The Authentic Gospel of Jesus

by Géza Vermes

In The Authentic Gospel of Jesus, renowned biblical scholar Geza Vermes distils a lifetime's knowledge to examine every saying attributed to Jesus and return to the true teachings of the man behind the messiah.Who was the real Jesus? What was the original message of the charismatic Jewish healer and moralist who changed the world? There can be no doubt that Jesus, 'a religious genius' as Geza Vermes describes him, lived and taught in Palestine some 2000 years ago. The influence he has had is incalculable. How though can we distinguish between the doctrines shaped to the needs of the burgeoning Christian church and the original views laid out by Jesus himself? How can we dig back through the additions, misinterpretations and confusions of later writers and two millennia of tradition to get back to the authentic gospel of Jesus? In The Authentic Gospel of Jesus, Vermes subjects all the sayings of Jesus to brilliantly informed scrutiny. The result is a book of unique value and novelty -scraping aside the accretions of centuries to come as close as we can hope to be to the true Jesus. 'The greatest Jesus scholar of his generation' Sunday Telegraph 'A pleasure to read from cover to cover' Literary Review 'One of the most commonsensical, wise books on the Bible ever published. Nobody can fail to be impressed by the magisterial scholarship and knowledge' Daily Express 'Vermes has made his fine scholarship wonderfully accessible to the general reader' Karen Armstrong, Sunday Times 'A truly fascinating book' Independent on Sunday Geza Vermes is director of the Forum for Qumran Research at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. His books, published by Penguin, include The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, The Story of the Scrolls and The Changing Faces of Jesus as well as the 'Jesus' Nativity, Passion and Resurrection.

Genres: History, Religion, Christianity, Nonfiction, Spirituality, New Testament, Theology

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Géza Vermes was a Jewish Hungarian scholar and writer on religious history, particularly Jewish and Christian.

Reviews

[Julian Worker]

This is a reference book.

I don't believe you can ever 'finish' books such as this because they're so scholarly and fascinating even if you're not a great follower of religion.

The great idea was to collect, classify, and comment on every word attributed to Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke in one book, enabling the reader to rediscover the religious message practised and preached by Jesus.

The statements are divided into nine categories / chapters: 1) Narratives and commands; 2) controversy stories; 3) words of wisdom; 4) parables; 5) biblical quotations; 6) prayers; 7) Son of Man sayings; 8) sayings about the Kingdom of God; 9) eschatological rules of behaviour.

The comments are illuminating, pithy, and sometimes amusing. For example, Geza Vermes points out that Matthew's understanding of the text of Zechariah 9:9 is idiosyncratic. Matthew overlooks that in the poetry of Zechariah 'a colt, the foal of an ass' is a literary parallelism meaning a single donkey and not a mother together with her young. In Matthew 21:7, the gospel writer speaks of two animals.

[Sheila]

Hmm, after reading only one chapter I am sensing a definite anti-Christianity vibe to this book. It seems like the author (A Professor of Jewish Studies) wants Jesus to just be a "regular" guy, and if any of the bible verses he discusses don't fit with this theory, then he dismisses them as "this is a folk legend" (his explanation for Jesus walking on water), or, for when Jesus predicts his own resurrection following death, the author states "the resurrection part of the prediction is probably a later editorial supplement".

I guess I can understand why someone who is not a Christian would try to come up with reasons to explain things they don't believe, or that don't fit their personel faith, but to then title this book as being "The Authentic Gospel of Jesus" seems like a slap in the face to Christians.

Update: okay, I set this aside on my reading pile over a year ago, and I have had no desire to continue with it, so as of today it is getting moved to my "did not finish" shelf. Moving on to other things.

[Thom Beckett]

Although Vermes' style is immensely readable, the meat of this book - a collection of all of the sayings of Jesus throughout the synoptic gospels, followed by an exposition of their likely source, veracity, and tone, can be pretty hard going.

Where this book really comes alive is in the last couple of chapters where Vermes really pulls together the various threads and paints a picture of the historical Jesus and his teachings. This is fascinating, eye-opening, and worth the study of the less obviously interesting previous sections entirely.

[Pete daPixie]

I just find all of Vermes's work so readable. Here he takes you back to 1st century middle east to sift through the New Testament, to select what is authentic Jesus, from the words that have been put in his mouth.

[Mark]

I find his logic more convincing than that of the Jesus seminar.
Folio Society Edition.

