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I m 70 m c 00 the condition that Hamilton be made a major-general and the actual organizer and commander of the militar\' forces. Adams was ftirious that Washinj^on had conipcUed him to pronitite over tlie heads of more deser\'ing men "the most restless, impatient, indefatigable and unprincipled intrij;T.ier in the United States, if not in the world to he second in command under himself." I T IS HAMILTON'S bebavinr in this crisis that historians have most reproved. The Republicans thought that he intended to use the army against them. Hamilton certainly meant to sup- pres.s any domestic insurrection with a massive show of force. When rumors spread that .Jefferson's and Madison's state wiLs arming, he seemed eager to "put Virginia to the Test of resistance." When an uprising actually occurred in eastern Pennsylvania early in 179y, he told the secretary' of war not to err by sending too few troops. "WTienever the Government appears in arms," he wrote, "it ought to appear like a Hercules, and inspire respect hy the display of strength." Hamilton believed that the crisis of 179H offered an opportunit>' to create what he had long wanted for the govern- ment: a respectable standing army. Such a ix'rmanent force would enable the United States both "to subdue a irfrmion/ and powerfiil fitnte" and to deal independently and equally with the warring powers of Europe. But a potent standing army was just the beginning of Hamilton's plans for strengthening the union. He wanted also to extend the judiciary; to build a system of roads and canals, to increase taxes, and to amend the Constitution so as to sub- divide the larger states. Beyond the borders of the United States, Hamilton's aims were even more grandiose. He thought that the war with France would enable the United States, in cooperation with Britain, to seize both Florida and Louisiana from Spain—in order to keep them out of the hands of France, he said. At the same time he held out the possibility of helping the Venezue- lan patriot Francisco de Miranda to liber- ate South America. In all these endeavors, he told Rufiis King, the American minister in Britain, in August 1798, America should be "the principal agency,'"especially in sup- plying the land army. "The command in this case would ver\" naturally fall upon me—and I hope I should disappoint no favorable anticipation." (Unfortunately this revealing letter is not included in the Librar\' of America volume.) More than anyihing, Hamilton wanted some of the honor and glory that would come to the United States as it assumed its rightful place in the world as a great power. 48 ; OCTOBER 15, 2001 Ali these extravagant dreams collapsed with President Adams's new peace mis- sion in 1799 and the end of the quasi-war with France. Many Americans, including the president, thought that Hamilton and the High Federalists had been bent on establishing a regal government allied with Britain, with Hamilton as its head. There is no evidence for such a view, but Hamiltons plans for an imperial Amer- ica were certainly out of toucb with the realities of his world in 1800. TXvo cen- turies later, however, these plans do not seem so bizarre. Hamilton would be right at home in our present-day United States and our present-day world. He would love our governmenl's vast federal bureau- cracy; its sprawling Pentagon, its enor- mous CIA, its huge public debt, its taxes beyond any he couk! have hoped for, and especially its large professional military force with well over one million men and women under arms spread across two oceans and dozens of countries. America has at last become the kind of superpower of which Hamilton could onlv dream. • Who He Was 5(/PAULA FREDRIKSEN The Changing Faces of Jesus by Geza Vermes (Vikincj, 324 pp., $25.95) Providential Accidents: An Autobiography by Geza Vermes (Rownian & Littlefield Ptiblishers, 258 pp., $26.95) T E WAS A time in the 'West—it lasted until the Re- naissance—when what Chris- tians in church believed about Jesus and what professors in universities taught about Jesus corre- sponded more or less closely. Ecclesiiisti- cal creeds and coimcils set the context for interpretation, which was straightfor- wardly theological. .Jesus was the Son of God, the second Person of the Ti-inity, who for humanity's redemption had come down to earth, taken on true flesh, died for humanity's sins, been raised bodily on the third day. established his church, and ascended (in his raised body) back to heaven. The supporting roles of various of his contemporaries were equally clear. The poor and the outcast loved him. His apostles absorbed his teachings, and they brought this saving knowledge, along with the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, to the Gentiles, who received them gladly. But the Jews whom Jesus first called rejected him: they were too PAULA FRKUKIKSEN is the author, most recently, oiJems of Nazareth, Kingof'the Jcxat: A Jexci-th Life and the Emergence of Chri.stianity (Knopf). attached to their own niles and rituals, infuriated by bis new teachings, and loathe to share redemption with the Gen- tiles. Eventually they prevailed upon Pon- tius Pilate to kill him: confronted with the evidence of his resurrection, they denied him; and faced with the chureh's sueeess among the Gentiles, they eursed him. Yet the church triumphed, just as the Old Testament had always said it would. During the Renaissance, learned opin- ion started to shift. The ancient manu- scripts of New Testament writings that scholars began to retrieve and to study revealed surprising differences between the received biblical texl and the readings in the earliest witnesses. References in canonical first-ccntur>' letters to fourth- century doctrines (sueh as the Trinity) began to look suspiciously like later addi- tions. Eventually textual critics would notice that some stories about Jesus (such as his encounter with the woman at the well) floated around in different manu- seript eopies of a particular gospel, and even between the manuscripts of two dif- ferent gospels. This new knowledge in effect eroded confidence that the texts in the churchs Bible corresponded verj' closely with whatever the original versions of those
Transcript
Page 1: Who - bu.edu

