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from PART III - “JEWISHNESS,” JESUS AND CHRISTIAN ORIGINS SINCE 1967
“Jesus the Jew” since 1967
Having produced a book on Jesus which I thought would be judged “unorthodox” by Christians, Jews and New Testament scholars alike, I was greatly surprised by an overall lack of hostility. Of course, some unkind words were printed. A Jewish critic, violently resenting my refusal to classify Jesus as a Pharisee, put me among the anti-Semites… But on the whole the findings oscillated between warm approval and an open verdict.
Geza VermesFor this writer at least, one of the most perplexing things in historical Jesus studies is just how long the “Jewishness” of Jesus took to be widely recognized in European and North American scholarship. By this I do not mean the issue of Jesus' ethnicity as such – with exceptions in Nazi scholarship virtually everyone has accepted Jesus was born Jewish – but the stress on, and debates over, Jesus’ teachings as particularly Jewish, in contrast to the hard dissimilarity with Judaism that dominated much of twentieth-century scholarship. In 1973, Geza Vermes’ ground-breaking Jesus the Jew would pave the way for a series of historical Jesus studies – with Jesus as Jew stressed in numerous book titles – that would, with their own particular emphases, make claims about just how Jewish Jesus was. But why did it take until the 1970s? It might have been thought that the Holocaust would have prompted a more immediate rethink of the historical Jesus’ attitude towards Jewish religion.
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