Géza Vermes, FBA (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈvɛrmɛʃ
ˈɡeːzɒ]; 22 June 1924 – 8 May 2013) was a British scholar of
Hungarian Jewish

Hungarian Jewish origin—one who also served as a Catholic priest in
his youth—and writer on religious history, particularly
Jewish

Jewish and
Christian. He wrote about the
Dead Sea Scrolls

Dead Sea Scrolls and ancient works in
Aramaic

Aramaic such as the Targums, and on the life and religion of Jesus. He
was one of the most important voices in contemporary Jesus
research,[1] and he has been described as the greatest Jesus scholar
of his time.[2] Vermes' written work on Jesus focuses principally on
Jesus the Jew, as seen in the broader context of the narrative scope
of
Jewish

Jewish history and theology, while questioning the basis of some
Christian teachings on Jesus.[3]
Contents
1 Biography
2 Academic career
3 Historical Jesus
4 Selected publications
5 References
6 External links
Biography[edit]
Vermes was born in Makó, Hungary, in 1924 to parents of Jewish
descent, schoolteacher Terézia (Riesz) and liberal journalist Ernő
Vermes,[4][5] (His family, however, had not practised
Judaism

Judaism since
the early 19th century.[4]) All three were baptised as Roman Catholics
when he was seven. His mother and father nonetheless died in the
Holocaust.
Vermes attended a Catholic seminary. When he was eligible for college,
in 1942, Jews were not accepted into Hungarian universities.[6]
After the Second World War, he became a
Roman Catholic

Roman Catholic priest, but was
not admitted into the Jesuit or Dominican orders because of his Jewish
ancestry.[7][8] Vermes was accepted into the Order of the Fathers of
Notre-Dame de Sion,[4] a French/Belgian order founded by Jewish
converts[9] which prayed for Jews.[10]
He studied first in
Budapest

Budapest and then at the College St Albert and the
Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, where he read Oriental
history and languages. In 1953 obtained a doctorate in theology with
the first dissertation written on the
Dead Sea Scrolls

Dead Sea Scrolls and its
historical framework.[4]
After researching the scrolls in Paris for several years,[4] on a
visit to Britain he met the scholar and poet Pamela Hobson Curle,[11]
a married woman. The two fell in love in 1955 and would later marry in
1958. Vermes left the Catholic Church in 1957 and reasserted his
Jewish

Jewish identity; however, he "insisted he had not converted, just
'grew out of' Christianity."[9] He took up a teaching post at what is
now the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.[4] In 1965 he joined the
Faculty of
Oriental

Oriental Studies at
Oxford

Oxford University, rising to become the
first professor of
Jewish

Jewish Studies before his retirement in 1991. In
1970 he became a member of the Liberal
Jewish

Jewish Synagogue of London.[12]
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 after a recurrence of cancer.[13]
Academic career[edit]
Vermes was one of the first scholars to examine the Dead Sea Scrolls
after their discovery in 1947, and is the author of the standard
translation into English of the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Dead Sea Scrolls
in English (1962).[14] 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

Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ,[15]
His An Introduction to the Complete Dead Sea Scrolls, revised edition
(2000), is a study of the collection at Qumran.[16]
Until his death, he was a Professor Emeritus of
Jewish

Jewish Studies and
Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, but continued to teach at
the
Oriental

Oriental Institute in Oxford. He had edited the Journal of Jewish
Studies[17] from 1971 to his death, and from 1991 he had been director
of the
Oxford

Oxford Forum for
Qumran

Qumran Research at the
Oxford

Oxford Centre for
Hebrew and
Jewish

Jewish Studies.[18] He inspired the creation of the British
Association for
Jewish

Jewish Studies (BAJS) in 1975 and of the European
Association for
Jewish

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

Oxford D. Litt.
(1988) and of honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh
(1989),
University of Durham

University of Durham (1990),
University of Sheffield

University of Sheffield (1994)
and the Central European
University of Budapest

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 MI (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

University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill,
at
Duke University

Duke University in Durham NC, at
Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore MD, and at the
University of Louisiana at Monroe