Im

70

mc00

the condition that Hamilton be made amajor-general and the actual organizerand commander of the militar\' forces.Adams was ftirious that Washinj^on hadconipcUed him to pronitite over tlie headsof more deser\'ing men "the most restless,impatient, indefatigable and unprincipledintrij;T.ier in the United States, if not in theworld to he second in command underhimself."

IT IS HAMILTON'S bebavinr in thiscrisis that historians have mostreproved. The Republicans thought

that he intended to use the army againstthem. Hamilton certainly meant to sup-pres.s any domestic insurrection with amassive show of force. When rumorsspread that .Jefferson's and Madison'sstate wiLs arming, he seemed eager to "putVirginia to the Test of resistance." Whenan uprising actually occurred in easternPennsylvania early in 179y, he told thesecretary' of war not to err by sending toofew troops. "WTienever the Governmentappears in arms," he wrote, "it ought toappear like a Hercules, and inspire respecthy the display of strength."

Hamilton believed that the crisis of179H offered an opportunit>' to createwhat he had long wanted for the govern-ment: a respectable standing army. Such aix'rmanent force would enable the UnitedStates both "to subdue a irfrmion/ andpowerfiil fitnte" and to deal independentlyand equally with the warring powers ofEurope. But a potent standing army wasjust the beginning of Hamilton's plans forstrengthening the union. He wanted alsoto extend the judiciary; to build a systemof roads and canals, to increase taxes, andto amend the Constitution so as to sub-divide the larger states.

Beyond the borders of the UnitedStates, Hamilton's aims were even moregrandiose. He thought that the war withFrance would enable the United States, incooperation with Britain, to seize bothFlorida and Louisiana from Spain—inorder to keep them out of the hands ofFrance, he said. At the same time he heldout the possibility of helping the Venezue-lan patriot Francisco de Miranda to liber-ate South America. In all these endeavors,he told Rufiis King, the American ministerin Britain, in August 1798, America shouldbe "the principal agency,'"especially in sup-plying the land army. "The command inthis case would ver\" naturally fall uponme—and I hope I should disappoint nofavorable anticipation." (Unfortunatelythis revealing letter is not included in theLibrar\' of America volume.) More thananyihing, Hamilton wanted some of thehonor and glory that would come to theUnited States as it assumed its rightfulplace in the world as a great power.

