and completely fails to convince . The first major flaw in Wise's thesis is that he invents an almost entirely fictitious biography for the Teacher of Righteousness of the Dead Sea Scrolls around 70 BC, whom he identifies as his `First Messiah'. Furthermore, the TOR never calls himself Messiah, and none of his followers, either during his lifetime or after his death, ever called him Messiah. Given the discussions about the meaning of `Messiah' in Vermes, Fitzmyer, Brown, Charlesworth, JJ Collins, Lim, Brooke, etc., Wise needs to have more clearly defined why he would call his `Judah' a Messiah. Fr Raymond Browns says: "... we know of no historical Jew who ever claimed to be the Messiah or was called the Messiah except Jesus of Nazareth" (`An Introduction to New Testament Christology', p. 159). Note that Brown does not say that intertestamental Judaism was not expecting a Messiah - see e.g . the translation of rthe Dead Sea Scroll 4Q521 in Geza Vermes's own translation, 'The Complete Dead Seas Scrolls in English', pp. 390,391): " ... [the hea]vens and the earth will listen to his Messiah ... And the Lord will accomplish glorious things which have never been ... For He will heal the wounded, and revive the dead and bring good news to the poor (Isa. lxi, i) ". ..This DSS fragment is rightly referred to as 'the Resurrection fragment', for Jesus quotes his raising of the dead as proof, to the messengers of John the Baptist, that he is indeed the eexpected Messiash. This DSS fragment, translated by Vermes himself, directly contradicts Vermes's own view that all such ideas were unknown to pre-Jesus Judaism I can sympathize with Wise's belief that the TOR showed some of the characteristics of the Messiah/Prophet/Priest/Teacher/King/Saviour/Shepherd/Isaianic-servant/Right