Scripture was composed by believers
Edward Norman
THE RESURRECTION by Geza Vermes Penguin, £7.99, pp. 168, ISBN 9780141030050 ✆ £6.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 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, fairminded, 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.
The disciples, so Vermes argues, enter tained ideas about the Resurrection of Christ that were ‘filled with oddities’; he also believes that Jesus’ own recorded predictions about his coming Resurrection were ‘inauthentic’. By this he means that they reflect the later conclusions of unfolding Christian tradition — which may be quite accurate in itself, but does not make the events described any less true or authentic. Christianity is believed by its adherents to be committed to a living body of members, and its definition of teachings is conceived to be dynamic and not closed for all time with the death of Christ.
Vermes’ language sometimes indicates a rather jaunty view of the sacred materials he is attempting to scrutinise, and it adds to an impression of discreet polemicism, a prejudicing of the reader’s judgment. This is especially unsatisfactory in a book that will be lauded and accepted by innumerable readers who think they are thinking for themselves. Of the saints who rose from their tombs in the earthquake that accompanied the Resurrection, Vermes remarks, ‘Needless to say, nothing is heard of them afterwards.’ Why is it ‘needless to say’? In another example, the words of the risen Christ spoken to the disciples, in Vermes’ opinion, were arranged in St Luke’s gospel ‘to make the story consistent with the Acts of the Apostles’. How does he know that? It is a purely speculative conclusion. In yet another place, extraordinary punctuation is employed to indicate scepticism by the author — the words of Jesus were ‘either misunderstood or forgotten (!?!) by his disciples’. The disciples, he conjectures, were ‘spineless’. St Paul persuaded his opponents of the truth of the Resurrection by the deployment of his skills as ‘a clever rhetorician’. How does Vermes know this is the case? There are other places where the writing lapses into unwarranted historical assertions and so become fictions. Thus St Paul’s account of the vision of Christ on the Damascus road was ‘intended to insinuate his equality’ with the other disciples. What is the evidence that this was his motivation? And how does the author know that the early Christian communities were ‘frenzied’, frightened that the possibility of premature death meant that they would ‘miss the boat’ of resurrection themselves on the day of Christ’s return — which Vermes refers to as ‘D-day’. The Normandy landings on the shores of Galilee is a novel concept.
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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