Jesus the Jew - Geza Vermes

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Jesus

      As an exceptional and controversial religious teacher, it was inevitable that Jesus should encounter criticism and hostility as well as respect and love, but strangely enough, the first opposition came from those closest to him, his family and fellow-citizens in Nazareth. When his relatives heard of his cures, exorcism and preaching, they set off to take hold of him, for they said:

      ‘He is out of his mind.’132

      The scandalous incongruity of this statement is the best guarantee of its historicity, and the Marcan variant, ‘For people were saying that he was out of his mind’, as well as the absence of Synoptic parallels, are no doubt due to an early ‘censorship’ tendency in the evolving Christian tradition. Moreover, it is difficult not to see it as a preliminary to the fuller account, a few verses later, of the arrival of Jesus’ mother and brothers at the house where he was teaching, their summons that he should join them, and Jesus’ subsequent retort that the greater family of those who do the will of God had first claim to his presence.133

      Whatever the actual outcome of this apparent refusal to submit to his family’s control, no further contact is mentioned in the Synoptics between them and Jesus. It is to remedy this unfortunate impression that the Fourth Gospel expressly depicts Mary as her son’s first convert, at the wedding feast in Cana,134 and as standing at the last beside him at the cross.135 Luke, too, finds Jesus’ mother and brothers in the company of the apostles after the Ascension.136 The family may, of course, have changed its mind at a later stage and made common cause with the disciples; it is in fact a historically reliable tradition that James, ‘the brother of the lord’, became the head of the Jerusalem Church.137

      If his immediate kin were shocked by his behaviour, it is not surprising that friends and neighbours were also scandalized.138 No one is prophet in his own town, Jesus is reported to have commented philosophically,139 though he was taken aback by their want of faith.140 Nevertheless, the Lucan story of an attempted lynching is probably an exaggeration.141

      This unsympathetic reception of Jesus in Nazareth may explain his rhetorical disparagement of the ties of nature compared with those which bound men to him, and through him, to God. Happy the womb that carried him! cried a woman admirer, and was corrected, ‘No, happy are those who hear the word of God.’142 On another occasion he was even more direct:

      ‘He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.’143

      The conflict between Jesus and the representatives of authority on doctrinal and politico-religious grounds requires several preliminary remarks. Firstly, the identity of the opponents is often unclear because the sources are contradictory regarding them. For instance, the protagonists in what appears to be the same event are described by Mark as Pharisees and Herodians, by Matthew as Pharisees only, and by Luke as lawyers and Pharisees.144 Secondly, interpretative tradition, both scholarly and popular, is too easily inclined to equate Pharisees, scribes and lawyers, but since Mark and Luke expressly refer to the lawyers of the Pharisees, it would follow that those not so described were not necessarily members of that party.145 Thirdly, in the various accounts of the plot which led to the arrest of Jesus and his surrender to Pilate for trial and execution, the Pharisees as a class play no part.146 Lastly, the struggle with the chief priests and elders, and probably with the Sadducees too, is confined to Jerusalem.147

      As far as basic Jewish beliefs are concerned, the only serious clash reported in the Gospels between Jesus and the established authority finds him opposing the Sadducees in their denial of the resurrection of the dead.148 Here, as well as in the identification of the greatest commandment – love of God and one’s fellow-men – Jesus is represented as sharing the outlook and winning the approval of the Pharisees.149 Yet it would be a gross overstatement to portray him as a Pharisee himself. Indeed, in regard to those customs which they invested with a quasi-absolute value, but which to him were secondary to biblical commandments, a head-on collision was unavoidable. Jesus ate with sinners and did not condemn those who sat down to table with unwashed hands or pulled corn on the Sabbath.150 The lawyers who accuse him of blasphemy because of his promise to forgive sins, and those who suggest that his exorcistic power is due to his association with the devil, need not have been Pharisees.151 The only other person said to have raised a charge of blasphemy against Jesus was the Sadducean high priest during the trial, although the words attributed to Jesus cannot, in fact, be construed as such by virtue of any known Jewish law, biblical or post-biblical. According to the Mishnah, only the misuse of the Tetragram, the sacrosanct name of God, constitutes blasphemy,152 and no accusation is levelled against Jesus in this respect. Also, even if it could be ascertained that he claimed to be the Messiah or the son of God, there are no grounds for seeing blasphemy in this, or any other capital crime.153

      There is little doubt that the Pharisees disliked his nonconformity and would have preferred him to have abstained from healing on the Sabbath where life was not in danger.154 They obviously enjoyed embarrassing him with testing questions, such as whether tax should be paid to Rome.155 An affirmative answer would have outraged Jewish patriots, and a denial would have been synonymous with preaching rebellion.156 But Jesus himself was not above employing the same methods:157 indeed, they were an integral part of polemical argument at that time. There is no evidence, however, of an active and organized participation on the part of the Pharisees in the planning and achievement of Jesus’ downfall.

       Arrest and Execution of Jesus

      The Synoptic Gospels know of two main plots to put an end to Jesus’ activities: one in Galilee, which failed, and one in Jerusalem, which resulted in the cross. Probably, some individual Pharisees bore a measure of responsibility for this, but in both cases the principal, and certainly the ultimate, guilt lay with the representatives of the political establishment – Herod Antipas and his supporters in Galilee, and the chief priests and Pilate in the capital.158

      Whether there was a trial of Jesus by the supreme Jewish court of Judea in Jerusalem on a religious charge, and a subsequent capital sentence pronounced and forwarded for confirmation and execution by the secular arm, remains historically more than dubious, as Paul Winter has shown in his magisterial study of the subject.159 If such a trial did take place, and if it were possible to reconstruct its proceedings from the discrepant, and often contradictory reports of the Gospels, the only justifiable conclusion would be that in a single session the Sanhedrin managed to break every rule in the book: it would, in other words, have been an illegal trial. Yet even those who are able to believe that a real trial occurred are compelled to admit that when the chief priests transferred the case from their court to Pontius Pilate’s tribunal, they did not ask for their findings to be confirmed, but laid a fresh charge before the prefect of Judea, namely that Jesus was a political agitator with pretensions to being the king of the Jews.160 It was not on a Jewish religious indictment, but on a secular accusation that he was condemned by the emperor’s delegate to die shamefully on the Roman cross.

       The Resurrection of Jesus

      Although founded on evidence which can only be described as confused and fragile, belief in the resurrection of Jesus became an increasingly important, and finally central, issue in the post-Synoptic and especially post-Marcan stage of doctrinal evolution. This development is all the more astonishing since the idea of bodily resurrection played no part of any significance in the preaching of Jesus. Moreover, his disciples did not expect him to arise from the dead any more than their contemporaries expected the Messiah to do so.161

      All in all, taking into account the disciples’ despair after the tragedy in Jerusalem, and their startled incredulity on hearing from their women of the empty tomb, the historian is bound to query whether Jesus in fact prepared them for this extraordinary happening by repeatedly foretelling that he would rise again precisely on the third day. Admittedly, Mark and Matthew make room for five separate announcements by Jesus of his suffering, death and resurrection, but it is generally held even by academic orthodoxy that the references to the resurrection at least constitute prophecy after the event.162

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