Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea by Geza Vermes (review)

Abstract

ANCIENTChristian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea. By Geza Vermes. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2013. Pp. xvi, 288. $30.00. ISBN 978-0-300-19160-8.)Geza Vermes, who passed away in May 2013, focused most of his scholarly attention on the Dead Sea Scrolls and on the historical Jesus. Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea was his final book, and in it Vermes endeavors to build upon his work on the historical Jesus through an assessment of how Jesus went from Galilean holy man to the second person of the Trinity at Nicaea in 325. Vermes argues that this metamorphosis developed over two unequal phases. The first phase was the short Jewish phase that lasted from AD 30 to 100, with the Synoptic Gospels, the first twelve chapters of Acts, and the Didache being the texts that correspond to this phase. These texts demonstrate that early Jewish-Christian followers did not view him as divine, but understood Jesus simply to teach total surrender to God in expectation of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God. Ss. Paul and John, however, definitively alter perceptions of Jesus. Paul, whose writings were addressed to Gentile rather than Jewish audiences, draws attention to Jesus himself rather than to his message, elevating Jesus to the triumphant Son of God who is the source of universal salvation. John's Jesus bears no resemblance to the charismatic holy man from Galilee, but is turned into a celestial savior through John's appropriation of terminology derived from Plato and Philo. One finds in both Paul and John a harbinger of things to come, for it is during the second phase (the Gentile phase from the early-second century to the Council of Nicaea in 325) that we find Jesus and his religion fundamentally transformed to become that which would have been unrecognizable by Jesus and his first followers. With referthe ence to an array of Christian texts from the second through the fourth centuries, Vermes traces the progressive elevation of the figure of Jesus by Gentile Christians, an elevation that corresponded to the influx of Graeco-Roman ideas and modes of thinking foreign to Judaism. Thus one finds Justin Martyr, for example, initiate and explicate a Christology deeply imbued with Greek philosophical thought, and later thinkers develop an understanding of the identity of Jesus Christ along these lines. Vermes notes in particular the contributions of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian, and Origen, the latter representing the summit of pre-Nicene Christian thought. …