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

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[edit]
Main article: Historical Jesus
Fragments of the scrolls on display at the Archeological Museum,
Amman. Photo taken by Gary Jones, 2002
Vermes was a prominent scholar in the contemporary field of historical
Jesus research.[19] The contemporary approach, known as the "third
quest," emphasizes Jesus'
Jewish

Jewish identity and context.[19] It portrays
Jesus as founding a renewal movement within Judaism.[19]
Vermes described Jesus as a 1st-century
Jewish

Jewish holy man, a commonplace
view in academia but novel to the public when Vermes began
publishing.[4] Contrary to certain other scholars (such as E. P.
Sanders[20]), 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.[19] This historical
Jesus, however, is so different from the Christ of faith that
Christians, says Vermes, may well want to rethink the fundamentals of
their faith.[19]
Important works on this topic include Jesus the
Jew

Jew (1973), which
describes Jesus as a thoroughly
Jewish

Jewish Galilean charismatic, The
Gospel

Gospel of Jesus the
Jew

Jew (1981), which examines
Jewish

Jewish parallels to
Jesus' teaching[16] and
Christian Beginnings (2012), which traces the
evolution of the figure of Jesus from
Jewish

Jewish charismatic in the
synoptic gospels to equality with God in the Council of Nicea (325
AD).
Vermes believed it is possible "to retrieve the authentic
Gospel

Gospel of
Jesus, his first-hand message to his original followers."[21]
The historical Jesus can be retrieved only within the context of
first-century Galilean Judaism. The
Gospel

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.[22]
Selected publications[edit]
Scripture and Tradition in Judaism:
Haggadic

Haggadic studies (Studia
post-biblica), Brill, Leiden 1961 ISBN 90-04-03626-1
Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels, Minneapolis,
Fortress Press 1973 ISBN 0-8006-1443-7
Post-Biblical
Jewish

Jewish Studies, Brill, Leiden, 1975
ISBN 90-04-04160-5
The Dead Sea Scrolls:
Qumran

Qumran in Perspective, Minneapolis, Fortress
Press 1977 ISBN 0-8006-1435-6
Jesus and the World of Judaism, Minneapolis, Fortress Press 1983
ISBN 0-8006-1784-3
The
Essenes

Essenes According to the Classical Sources (with Martin Goodman),
Sheffield Academic Press 1989 ISBN 1-85075-139-0
The Religion of Jesus the Jew, Minneapolis, Fortress Press 1993
ISBN 0-8006-2797-0
The Complete
Dead Sea Scrolls

Dead Sea Scrolls in English, Penguin 1997
ISBN 978-0-14-044952-5 (2004 ed.) (Fiftieth anniversary ed. 2011
ISBN 978-0-141-19731-9)
The Changing Faces of Jesus, London, Penguin 2001
ISBN 0-14-026524-4
Jesus in his
Jewish

Jewish Context, Minneapolis, Fortress Press 2003
ISBN 0-8006-3623-6
The Authentic
Gospel

Gospel of Jesus, London, Penguin 2004
ISBN 0-14-100360-X
The Passion, London, Penguin 2005 ISBN 0-14-102132-2.
Who's Who in the Age of Jesus, London, Penguin 2005
ISBN 0-14-051565-8
The Nativity: History and Legend, London, Penguin 2006
ISBN 0-14-102446-1
The Resurrection: History and Myth, Doubleday Books 2008
ISBN 0-385-52242-8.
Searching for the Real Jesus, London, SCM Press 2010
ISBN 978-0-334-04358-4
The Story of the Scrolls: The Miraculous Discovery and True
Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, London, Penguin 2010
ISBN 978-0-14-104615-0
Jesus: Nativity – Passion – Resurrection, London, Penguin 2010
ISBN 978-0-14-104622-8
Jesus in the
Jewish

Jewish World, London, SCM Press 2010
ISBN 978-0-334-04379-9
Christian Beginnings. From Nazareth to Nicaea, AD 30-325, London,
Allen Lane 2012 ISBN 978-1-846-14150-8
The True Herod, London, Bloomsbury, 2014 ISBN 978-0-567-57544-9
For more details see his autobiography, Providential Accidents,
London, SCM Press, 1998 ISBN 0-334-02722-5; Rowman &
Littlefield, Lanham MD, 1998 ISBN 0-8476-9340-6.
References[edit]
^ Theissen, Gerd and Annette Merz. The historical Jesus: a
comprehensive guide. Fortress Press. 1998. translated from German
(1996 edition). Chapter 1. Quest of the historical Jesus. p. 1-16
^ Crace, John (18 March 2008). "Geza Vermes: Questions arising".
London: The Guardian. Retrieved 19 March 2008. ; G. Richard
Wheatcroft review of The Authentic
Gospel

