Jesus of Nazareth
By Pope Benedict XVI, reviewed by Geza Vermes

I LEARNT ABOUT the imminent appearance of Pope Benedict XVI’s book on Jesus at the University of Princeton about four weeks ago. I attended there an international conference on methodology in the quest of the historical Jesus where I was to give the opening address. The title, Jesus of Nazareth, not “Jesus, the Son of God” or something similar, seemed to imply that the Pope was one of us, a seeker after historical truth. Indeed, his preface explicitly states that his study incorporates modern historical criticism, and is intended to portray Jesus as an “historical” figure “in the strict sense of the word”. I must confess, however, that my initial reaction was overoptimistic.

For the benefit of readers not fully conversant with modern Jesus research, blind faith in the literal truth of the Gospels ended, and enlightenment began, in the late 1800s. For more than a century, the German liberal Protestant practitioners of the “quest for the historical Jesus” engaged in the analysis of the Gospels qua ancient religious texts. Their search produced two diametrically opposite portraits: Jesus, the liberal teacher of exalted Jewish morality, and Jesus, the herald of the imminent catastrophic onset of a new world, the Kingdom of God. The two theories turned out to be irreconcilable, and in 1906 Albert Schweitzer concluded the first quest, and declared the historical Jesus dead.

After the First World War, Gospel research restarted under the inspiration of the German form-critical school, founded by Rudolf Bultmann. He believed that the study of “the life and personality of Jesus” was doomed because the earliest Christian sources were interested only in the faith of the church. Instead, the task of the scholar was to distinguish various literary forms (proverbs, parables, controversies, apocalyptic prophecies) in the transmitted material and to locate them in early church history and, occasionally, in the story of Jesus. Hence, 1920 to 1950 was the period of “no quest”.

However, despite Schweitzer’s funeral oration, the historical Jesus refused to lie down. Around 1950, a new attempt to retrieve him was launched in Germany by Bultmann’s pupils, who reemployed the form-critical method in the pursuit of historical research. The “new” or “second quest” went on for some 20 years without much success. It coincided with the years of Joseph Ratzinger’s theological studies. …..

The 1970s and 1980s introduced the “third quest”. By then, the dominance of German professors, with Hellenistic expertise to deal with Greek Gospels but without direct familiarity with the Jewish world of the age of Jesus, came to an end. They were replaced by British and American scholars concerned with the discovery, partly associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, of the “Jewish” Jesus. The literary landmarks of the new era were Jesus the Jew (1973) by your reviewer and Jesus and Judaism (1986) by E. P. Sanders, both professors at Oxford. In no time, the search for the Jewish Jesus became dominant worldwide. By then, Roman Catholic scholars, too, came to the fore, having been debarred until the 1940s from participating in critical Bible research by the Vatican’s Pontifical Biblical Commission.

The change came about so promptly because academics and educated lay people realised that, in order to encounter the Jesus of flesh and blood, one had to break through the barrier constituted by the translation into Greek of the original Semitic, Aramaic-Hebrew, cultural and religious traditions aimed at the nonJewish Christians of Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece and Italy. Remember the saying, every translator is a traitor.

Turning to the Pope’s book, its ten chapters cover the career of Jesus from his baptism to Peter’s confession and the Transfiguration, with full chapters assigned to the gospel of the Kingdom, the sermon on the mount, the Lord’s prayer, the parables, images in John’s Gospel and a few titles of Jesus. It is a haphazard mixture of life and doctrine.

In his preface, the scholar Ratzinger bravely declares that he and not the Pope is the author of the book and that everyone is free to contradict him. I was first tempted to say, “Yes, I will”, but quickly realised that a frontal assault on Jesus of Nazareth from the standpoint of present-day Gospel criticism would be inappropriate. The Pope was engaged not in academic research but in a series of meditations on the Gospels for his own and his readers’ edification. The efficacy of these meditations cannot be judged by academic criteria.

Nevertheless, we are told that the Pope obeyed the rules of historical criticism. However, he was prepared to abide by those rules only if they confirmed his traditional convictions. Otherwise, he discarded them without further consideration. As he refuses to examine various possibilities of meaning, he must take it for granted that he has the correct understanding. But how can this be if no critical questions are asked about the original significance of words?

For a scholarly critic, one of the most disturbing aspects of the book is the absence of reference to texts that in some way contradict Benedict’s cherished beliefs. For instance, he finds in the Gospels scores of allusions to the divinity of Christ. They are all made explicit by the Pope and considered as proven. Yet, try as you may, nowhere will you read in this “Gospel according to Benedict” that Jesus refused to accept the title, “Good Master” on the grounds that it would implicitly suggest that he possessed a divine quality. “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mark x, 18). Another recurrent theme in Ratzinger’s perception of Christ is that Jesus intended the Gospel to be preached to all the nations. If so, did he just forget Jesus’ sayings that contradict the universality of the apostolic mission, namely, that both Jesus and his disciples were sent only to the “lost sheep of Israel” (Matthew x, 5-6; xv, 24).

Be all this as it may, in fairness, one must concede that the Pope is free to find his spiritual solace wherever he chances upon it, and to communicate his insights to all those willing to share them.

Yet I must protest against the reiterated papal claim that the divine Christ of faith – the product of his musings – and the historical Jesus – the Galilean itinerant healer, exorcist and preacher – are one and the same. In the absence of a stringent linguistic, literary and historical analysis of the Gospels, especially of their many contradictory statements, the identification is without foundation. One must declare groundless Benedict’s appeal to “canonical exegesis”, an exercise in biblical theology whereby any text from the Old or the New Testament can serve to explain any other biblical text. Such an approach to biblical studies would force back Catholic Bible experts, already the objects of frequent papal disapproval in Jesus of Nazareth, to a preCopernican stage of history.

As a final comment, may I, after a lifetime of study of Judaism and early Christianity and in the light of hundreds of letters inspired by my books, voice the conviction that the powerful, inspirational and, above all, real figure of the historical Jesus is able to exercise a profound influence on our age, especially on people who are no longer impressed by traditional Christianity. While scholarly exegesis removes some of the mystery enveloping the church’s Christ, it does not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Contrary to Pope Benedict’s forebodings, the world would welcome this authentic Jesus.