48 ; OCTOBER 15, 2001

Ali these extravagant dreams collapsedwith President Adams's new peace mis-sion in 1799 and the end of the quasi-warwith France. Many Americans, includingthe president, thought that Hamilton andthe High Federalists had been bent onestablishing a regal government alliedwith Britain, with Hamilton as its head.There is no evidence for such a view, butHamiltons plans for an imperial Amer-ica were certainly out of toucb with therealities of his world in 1800. TXvo cen-turies later, however, these plans do not

seem so bizarre. Hamilton would be rightat home in our present-day United Statesand our present-day world. He would loveour governmenl's vast federal bureau-cracy; its sprawling Pentagon, its enor-mous CIA, its huge public debt, its taxesbeyond any he couk! have hoped for, andespecially its large professional militaryforce with well over one million men andwomen under arms spread across twooceans and dozens of countries. Americahas at last become the kind of superpowerof which Hamilton could onlv dream. •

Who He Was5( /PAULA F R E D R I K S E N

The Changing Faces of Jesusby Geza Vermes(Vikincj, 324 pp., $25.95)

Providential Accidents:An Autobiographyby Geza Vermes(Rownian & Littlefield Ptiblishers, 258 pp., $26.95)

TE WAS A time in the

'West—it lasted until the Re-naissance—when what Chris-tians in church believed aboutJesus and what professors in

universities taught about Jesus corre-sponded more or less closely. Ecclesiiisti-cal creeds and coimcils set the contextfor interpretation, which was straightfor-wardly theological. .Jesus was the Son ofGod, the second Person of the Ti-inity,who for humanity's redemption had comedown to earth, taken on true flesh, diedfor humanity's sins, been raised bodilyon the third day. established his church,and ascended (in his raised body) back toheaven.

The supporting roles of various of hiscontemporaries were equally clear. Thepoor and the outcast loved him. Hisapostles absorbed his teachings, and theybrought this saving knowledge, alongwith the sacraments of baptism and theEucharist, to the Gentiles, who receivedthem gladly. But the Jews whom Jesusfirst called rejected him: they were too

PAULA FRKUKIKSEN is the author, mostrecently, oiJems of Nazareth, Kingof'theJcxat: A Jexci-th Life and the Emergence ofChri.stianity (Knopf).

attached to their own niles and rituals,infuriated by bis new teachings, andloathe to share redemption with the Gen-tiles. Eventually they prevailed upon Pon-tius Pilate to kill him: confronted with theevidence of his resurrection, they deniedhim; and faced with the chureh's sueeessamong the Gentiles, they eursed him. Yetthe church triumphed, just as the OldTestament had always said it would.

During the Renaissance, learned opin-ion started to shift. The ancient manu-scripts of New Testament writings thatscholars began to retrieve and to studyrevealed surprising differences betweenthe received biblical texl and the readingsin the earliest witnesses. References incanonical first-ccntur>' letters to fourth-century doctrines (sueh as the Trinity)began to look suspiciously like later addi-tions. Eventually textual critics wouldnotice that some stories about Jesus (suchas his encounter with the woman at thewell) floated around in different manu-seript eopies of a particular gospel, andeven between the manuscripts of two dif-ferent gospels.

This new knowledge in effect erodedconfidence that the texts in the churchsBible corresponded verj' closely withwhatever the original versions of those

Page 2: Who - bu.edu

texts might have been: too many genera-tions of pious copyists, anxious to "correct"what to them might have seemed likedefeetive recensions, stood between thefirst Christians and their modern readers.Then Luther, and the Protestant Refor-mation, complicated these interpretiveissues by altering their theological context.In his commentaries, "good" Jews (that is,the Christian ones) and saved Gentiles puttheir faith in a Christian message thatlooked surj^risingly close to Luther's own,while the ritual-soaked church of Romeappeared increasingly like their Jewishopponents, the Pharisees. At this point,too, the canon of the Old Testament splitbetween Roman Catholic communitiesand Protestant communities. The Catho-lics kept the larger, traditional collectionof Old Testament writings based on theGreek Septuagint; the Protestants, morecaught up in Renaissance scholarship,accepted as Scripture only those works forwhich they had a Hebrew original.