Gospel of Jesus Archived 8 January
2011 at the Wayback Machine..
^ Harrington, Daniel J. (24 March 2008). "No Evidence? The
Resurrection by Geza Vermes". America. Retrieved 19 December
2008.
^ a b c d e f g Yardley, William (16 May 2013). "Geza Vermes, Dead Sea
Scrolls Scholar, Dies at 88". The New York Times.
^ Who's who in Biblical Studies and Archaeology – Google Books
^ Geza Vermes, Hungarian Bible Scholar Who Returned to
Jewish

Jewish Roots,
Dies at 88 – Forward.com
^ 1924: The priest who noticed Jesus had been
Jewish

Jewish is born in
Haaretz. Access 6/30/2016.
^ Geza The
Jew

Jew By Hershel Shanks in Biblical Archeological Society.
June 1999. Access 6/30/2016
^ a b Geza Vermes: Geza Vermes, a Jew, ex-priest and translator of the
Dead Sea Scrolls, died on May 8th aged 88
^ Geza Vermes, Hungarian Bible Scholar Who Returned to
Jewish

Jewish Roots,
Dies at 88 – Forward.com
^ Alexander, Philip (14 May 2013). "Geza Vermes obituary: Expert on
the Dead Sea Scrolls, the historical Jesus and the origins of
Christianity". The Guardian. Retrieved 2 March 2014.
^ Géza Vermès, Providential Accidents: An autobiography, Rowman
& Littlefield, 1998, ISBN 0-8476-9340-6, p. 170.
^ PaleoJudaica.com: 05/05/2013 – 05/12/2013
^ , re-issued in London by Penguin Classics, as The Complete Dead Sea
Scrolls in English, 2004, ISBN 0-14-044952-3.
^ Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1973, ISBN 0-567-02242-0, 1979,
ISBN 0-567-02243-9, 1986–87. ISBN 0-567-02244-7,
ISBN 0-567-09373-5.
^ a b "Jesus Christ." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia
Britannica Online. 8 November 2010 .
^ JJS Online Journal of
Jewish

Jewish Studies.
^
Oxford

Oxford Centre for Hebrew and
Jewish

Jewish Studies.
^ a b c d e Vermes, Geza. The authentic gospel of Jesus. London,
Penguin Books. 2004. Epilogue. p. 398-417.
^ Sanders, E. P. The historical figure of Jesus. Penguin, 1993.
^ Géza Vermes, "The great Da Vinci Code distraction", in The Times, 6
May 2006. Article reproduced in Vermes, Searching for the Real Jesus:
Jesus, The
Dead Sea Scrolls

Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Religious Themes (SCM Press,
2009). ISBN 978-0334043584
^ Vermes, Geza (2010). The Real Jesus: Then and Now. Augsburg
Fortress, Publishers. pp. 54–55. ISBN 978-1-4514-0882-9.
The historical Jesus can be retrieved only within the context of
first-century Galilean Judaism. The
Gospel

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. [...] The reliability of Josephus’s
notice about Jesus was rejected by many in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, but it has been judged partly genuine and partly
falsified by the majority of more recent critics. The Jesus portrait
of Josephus, drawn by an uninvolved witness, stands halfway between
the fully sympathetic picture of early
Christianity

Christianity and the wholly
antipathetic image of the magician of Talmudic and post-Talmudic
Jewish

Jewish literature.
External links[edit]
Quotations related to Geza Vermes at Wikiquote
Appearance on Desert Island Discs 4 June 2000
Authority control
WorldCat Identities
VIAF: 109150730
LCCN: n79066351
ISNI: 0000 0000 8174 276X
GND: 118973576
SELIBR: 334038
SUDOC: 027181472
BNF: cb119280006 (data)
NDL: 00459