One scholar's view of the Christianity of Christ

The Religion of Jesus the Jew by Geza Vermes (SCM Press, £12.50) William Oddie WITH The Religion of Jesus the Jew, Geza Vermes has completed the trilogy which began with Jesus the Jew 20 years ago. His thesis, to oversimplify (though not that much), is that Jesus was an essentially Jewish teacher whose message was for Jews; he quotes with approval Martin Bilber's prophecy that "a great place belongs to him in Israel's history of faith".
This proposition has an essential corollary: that there is only the most tenuous connection between Jesus and the Christian religion, which was mostly invented by his followers after his death. It is "unjustifiable", he says, to continue to represent Jesus as "the establisher of the Christian Church..."
"Christians ignorant or unconcerned about the historical reality behind their faith" says the blurb, "may... find many of its pages... disturbing". Well, they might — if they suppose that there is no other respectable scholarly scenario than that proposed here.
Certainly, Professor Vermes is by any standards a major biblical scholar (unlike AN Wilson's Jesus much of which was based on Venues The Religion of Jesus the Jew contains no trace of the sloppiness and eccentricity that caused Wilson's book to selfdestruct on the launch-pad).
But other equally considerable scholars have come to very different conclusions in matters of faith, there is no such thing as dispassionate scholarship. Begin from the assumption that the Resurrection did not take place, and you will arrive at a very different judgement about the nature and historical status of the Gospel texts from that which you will entertain if you know by faith that it did.
Part of the difficulty is that there has been far too little scepticism about what used to be called "the assured results" of the biblical criticism on which Professor Vermes and others base many of their assumptions.
He quotes the liberal Protestant scholar AE Harvey on the "limited historical genuineness" of the Gospels; but he does not quote Harvey admitting elsewhere in the same book that his opinions have no foundation in anything but speculation: "Nothing new has been discovered," says Harvey. "The evidence is exactly the same as it always was the bare text of the Gospels... There is no discovery, only an hypothesis."
From his own viewpoint, of course, Professor Vermes's hypothesis works perfectly well; it is, indeed, the only one available to him.
ChristianS, from their own viewpoint, will find a great deal here that is enlightening: Jesus, after all, was a Jew. and it is a vital part of the Catholic understanding that he came in the setting of a particular religious culture, a culture chosen by God so that in the fullness of time his Son might be born into it.
Read carefully and selectively, this is an interesting and nourishing book for a Christian reader. But uncritically swallowed whole, it could give you a nasty turn.