The Enlightenment intensified all thisactivity when scholars, freer from doctri-nal constraints than ever before, began toapply the fledgling standards of criticalhistorical research to the texts of the NewTestament, investigating them as theywould any other ancient documents. Inconsequence, the differences in tone andin content between the gospels emergedwith increasing elarity, and this discoveiycalled into question their status as histori-cal witnesses to the life and the times ofJesus. The evangelists in their individual-ity came to be seen more as creative inter-preters of traditions from and about Jesus,and thus as witnesses first of all to theirown communities and their own historicalperiods, rather than as historical witnessesto Jesus of Na7.areth himself, who hadlived and preached (in Aramaic, not inGreek) some forty to seventy years priorto the composition of these gospels. TheJesus of history began to assume featuresdistinct from those of the Christ—orrather, the Christs—of faith.

THE LINGUISTIC GAP betweenJesus and the earliest documentsabout him highlighted another dif-

ferenee between him and later Christiantradition, a difference that was very sig-nificant theologically: Jesus would havebeen familiar with Semitic-language ver-sions of the Jewish Bible, whether Ara-maic or Hebrew, whereas Paul and theevangelists all drew upon its Greek ver-sion, the Septuagint. Where these two tex-tual traditions diverged sharply—say, inthe rendering of Isaiah 7:14, where in theHebrew a "young girl" {'aalmah) givesbirth to a child, but in the Greek the newmother is a "virgin" (/?art/ie?i(w)—scholarshesitated to attribute to the historical

THE BOSTON UNIVERSITY GRADUATECREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM

OLir pr(>i -:iiii, one of llie oldest and most prestigious in the nation. \^ small (no more than a dozenstudents .ulmitted in .my geiirv. with .ill workshops limited to twelve members); very intensive'(the Master"', lifjjrce is ordinarily .nvjrdeil after the atadeniit year of i-iyht courses); and highly

i.inipetitivi- (normally sixteen students iipply for each spot in fiction and poetry). We are best known fordie qiulity of our graduate workshop"-. All ill these are held in the same small room, whith allows throughIts dtwy windows a glimpse of the Charles Kivrr. IVrhaps the most remarkable such workshop occurredwhen Sylvia I'lath.Anne Sexton, and (Ifot^e Starbiiik gathered tor instruction hy Robert Lowell - gathered,by the way, less often in that little room than at the Rit7 liar,These days, the poetry workshops are run byour rej;iilar fatuity of Kier l.iiure,ite Robert I'insky and Nobel Laureate Derek Wilcott, who also conductsthe pbywriting workshops; and those in fiction are led by Leslie lipstein, SLis.inna Kaysen, and the newest•iddition to our permanent fdctilty, H J Jin. Of course our students have about them the resources of a j^reatuniversity.That means they often take courses with A superh taculty in literLitiire that includes, hesides thepoets t^eotfrey Mill and IJji^anna Warren, the schoKir Christopher Ricks and Boston University's twoother Nohel i'rize winners, Saul Itellow and Elie Wiesd, It is difficult to know how best Co measure astudents success, or the worth of a program to a writer; we cjn say thai our jiraduatcs in each j^enre hjveaccomplished a j;ood deal. Over the last lew years our phywrijjhts have been awarded the ABC' NationalI'laywriring IVize, the Charles MacArthur Aw:ird for C^oniedy. the Heideman Award, first prize in hoth the21st Century ['layurigliLs' Festival and ihe Ualtiinore Playwrights' Festival, and productions with N.ikedAni-els jnd the Manhattan Class Co, Quite recently our graduates in poetry liave won the 830,0(11]Whiting Award, the Dariiard New Women I'oets Series, a gram from the NtA, and the Nornw FarberHirst Book Award fi-om the Rietrv Society ot America; there have heen three winners in three years ot theOiscovery/Till' NaiUw Award, and two winners of the Natuiu.il I'oetry Series. In fiction, our students havealso won the Whiting Award, along with in inordinate share i)t the nationwide Henfield Awards, In 1'*''')our writers swept every major literary .iward in the country, with 1 la Jin winning the Natiorul Book Awardand the I'EN/Faulkner, and Jhunipa Lahiri the I'F,N/Hemingway and the I'uht^er Prize. Not a year goes bywithout a graduate of our program bringing out a book with a major publisher, and some, like Sue Millerjiid Arthur Colden, spend A good deal of lime on best-seller lists. Over the last decade we have placed moretliiin fifteen of our graduates m tenure-track positions at major American universities. We make, ol course,no such assurances. Our only promise, to those who join us, is of a fair amount of time in that river-viewroom, time shared with other writers in a common, most ditticult pursuit; the perteclion ot one's craft. Formore irilorm;ition about the program, visiting writers, and tinancial ,ud (our teaching felkiws conductiindergraiiuate creative writing classes) write to Director, Creative Writing Program, lioston University.2^(< li.iy Scile Road, Boston, MA n221S or visit our Web site at iivu'.bii.nlii/ii-rifin^/.

