Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus - Overview

Since his ground breaking Jesus the Jew (1973), Geza Vermes has produced a steady stream of approachable scholarship on the life of Jesus within the context of his own Jewishness and the conditions in which he lived.

The Changing Faces of Jesus is by far his most comprehensive and challenging synthesis.

He says that the initial "historical Jesus" has been obscured by layers of later interpretation:

There are two major problems for the impartial critic:

The Christian critic will have two over-riding observations:

Vermes notes, in conclusion, the sad history of anti Semitism in Christianity and how it took Hitler's atrocities to moderate it so that Jesus could be re-considered as  Jew after almost two millennia of first Greek and then Latin clouding.

Partly taken from

Vermes, Geza: The Changing Faces of Jesus, Allen Lane, 2000, ISBN 0 713 99193 3 (commission earned)

KC iv/08

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