Jesus, the Dead Sea Scrolls and other religious themes
By Geza Vermes
SCM. 185 pages. £14.99
ISBN 978-0-33404-358-4
THE STORY OF THE SCROLLS
The miraculous discovery and true significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls
By Geza Vermes
Penguin. 260 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978-0-14104-615-0
While it is an exaggeration to claim that he is ‘the greatest living Jesus scholar’, as the back cover of the book asserts, Geza Vermes is rightly regarded as a significant Biblical Studies scholar.
This is especially for his contribution to study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which forms the focus of the second book under consideration here, and is one theme of the first book, The Real Jesus.
Readers of EN will struggle with the presentation of Jesus therein, since its ‘Jesus’ is not the Christ they would recognise from the Bible and personal experience. This is important, because Vermes’s works are among those regularly quoted by Islamic polemicists in their propaganda against biblical Christianity. A perusal of this book reveals why Muslim missionaries are so keen on his work.
Popular pieces
The book is a ‘collection of shorter popular pieces’, many of which appeared in the media rather than academic journals. Such media rarely allow a conservative evangelical presentation on Jesus and the Bible, and it is no surprise that Vermes declares himself ‘a liberal thinker’, arguing for ‘the historical Jesus, his real life and authentic teaching’ as opposed to one supposedly superimposed by ‘theological speculations’ (p.x). In his essay on ‘The Age of Jesus’, he repeats the old chestnut that Luke’s Gospel gets the date of Quirinius’s census wrong (p.11).
One major theme in current Islamic polemics is to highlight the Ebionites, a Jewish-Christian sect that rejected Paul, and the deity of Christ and possibly also his virgin birth. Modern Muslim propagandists are increasingly associating Islam with this group, presenting them as ‘the true Christians’. Vermes seems to agree with the latter analysis, claiming that the Ebionites were ‘treated as heretics for resisting the developing Christian doctrines of the divinity of Jesus and his virginal conception’ (p.17).
There are three obvious responses to this. Firstly, the inital reference to them is by Irenæus, c.180 AD. Why were there no prior references if they were the lineal descendents of the first Jewish-Christians?
Secondly, we know they used a ‘gospel’ which, according to another figure quoted by Islamic missionaries, the agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman (in his book Lost Scriptures, p.12), ‘represented a kind of harmony of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke’, as demonstrated by its conflation of the Gospel accounts ‘of the voice at Jesus’s baptism’. Hence, on both counts, the Ebionite sect must be later than mainstream Christianity, since they used a synchronisation of these Gospels.
Thirdly, the evidence from pre-Pauline material in the Epistles points to belief in Jesus’s divinity being immediate in the churches existing before Paul’s conversion, as scholars such as Bauckham and Hurtado have surely demonstrated. It follows therefore that belief in Jesus’s divinity was not the result of later theological development, but was actually the faith of the apostolic church. Unfortunately, Vermes does not interact with these points. Strangely, and in contradiction, in the essay ‘Was Jesus Really Human?’ (p.60), Vermes notes: ‘Religious thinkers in the early centuries... had no difficulty in accepting Jesus’s divinity. What they questioned from late New Testament times onward (1 John 4.2) was the reality of his flesh’.
Jesus’s divinity
Vermes returns to the issue of Jesus’s divinity in his essay, ‘Jesus the Jew’, where he claims that the Synoptic Gospels ‘do not depict him as divine’ (p.20). The excellent book by Simon Gathercole, The Pre-existent Son, demonstrates how hollow is this assertion. Incredibly, Vermes states that John’s Gospel was written ‘at the beginning of the second century’, repeating this claim several times. This assertion was prominent in 19th-century liberalism, but subsequent scholarship demolished it — for example, the far from conservative Kümmel’s Introduction to the New Testament (p.246) dates John’s Gospel to the last decade of the first century, which, it observes, is ‘almost universally accepted’.