('uircrsilY JN an y, ajfinnalife mlii'ii iiislinilioti.

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THE NEW REPUBLIC : OCTOBER 15, 2001 : 49

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1m

m

m•oc00r—I-H

o

Jesus what would have been possible, soto speak, only in Greek. The gap betweenhistory and theology widened.

Into this breach stepped liberal Protes-tant scholars. In quest of the historicalJesus, they focused on the meaning of acentral phrase frequently on his lips inthe gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke:the Kingdom of God. Jesus had used thisphrase, these questers maintained, as amoral metaphor: by invoking the King-dom, he had meant "love one another," and

nated the "intertestamental" period.These esoteric and less familiar writ-

ings—the Assumption of Moses, thePsalm of Solomon, the Sybilline Oracle,Enoch—also contained the phrase "King-dom of God," and they certainly did notuse it to stand as a timeless moral meta-phor. The Kingdom that these texts pro-claimed was an energetically desired andanticipated historical event. Various end-time scenarios crowded their pages. Therighteous would suffer, but then they

Ruins of the ancient synagogue at Chorazin, the Galilee

"'feed the hungry" and "be kind to widowsand orphans." By preaching the comingKingdom, the great nineteenth-centuryscholar Adolf von Harnack explained,Jesus had really been teaching "the father-hood of God and the brotherhood ofman." This pleasing message, immediatelymeaningful to Harnack's modern readers,just happened to coincide with the theol-ogy of liberal Protestantism.

For these scholars, Jesus stood withinthe great prophetic tradition of the OldTestament. These holy men too, theythought, had urged ethical action over rit-ual performance, prayer over blood offer-ings, faith over works. But then otherscholars started to take their investiga-tions further afield. Turning from the OldTestament canon, they studied insteadthose Jewish writings from the periodmuch closer to Jesus's own lifetime, from200 B.C.E. to 200 C.E., which they desig-

wonld be vindicated. A great battle be-tween good and evil would ensue, to be ledperhaps by an archangel, perhaps by theLord's messiab. Exiled Israel, all twelvetribes, would be gathered up into the land,and to Jerusalem. (By the time these writ-ings were composed, ten of the twelvetribes had long since vanished, so the ex-pectation anticipates a great miracle.) Thedead would be raised. Gentiles wouldabandon their idols and worship the Godof Israel. The strong theme that wascentral to all these writings, in brief, wasapocalyptic eschatology: the con\ictionthat God was about to intervene defini-tively in history, and vanquish injustice,evil, and death forever, and establish hiskingdom of peace.

