That fact is the solid ground beneath our feet. Though almost every detail of His life and death is problematic, we know more about Him than we do about many other historical figures. Jesus of Nazareth is the foundation stone of the vast edifice we call the Church. What Albert Schweitzer called the quest for the historical Jesus began with the humanist textual and linguistic researches of the Renaissance, was further stimulated by the biblical fundamentalism of the Reformation, gathered pace in the 19th century with the agnostic biographies of Strauss and Renan, and culminated in the late 20th century with the rediscovery of Jesus by Jewish scholars. Answers to these and many other questions will be found in The Changing Faces of Jesus, a new book by Geza Vermes, published this week by Penguin.
Few academics are able to distill so much erudition into such a readable form.
In his autobiography, Providential Accidents, Professor Vermes recalls the electrifying impact of his first essay in this field, Jesus the Jew, on a Christian intellectual world that still behaved as if it had a monopoly of the subject. The idea of treating Jesus as a charismatic Jewish preacher and exorcist, only one of several Hassidim in first-century Palestine, was strong medicine in 1973. Yet a discussion at the British Academy this week between Professor Vermes and Canon John Fenton, an eminent Anglican divine, soon revealed that there is now a consensus in favour of the Jewish Jesus. In his new book, Professor Vermes begins with the Christian Jesus, whom he treats as a palimpsest from which the Judaic original has been effaced. St John's Word made flesh, St Paul's cosmic drama of redemption, the risen Christ of the Acts and the synoptic Gospels.