Book Review: The Changing Faces of Jesus

Despite (or because of) my on-going crisis of faith, I find myself drawn to books about Jesus and early Christianity. The Changing Faces of Jesus by Géza Vermes is the most recent one to catch my eye, and in many ways it has been the most interesting of the bunch.

The author has an interesting background. Vermes was born in Hungary to a Jewish family, although he and his parents were baptised as Roman Catholics when he was 7, a fact that did not save his parents from dying in the Holocaust a decade later. Given a Catholic education, Vermes was ordained a priest after the Second World War. In 1957, he left the Catholic church and reverted to Judaism. In addition to teaching at the Universities of Newcastle and Oxford, Vermes has written extensively on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Jesus the Jew.

The Changing Faces of Jesus is an examination of the way Jesus was portrayed in the early Christian church. Vermes begins by discussing the way Jesus is portrayed as a divine Messiah in the Gospel of John. He then makes an extensive study of the Jesus who inhabits the epistles of Paul, which is followed by a look at how the Synoptic Gospels portray Jesus. The book ends by putting Jesus into what Vermes claims is the Jewish context in which Jesus actually lived.

I have to confess that I have a problem with these sorts of books, because so much has to be taken with a great deal of faith. I am not just referring to ideas such as the divinity of Christ, which is a rather obvious leap of faith -- I am also referring to faith that an author's knowledge of ancient languages and past times is, in fact, accurate. I am therefore unable to attest to whether or not Vermes' basic views are correct. I can, however, say that his arguments make sense in a logical way.

And what exactly is Vermes' argument? Put briefly, Vermes believes that Jesus, the man who first attracted followers in Galilee two millenia ago, was a charismatic, devout Jewish healer and teacher who made no explicit claims to being divine. One of the more interesting revelations in the book is the fact that the phrases "Son of Man" and "Son of God" were neither unique to Jesus, nor necessarily used by Jesus himself. Another interesting aspect of book is the degree to which Jesus was part of a larger Jewish religious tradition.

As I said, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of Vermes' arguments, but his ultimate portrait of Jesus as a devout Jewish mystic rather than as one self-proclaimed third of a holy trinity makes a lot of sense. I suppose I will have to seek out the inevitable critique of his arguments to discover the holes in his arguments.

The Changing Faces of Jesus
Géza Vermes
Penguin Books, London, 2001
ISBN: 0-14-026524-4