Scholars placing the New Testamentwritings within the interpretive context ofthese apocaljptic ones discovered a newJesns, a new Paul, and a different King-

dom. The apocalyptic themes in the earli-est Christian message sounded with in-creasingly clarity. This trajectory of re-search cuhninated in the early twentiethcentury with Albert Schweitzer's greatwork The Quest of the Historical Jesus,which appeared in 1,901. Schweitzerargued—shockingly, for the time—thatJesus himself, like many of his contempo-raries, lived in the expectation of the immi-nent end of the world. To understand NewTestament Scriptures, be asserted, the his-torian must place bis subject, whetherJesus or Paul, within his own historicalcontext of a "thoroughgoing eschatology."

Compelling as this reconstructionmight have been historically, it was hope-lessly awkward theologically. What reli-gious meaning could twentieth-centuryChristians make of a first-century apoca-lyptic mission whose central message—"The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom ofGod is at hand!"—had proved to be sowrong? As another liberal scholar mused,"Jesns preached the Kingdom, but it wasthe Church that came."

The heart of this energetic scholarlyactivity during this time was ProtestantGermany. The Roman Catholic Church,already traumatized by European culture'slurch into modernity, was having noneof it. Papal mandate all but obliteratedany serious Catholic biblical scholarshipfrom the middle of the nineteenth centuryto the middle of the twentieth century.Catholic scholars who did persevere inattempts to effect a reform and to press forintellectual freedom lefl the church, orwere intimidated into silence, or wereexcommunicated.

In the 1940s, Pins XII cracked the dooropen a bit, acknowledging in an encycli-cal letter the existence of literary forms inthe Bible. (Non-Catholic biblical scholars,by contrast, had for well over a hundredyears used distinctions between differentliterary forms as a way to distinguisb thedifferent traditions, WTiters, and historicalperiods embedded in—and so disgnisedby—Scripture's continuous narratives.)More changes of ecclesiastical attitudeeventually followed, and nowadays Cath-olic scholars are free to be as rigorouslycritical as any of their non-Catholic col-leagues. But a scant fif^ years ago thingswere otherwise.

I RONICALLY, AND AGAIN in the1940s, Pius's church took a step,unknown to him, that would issue in

some of the most daring, original, andhistorically imaginative critical work oftwentieth-century bibhcal scholarship. Inacorner of Hungar}', for the course of thewar, it sheltered a young and fomierlyJewish seminarian from the anti-Semiticmurders raging all around him. That

50 : OCTOBER 15, 2001

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young seminarian was Geza Vermes.Professor emeritus of Jewish studies at

the University of Oxford, author and edi-tor of an essential multi-volume study onJews in the Hellenistic and Roman peri-ods, nonpareil translator and scholar ofthe Dead Sea Scrolls, Vermes has had avery long and very distinguished career asone of the worlds pre-eminent historiansof ancient Jewish biblical interpretation.In the early 1970s, he embarked on arelated but very different trajectory of re-search. As a result, he has produced also agroundbreaking .series of studies on thehistorical Jesus. His earlier trilog}'—,/(',s'/wthe Jeic (1973), Jesus and the World ofJudaism (19S3), The Religion of Jesus theJew (1993)—replete with footnotes andpolyglot references, was critical as wellas synthetic: that is, besides offering hisown interpretations, Vermes addressed,assessed, and criticized the argimients ofother scholars in the field. His expertisein Semitic languages and Jewish historyopened up new perspectives on traditionsabout .Jesus in ways that both challengedand refreshed how other students of thiselusive figure thought about the Gospelsas historical evidence. But Vermes's clearand graceful English (his third vernacu-lar!), as well as bis great subject, alsoinvited the general reader into his pages;and indeed these works—especially Jesus

the Jert'—have enjoyed wide popularityoutside the academy.

