Géza Vermes, (; 22 June 1924 – 8 May 2013) was a British academic, Biblical scholar, and Judaist of Jewish–Hungarian descent—one who also served as a Roman Catholic priest in his youth—and scholar specialized in the field of the history of religion, particularly ancient Judaism and early Christianity. He is best known for his complete translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls into English; his research focused on the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Ancient Hebrew writings in Aramaic such as the Targumim, and on the life and religion of Jesus. Vermes was one of the most important voices in contemporary Jesus research, and he has been described as the greatest Jesus scholar of his time. Vermes' written work on Jesus focuses principally on the Jewishness of the historical Jesus, as seen in the broader context of the narrative scope of Jewish history and theology, while questioning and challenging the basis of the Christian doctrine on Jesus.

Biography

Vermes was born in Makó, Kingdom of Hungary, in 1924 to a family of Hungarian Jewish descent: Terézia Riesz, a schoolteacher, and Ernő Vermes, a liberal journalist. The Vermes family was of Jewish background but had given up religious practice by the mid-19th century. All three were baptised as Roman Catholics when he was six; Vermes was accepted into the Order of the Fathers of Notre-Dame de Sion, a poet and scholar, disciple of the Neo-Hasidic Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, After the death of his first wife in 1993, he married Margaret Unarska in 1996 and adopted her son, Ian. Vermes died on 8 May 2013 at the age of 88. He is one of the leading scholars in the field of the study of the historical Jesus (see Selected Publications, below) and together with Fergus Millar and Martin Goodman, Vermes was responsible for substantially revising Emil Schurer's three-volume work, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, His An Introduction to the Complete Dead Sea Scrolls, revised edition (2000), is a study of the collection at Qumran.

Until his death, he was a Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, but continued to teach at the Oriental Institute in Oxford. He had edited the Journal of Jewish Studies from 1971 to his death, and from 1991 he had been director of the Oxford Forum for Qumran Research at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He inspired the creation of the British Association for Jewish Studies (BAJS) in 1975 and of the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS) in 1981 and acted as founding president for both.

Vermes was a Fellow of the British Academy; a Fellow of the European Academy of Arts, Sciences and Humanities; holder of an Oxford D. Litt. (1988) and of honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh (1989), University of Durham (1990), University of Sheffield (1994) and the Central European University of Budapest (2008). He was awarded the Wilhelm Bacher Memorial Medal by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1996), the Memorial Medal of the city of Makó, his place of birth (2008) and the keys of the cities of Monroe LA and Natchez MS (2009). He received a vote of congratulation from the US House of Representatives, proposed by the Representative of Louisiana on 17 September 2009.

In the course of a lecture tour in the United States in September 2009, Vermes spoke at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, at Duke University in Durham NC, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore MD, and at the University of Louisiana at Monroe and at Baton Rouge.

On 23 January 2012 Penguin Books celebrated at Wolfson College, Oxford, the golden jubilee of Vermes's The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, which has sold an estimated half-a-million copies worldwide. A "Fiftieth anniversary" edition has been issued in the Penguin Classics series.

Historical Jesus

thumb|300px|Fragments of the [[Dead Sea Scrolls previously on display at the Jordan Archaeological Museum, now in The Jordan Museum, Amman.]]

Vermes was a prominent scholar in the contemporary field of historical Jesus research. Vermes concludes that Jesus did not reach out to non-Jews. For example, he attributes positive references to Samaritans in the gospels not to Jesus himself but to early Christian editing. He suggests that, properly understood, the historical Jesus is a figure that Jews should find familiar and attractive.

Important works on this topic include Jesus the Jew (1973), which describes Jesus as a thoroughly Jewish Galilean charismatic, The Gospel of Jesus the Jew (1981), which examines Jewish parallels to Jesus's teaching

<blockquote>The historical Jesus can be retrieved only within the context of first-century Galilean Judaism. The Gospel image must therefore be inserted into the historical canvas of Palestine in the first century CE, with the help of the works of Flavius Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls and early rabbinic literature. Against this background, what kind of picture of Jesus emerges from the Gospels? That of a rural holy man, initially a follower of the movement of repentance launched by another holy man, John the Baptist. In the hamlets and villages of Lower Galilee and the lakeside, Jesus set out to preach the coming of the Kingdom of God within the lifetime of his generation and outlined the religious duties his simple listeners were to perform to prepare themselves for the great event.</blockquote>

Selected publications

  • Scripture and Tradition in Judaism: Haggadic studies (Studia post-biblica), Brill, Leiden 1961
  • Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels, Minneapolis, Fortress Press 1973
  • Post-Biblical Jewish Studies, Brill, Leiden, 1975
  • The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective, Minneapolis, Fortress Press 1977
  • Jesus and the World of Judaism, Minneapolis, Fortress Press 1983
  • The Essenes According to the Classical Sources (with Martin Goodman), Sheffield Academic Press 1989
  • The Religion of Jesus the Jew, Minneapolis, Fortress Press 1993
  • The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, Penguin 1997 (2004 ed.) (Fiftieth anniversary ed. 2011 )
  • The Changing Faces of Jesus, London, Penguin 2001
  • Jesus in his Jewish Context, Minneapolis, Fortress Press 2003
  • The Authentic Gospel of Jesus, London, Penguin 2004
  • The Passion, London, Penguin 2005 .
  • Who's Who in the Age of Jesus, London, Penguin 2005
  • The Nativity: History and Legend, London, Penguin 2006
  • The Resurrection: History and Myth, Doubleday Books 2008 .
  • Searching for the Real Jesus, London, SCM Press 2010
  • The Story of the Scrolls: The Miraculous Discovery and True Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, London, Penguin 2010
  • Jesus: Nativity – Passion – Resurrection, London, Penguin 2010
  • Jesus in the Jewish World, London, SCM Press 2010
  • Christian Beginnings. From Nazareth to Nicaea, AD 30–325, London, Allen Lane 2012
  • The True Herod, London, Bloomsbury, 2014

For more details see his autobiography, Providential Accidents, London, SCM Press, 1998 ; Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD, 1998 .

See also

  • Paul Winter
  • Paula Fredriksen
  • Daniel Boyarin

References

  • Appearance on Desert Island Discs 4 June 2000