The biographical note on the jacket of this magisterial book tells us that Professor Geza Vermes was born in Hungary in 1924 and that from 1957 to 1991 he taught at the universities of Newcastle and Oxford. It also tells us that ‘his pioneering work on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the historical figure of Jesus led to his appointment as the first Professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford’.
His moving autobiography Providential Accidents, which is not mentioned in this short blurb, tells us how he was caught up at the most painful imaginable level in the central drama of 20th-century history in Europe, namely in the culmination of centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. He last saw his mother, a devout Roman Catholic convert from Judaism, when she came to see him at a seminary in Hungary. She was wearing a yellow star sewn to her clothes. She perished, of course, with six million others. The fact that both his parents had converted years before to Catholicism did nothing to save them. ‘Are they Hebrews?’ asked the Apostle Paul. ‘So am I!’
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