With the recent publication of TheChanging faces of Jesus, Vermes sums upthe arguments and the conclusions of histhree prior publications, and also widensthe scope of his inquiry beyond the Gos-pels to include other documents in theNew Testament. And be has done so withthe general reader particularly in mind.No academic apparatus or learned in-fighting with other scholars clutters thesewondcrhil pages, on the correct assump-tion that the reader who wants to see Ver-mes's interpretations developed on thatlevel will know where to find them.Instead, with grace, wit, and vigor, he flu-ently conducts his tour of these texts,which he organizes into six chapters alonga gradient (these are my characteriza-tions, not his) of least Jewish, and there-fore least historically plausible—the Gos-pel of John—to more Jewish (that is, pre-senting mt)re recognizably Jewish themesand traditions) and therefore containingmore historically reliable information—the three synoptic ("seen-together") Gos-pels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Hispenultimate chapter introduces Vermes'sreconstruction of the Jesus of history; andhis concluding chapter is a very briefsummar\' of the transformation of Jesus'soriginal message in the Gentile, Greek-

speaking world together with a keenlyobserved assessment of scholarly work onJesus in the past half-century, and of theunfortunately formative effects of Christ-ian anti-Judaism on each. And then, withartistr}' and with an appealing chutzpah,Vermes brings the wbole to a close by relat-ing a dream vision of a returned .Jesus whoaddresses first the Jews, then masses ofassembled Christians ("not quite as big[a crowd] ... as the one which recentlygreeted the Pope in Cracow"), and finallythe lost and the lapsed.

Vermes's great contribution to the late-twentieth-centiuy quest for the historicalJesus has been to construct another inter-pretive framework within which to placeand sort through the later Christian tra-ditions about him. To do so. he workedespecially with those sources that arelinguistically and culturally (and, wherepossible, chronologically) close to Jesus.These are the Hebrew and Aramaic tradi-tions preserved in various Jewish writ-ings: targumim (loose translations ofHebrew Scriptures into Aramaic); theMishnah and the later Talmuds (rabbinicexplorations of the meaning and the rangeof application of biblical law); rabbiniccommentaries on the five books of Moses(the Pentateuch), which contain muchmaterial of a legendary nature; the DeadSea Scrolls; intertestamental apocrypha

CENTERS OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

Center tor Jewish History15 West T6 Street, NY, NY looii

A Conference to Celebrate the Inaugurationof the Center for Jewish History as a Major Resource in Jewish Studies

October 28-29, 2OO1

The following sessions are open to the public and free ot charge.Please RSVP to (212) 2C)4-83i3 by October 15

SiNDA^, O<::T()isii:K 2S, 7 - 1 0 K M .

Creating Modern Jewish Studies'

Dr.RobertChazan,sii mdHtlen R, Sthcuer Professor ot

Hebrew and Judaic Studies,

New York Univcrsirv'

Opening Remarks

Dr. J a n e Gerber, Protessor

ot KvMsli l!l^lory iiiid Director ot

rhf Instirute tor Sephardic

Sruilits, Graduate Center ot^the

(~,ity UniviTsit)' of iVew York

( "HAIR

Dr. Michael Brenner, I'rotcssor ot Jt-wish ] Ustorv- and Culmrc,University of Munich

Dr. Jonathan Frankel, Profesbor ot Modern Russian and

Jfwjsh I iistorv; Tin.-1 Itbrew I'niversity, Israel

Nation-Building and the Israeli Historians:Mythologizers. Revisionists, Post-Zionists

Dr. Je f f rey S. GurOCk, Libby M . Klaperman Professor of

Jcwjih History, Yesbiva University

American Jewish History: Persorml andProfessional Reflections on a Disciplin^PathTowards Scholarly Acceptance

Dr. S t e p h e n J. ZipperStein. Danld t:. Ko^bland Professor inJt-wisb Culture and H[st<)n,and t^o-Directorof tbelaube FamilyCenter tor Jewish Studies, Stantord L niversity

On the Evolution—and Future—of Russian JewishHistoriography

, S : l , - l O P.M.