Obviously, much of the book will not commend itself to EN readers, but there are points of value. For example, in recent years, various TV programmes, articles and books have claimed that Jesus was married — specifically to Mary Magdalene. Vermes acknowledges that celibacy was unusual among Jews, save the Essenes, but concludes that Jesus’ conviction that he was a prophet, involving a renunciation of worldly pleasures, might have motivated his celibate state (p.21). Moreover, the chapters of the book dealing with the Dead Sea Scrolls are excellent, informative and lucid. However, readers might prefer to obtain Vermes’s second book under consideration here, which concentrates on the Scrolls.
Dead Sea Scrolls
The Story of the Scrolls is fascinating, introducing the story of Qumran to a popular audience. This is necessary, because a scandal/conspiracy cult has grown up around the Scrolls. The conspiracy theory — which, again, Islamic polemicists frequently assert — is that the Scrolls contain information devastating to traditional Christian belief, and so the Vatican engaged in a massive plot to conceal the truth.
Vermes is forthright: ‘The theory is without any foundation’ (p.90). He notes the presence of non-Catholic scholars in the study of the texts, who therefore were not ‘under the control of the Vatican’. He denounces as ‘ignoramuses’ those who propose that Roland De Vaux, who led the Scrolls team, deliberately, and ‘unnoticed’ by his fellows, ‘destroyed materials’ seemingly subversive of Christian history (p.91). In fact, the delays and controversies that bedevilled translation and publication were the result of ‘very ordinary human failings’ (p.92), not least a ‘turf’ mentality among the scholars, political differences and, in one case, alcoholism.
Other issues of interest are the claims of John Allegro in 1956 that the Scrolls presented a ‘crucified’ Teacher, who would rise again (pp.60-61) — an idea rejected by other scholars, and which Allegro admitted was not ‘literally stated in the Scrolls’. Messianic parallels have always fascinated both Christians and conspiracy-mongers, so it is worth noting that the Qumran community believed in two Messiahs, one royal, the other priestly (pp.151,231). Given that the sect and the later Christian community both emerged in the milieu of post-exilic Jewish religious thought, it is hardly surprising that we find parallels between them, but it is the differences that are more poignant: ‘The law-centred religion of Qumran is very far from the paramountly eschatological and ethical turn of mind of Jesus’ (p.236).
More eccentric theories
This has not stopped eccentric theories emerging, such as those of Barbara Thiering, characterised by Vermes as ‘idiosyncratic exegesis’, who finds Jesus in the Scrolls, married to — yes, you’ve guessed it — Mary Magdalene, only to leave her and their children for Lydia (Acts 16.14), whereas Robert Eisenman has James as Qumran’s Teacher of Righteousness opposed by the Wicked Priest — Paul (pp.190-191). The latter theory is often repeated by Muslim propagandists. Vermes comments on these ideas: ‘They fail the basic credibility test, being foisted on, rather than springing from, the evidence’.
Vermes also points out that, while the Qumran community did not produce a canonical list (p.100), ‘there was no difference between the Qumran Bible and the Hebrew Bible of the Palestinian Jewish population at large’. Only Esther may be missing, and even that is unsure. The implication is that ‘the list of authoritative books was established while Qumran was in existence, that is to say, before the year 70 CE at the latest, and not in the early decades of the second century CE, as commonly held’ (pp.215-216). It follows that the Protestant Old Testament canon, often the subject of derision by Islamic polemicists because of its divergence from the larger Catholic list, is indeed the historical one.
Before the Scrolls were discovered, we had ‘only a small Hebrew papyrus fragment from that age’, containing ‘brief extracts from the Bible’ (p.96), so the emergence of the Scrolls has been a boon to biblical studies. Vermes’s book, though marred by theological liberalism, presents a popular and lucid account of their history and content. One final thought: before the Scrolls were found, the oldest Old Testament Hebrew text dated from the tenth century AD. What if one day, another Palestinian shepherd-boy were to stray into some cave and find New Testament texts earlier than those extant now?
