We are told that ‘attentive readers’ will discern ‘discrepancies’ in the biblical accounts of the Resurrection. No doubt they will, as they have done since the New Testament canon was compiled. The most sacred knowledge, when in the hands of humans, is liable to fallible recording, especially in societies whose teachings were normally conveyed by oral testimony. It might be instructive to ask whether Vermes’ own book is without ‘discrepancies’. Consider, for example, his conclusions concerning the value of the testimony of the women who first encountered the risen Christ. There is an early reference in the book to ‘the male chauvinist’ author of Genesis, and this rather sets the scene. Of the Resurrection witnesses the reader is first assured that this testimony would be ‘unacceptable in a Jewish law court’ because their accounts revealed variations. But then comes the statement that their evidence ‘is weakened by the fact that they are women’. Later we read about ‘the legally worthless female testimony,’ and finally the matter is rounded off by remarking that ‘the apostles poked fun at the women’ for their assumed credulity. Was their evidence likely to be questioned in a court because it was unreliable or because they were women? A more fundamental ‘discrepancy’, however, concerns the references by Christ himself to his own Resurrection. At first Vermes insists that ‘according to the gospels, Jesus had repeatedly prepared his intimates for his return from the tomb’. Later he writes that ‘allusions to his rising can be counted on the fingers of one hand’. The final conclusion is that, ‘Resurrection played no significant part in the teaching of Jesus’.

The plain fact is that there is no satisfactory way of using scriptural accounts as the basis for belief in the Resurrection. There is no internal way of invalidating scripture; it was composed by believers, and what may appear as levers by which to move criticisms of its veracity are simply inappropriate as intellectual mechanics. The gospels were not written to provide a full statement of Christian teaching, nor were they, though arranged in narrative style, intended to be historical records in the modern sense. They were written to prove that Jesus was the fulfilment of prophetic expectations, that he was the saviour. The New Testament was put together by the early Church; it is tradition that sustained and developed Christianity. But Vermes appears to deny tradition as authority at the very beginning of his study, which intends, he claims, ‘to investigate what the authors of the New Testament actually say in their writings and not what interpretative Church tradition attributes to them’. And so the thought of Bishop Wright of Durham, an acknowledged scholar of the Resurrection accounts, is rejected out of hand — for concluding that the Resurrection ‘was a historical event’: a view which is ‘extreme’, ‘fundamentalist’, and ‘not susceptible to rational judgment’. Instead, Vermes lists and discusses six alternative explanations of the Resurrection and eventually opts for the possibility that the event was a kind of emotional sensation, a camaraderie among the disciples, a feeling ‘in the hearts of men’. This, as it happens, is the very message that liberal clergy will deliver from the pulpits this Easter. Professor Vermes is clearly an Anglican.

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