This patient, scrupulous study should be read as the companion volume to Jesus the Jew and The Changing Faces of Jesus, books in which Geza Vermes places Jesus unequivocally within the Jewish life of northern Israel in the first century AD. Galilee, the scene of Jesus’s short mission, was a provincial, rural region often scorned by the Jerusalem establishment, and Jesus, like northern prophets Elijah and Elishah, was a charismatic figure, who backed up his teaching with miracles of healing and exorcism. In The Authentic Gospel of Jesus, Vermes examines every single one of the maxims attributed to Jesus in an attempt to discover his genuine message, before it was overlaid by the theological reflections and anxieties of his Christian followers.

Vermes has made his fine scholarship wonderfully accessible to the general reader. Even though his approach is deeply respectful of Jesus and entirely devoid of aggressive polemic, some of his findings will be disturbing to Christians who see Jesus as a unique, divine figure. Indeed, Vermes points out that the Christianity that has evolved over two millennia belongs to a different world from that of Jesus, who was entirely uninterested in meta- physical or doctrinal speculation about God, and wholly consumed by the purely practical implementation of religion.

Vermes’s painstaking and detailed exposition of the texts shows that Jesus never referred to himself as the Son of God. Instead, he preferred the more humble title, “son of man”, which stressed his humanity, vulnerability and mortality. He believed that he was the herald of the Kingdom of God, a phrase he never defined closely, but that seems to have implied a new era in world history, in which God’s reign would be fully recognised here on earth. The kingdom had already begun with the preaching of John the Baptist; Jesus’s own miracles revealed God’s presence and victory over the forces of evil. Very soon the kingdom would be fully established, and in the meantime his followers should show their consciousness of this new state of affairs by an unswerving trust in God’s power, by casting aside their material possessions and family ties, and by dedicating their lives to the imminent kingdom.

The citizens of the kingdom would be Jews. Although he was sometimes surprised and even delighted by the faith of Gentiles, Jesus preached only to Jews and forbade his disciples to preach to non-Jews and Samaritans. Jesus had no intention of jettisoning the law of Moses; indeed, he insisted on a more stringent observance of the commandments that went beyond purely external conformity in a surrender of heart and mind to God’s law.

By the time the gospels were written (the earliest in about AD70, some 40 years after Jesus’s crucifixion) Christians had to explain why he had died such a disgraceful death and why the kingdom had not been definitively established. Some envisaged, as a first step, the imminent return of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven; later, when even this hope was disappointed, they postponed the advent of the kingdom indefinitely, and saw the new Church as the locus for God ’s saving presence. All these different views are represented in the New Testament. Further, as a result of a new revelation and to the dismay of some of Jesus’s original disciples, St Paul had taken the gospel to non-Jews. Increasingly, Christianity was becoming a gentile faith, and the gospels accordingly reflect the incontrovertible reality that gentiles seemed more enthusiastic about the kingdom as preached by Jesus than Jews. They therefore imagine that Jesus must have foreseen this development, and make him proclaim a universal mission to all the goyim.

An open-minded appraisal of this “authentic gospel”, Vermes concludes, will demand that Christians rethink their faith. That should not be an unacceptable option, because Christians have always been able to revise their ideas of God and the person of Jesus — often quite drastically. The doctrines of Trinity, Incarnation and Redemption are now de rigueur, but would have seemed very strange to the authors of the New Testament. Originally they were all extremely controversial, innovative and creative attempts to make the gospels speak to contemporary conditions. A tradition that lacks this flexibility will not survive.

For too long, the findings of such New Testament scholars as Vermes have been confined to specialist circles. Lay people have been given no guidance about how to integrate these academic insights with their faith. We could start with Jesus the Jew, as described by Vermes and others. A carefully cultivated appreciation of the fact that Jesus, a man whom Christians revere as an avatar of the divine, was so profoundly committed to Judaism could help to heal the anti-semitism that has so gravely compromised the Christian tradition.

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