[Kevin de Ataíde]

Tedious and tiresome, a pompous book with a pompous title. Despite its self-exaltation in the introduction, this is another of the Jesus books from the end of the last century which attempt to find an 'historical Jesus,' as opposed to the 'Jesus of faith' revered particularly by the apostolic Church, and end up remaking the Holy One in the image of the author - Christ becomes either who the author is spiritually, or who the author thinks He should be. So that the author can decide for himself how many of the gospel sayings are historical, etc.

In this case, Christ is a kind and generous rural rabbi from the Galilee, only to be seen against the background of first century Galilean Judaism, and who couldn't possibly have foreseen the tragedy of the cross, or said all those terrible apocalyptic things at the end of the gospels, about being vigilant or else excluded from the body of the faithful, etc. (with weeping and gnashing of teeth...) No, no, that was the 'apostolic church' or the 'gentile church' (founded by Saint Paul, per the author) treating later difficulties, such as her deteriorating relationship with the greater Jewish nation in the run up to and after the failed revolts in the late 60s, and who also aggrandised Christ's ministry with miraculous signs and fulfilled prophecies of the Old Testament (must have been that Paul again...).

All that said, the considerable value of this book is (i) its establishing an historical background of the Christian movement as given by the gospel narratives - I know a little more about pharisees and scribes and herodians than I could have done before, and about the various rabbinic writings of the post-Temple period (but those rabbis couldn't possibly have been inspired by the Christians, oh no) - and (ii) the amount of gospel texts that it reproduces in its pages (which constitute most of the book).

Took me months to get through this unappetising book.

[Lizzy]

Philip Pullman's Top 6

[Michael]

Interesting.

[Ni]

Of the New Testament commentaries that I have read, this is the most comprehensive. Thorough, rooted in Jewish tradition and law, quite repetitive but inclusive. Its analysis: explaining how the Early Church needed to establish safety in a hostile environment of the Roman Empire is the most interesting to me, also the historical sources at the time, historians and Jewish writers whose work intersects with the words and actions of Jesus. Géza places the Gospels in order and traces the verses that are lifted from Mark in Luke and Matthew and those from Q, a source of Jesus' sayings and those special to each Apostle. He notes the different emphasis of each writer: Mark who may be Peter's interpreter who accompanied him to Rome, Luke, the Greek physician who was an associate of Paul.
Géza asks why Paul makes no mention of his conversion on the road to Damascus and why Mark omits Peter's attempt to walk on water.
Wider questions occur to me which a book of this kind cannot answer.
Why did Jesus not use a scribe to record his exact words? The gospels dating from 75AD-100AD likely contain inaccuracies due to time passing, lack of eye witnesses, changes in the world: destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the Roman conquest of Judea under Vespasian, the needs of the Early Church, disagreements between Gnostics, Coptics, Followers of Thomas, Jewish Christians and Greek and Roman converts. Jewish Christians who met in the Temple at Jerusalem were murdered or dispersed. It must have seemed like the end of the world, Christians at the time expected the Jesus to return immediately.
Why choose twelve largely illiterate disciples who fall asleep at prayer and misunderstand his parables?
Romans customarily exterminated rebel leaders and every one of their followers; How come the disciples were spared? Pontius Pilate was a notorious killer, responsible for a thousand crucifixions every year, so why is he portrayed as a reluctant, almost philosophical ruler in conversations that no one could have recorded at the time?
So a worthy attempt to detect the Galilean accent of Jesus behind the Greek translation of the Gospels and a thought-provoking analysis.

[Pollymoore3]

Vermes takes a look, from his viewpoint as a Jewish scholar, at how much of the sayings and deeds of Jesus we can regard as "gospel"! that is, authentic. Provides a very good cultural context for much that is puzzling if read "straight". My take on it is that if we absorb no other truth from the Bible except to love God and to love our neighbour as we love ourselves, we have understood everything that is needful.

[Tom Motko]

Fine, if occasionally ponderous, deconstruction of "New Testament" texts by the well-known biblical scholar creating a credible argument about the difference between the actual teachings and beliefs of the man we call Jesus and the often spurious material added decades and sometimes centuries after the crucifixion.

[Samantha]

Great author makes you go back to scripture and really begin to understand it

[Scott Hackler]

A masterwork I’ll consult throughout my ministry

Highest praise

[Brian]

A search for and an examination of the historical Jesus, distilled from the gospels. Very well done and incisive.