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The Resurrection

Scripture was composed by believers

Geza Vermes
Penguin, 168pp, £7.99,

Edward Norman

Tuesday, 18th March 2008

Edward Norman on the new book from Geza Vermes

It is difficult enough to evaluate the evidence that the British government is supposed to have received before its decision to engage in the Iraq war: imagine, therefore, the enhanced problem in determining the evidence for the Resurrection of Christ — 2,000 years after the event. There are also 2,000 years of accumulated attempts. Now Professor Vermes offers a further essay; his version is lucid and uncomplicated and unoriginal. His arguments are, in their way, fair- minded, but no new insights extend before us, and his conclusions, impeccably liberal, add virtually nothing to understanding.

Vermes writes from a Jewish perspective, and with the authority of an established scholar; he is a Fellow of the Jewish Academy. His study sets out to describe the ideas of resurrection, both corporeal and spiritual, which furnished discussion in the time of Christ. The work, however, lacks depth: astonishingly, there is no mention of the Egyptian cult of Osiris and Isis, the most widespread form in which the culture of the ancient world envisaged bodily resurrection. Osiris had been murdered and dismembered by Set, and his wife Isis had dredged his remains from the Nile in order to secure his resurrection — in Egypt resurrection from the dead depended on the preservation of the body. The Osiris cult remained hugely influential as a popular spirituality well into the Roman period among Mediterranean peoples. It attracted the Greeks, whose thinkers considered the Egyptians possessed of a special genius for religious ideas. Plato is said (presumably incorrectly) to have visited Egypt in order to see for himself. The presence of the Holy Family, the story of the flight from Herod testify to continuing links of Palestine and Egypt — indeed Egypt became a second Holy Land until the Arab invasion. For Vermes ‘bodily resurrection is definitely a Jewish idea’. Yet he obviously accepts, for it is incontrovertible, that Jews of the time of Jesus were Hellenised, and so well-acquainted with the concept of the survival of the soul as well as with the Egyptian concept of corporeal resuscitation. His picture of the religious developments of the ancient world is, perhaps, too centred in Judaism to allow a more sympathetic understanding of the religious expectations of those Hellenised Jews to whom Christianity was first addressed in the cities of the Mediterranean shores.

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Danidus Heorot

March 21st, 2008 3:22pm

The mysteries of Isis and Osiris had a resurrection myth at their center--or, rather, a restoration and resuscitation myth--but that is a far cry from corporeal resurrection for human beings (which those mysteries never promised). The remote sources of the idea of resurrection in Jewish apocalyptic were Persian Zoroastrian beliefs, absorbed during the second Temple period. And by the time of Christ the idea of resurrection was common among Jews of the Holy Land and in the Diaspora. Leave Egypt out of this.

Elliott A Green

March 24th, 2008 12:41pm

Edward Norman wrote a serious anachronism in his review of Vermes' book. He uses the term "Palestine" for the country where Jesus was born. However, Jesus himself probably never heard that name for the country, nor is it used in the New Testament. Rather, the Book of Matthew uses the term "Land of Israel" twice [2:20-21] and the Roman Empire called the country as a whole Judea [PROVINCIA IVDAEA]. The NT uses the name Judea in two senses, in the broader, Roman sense of the whole country [see some verses in Luke & Acts], and in the narrower Jewish sense of the area of the former kingdom of Judah. The Romans did not apply the name "Palestine" to the country until Emperor Hadrian defeated the Jewish Bar Kokhba revolt [135 CE] and renamed Judea "Syria Palaestina" as a political punishment of the Jews. It is of interest that in the combination "Syria Palaestina," "Palaestina" is an adjectival form, denoting a part of Syria, in the Roman view. It is of interest that the name "Palestine" was first applied to the country by the Romans for political reasons. Using the name "Palestine" for the country in Jesus' time is an anachronism.

Max Kaye

March 25th, 2008 10:05am

Edward Norman's main criticism of Geza Vermes is that he doesn't accept the Gospels as - er - Gospel.

Dr Harry Preston

March 30th, 2008 9:00am

Your writer, unfortunately lets his own bias cloud his judgement: another example of a Christian debating with a Jew rather than a historian of the the period calmly assessing the evidence. He does neither Vermes nor himself useful service. Most of his criticism is knee jerk emotionalism, rather in the way that Michael Burleigh, an eminent historian in other ways would let himself down.

Rather than pulling his arguments apart that are, in the main, specious, let me remind you critic that Geza Vermes is not just "Jewish" but is/was one of Catholic christianity's great modern scholars; responsible for the educational of many in the Christian Church. The wrath visited upon this "heretic" is, again, plain for all, with open minds, plain to see!