"Modern Jewish Studiesand the American Context

Dr. Arthur Goren, Russdl Knapp Professor

of American Jewisb History; Columbia University

C H A I R

Dr. Jon Dutler, William Koberrson Coe Professorof American History; Profes«>r ot American Studiesand Pnitessor of Religious Studies, Yale University

The American Setting

Dr. Deborah Dash Moore, i rofcssor oiJuwjsb Studies, Vassar C~,ollege

The Urban Context

Dr. HaSia Diner, Paul S. and SylvIa SteinbergPrutessor (it American Jewish I listory.New York UniversityThe Multicultural Context

THE NEW REPUBLIC : OCTOBER 15, 2001 : 51

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and pseudepigrapha in various languages;and, in Greek, the work of Jesus's Jewishnear-contemporaries Philo and Josephus.

Vermes constructs his image of Jesus byappeal to these texts. The premise fromwhich he begins is historically unim-peachable; that Jesus of Nazareth was aJew and his mother tongue was Aramaic.Beneath the koine {"common," that is,non-literary) Greek of the synoptic Gos-pels, this linguistic layer of Aramaic canstill be glimpsed—and occasionally it evencomes to the surface. (Commanding adead child to rise, the synoptic Jesusorders: Talitha cumi, or "Little girl, getup!" And his cry from the cross—the firsthnes of Psalm 22—Mark gives not inHebrew, but in Aramaic: Eloi, Eloi, lama

tiahaehtani? or "My Grod, my God, whyhave you forsaken me?")

Vermes regards the synoptic evangelists'portraits of Jesus as the most reliable, andso he peoples his presentation with otherGalilean holy men renowned for theirability to work nature miracles or to curethe ill even from a distance—and (a re-lated expertise) to exorcise demons. Un-schooled, perhaps illiterate, these menwere remembered in later tradition fortheir piety, their extreme material poverty,and their powerfiil prayer. Sometimestheir fellow Jews referred to such hasidim("pious ones") as prophets, even as "son(s)of God," while a hasid might invoke thedeity in Aramaic as Abba, "Father." Onee,according to a Talmudic story, a "voice

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from heaven"—that is, God—even pro-claimed one of these miracle-workers hisson.

By the end of Vermes's book on Jesus,the constant cameo appearances of thesecharismatic Galileans indeed work a smallmiracle. The intractably theological titlesfor Jesus such as "Son of God" and "son ofman," and the miraculous deeds attributedto him, all of which in Christian traditionserve to indicate Jesus's unique status asGod's Son, are shown to be native to Jew-ish—and especially to Aramaic and Gali-lean Jewish—streams of thought. In thatcontext they express not a super-humansubject's metaphysical status, but ahuman subjects moral status as a piousman responsive to the needs of his fellows,and whom, on that account, God particu-larly loves. To move closer to the Jesus ofhistory—"the real Jesus," as Vermes callshim—the angle of approach should becalculated, he urges, with or from thesenative Jewish traditions.

BUT WHAT OF those other writingsin the New Testament's core canon,the Gospel of John and the letters

of Paul? On these two sources, the JewishAramaic traditions provide much lesspurchase. What, then, can the FourthGospel and Paul tell us about "the realJesus" and about that sole conduit for suchhistorical knowledge, his earliest disciples'proclamations about him? Not much, saysVermes; and in a sense he is right. Thehero of John's Gospel is a mouthpiece forthe evangelist's theology: it is difficult toplace the Johannine Christ's bel cantosoliloquies on his own divine nature in arealistic rural early-first-century Galileansetting. And Paul specifically says thathe never knew the human Jesus. For thepurposes of Paul's message, what needs tobe known about the human Jesus is hisdeath, which is the necessary prelude tohis resurrection and to the resurrection ofthe dead and transformation of the livingto take place shortly, says Paul, whenChrist returns.

Material from these sources that mightsupplement or enrich what we otherwisepossess from the synoptic Gospels-Jesus's teaching regularly in Jerusalem, asJohn portrays; or Paul's claim that he, andalso the Gentiles whom be had baptized,were empowered to do "works of power"and charismatic healings, to prophesy,and to discern between spirits, much asthe synoptic Jesus does—Vermes for themost part lets pass by. Those traditions inJohn and Paul that stand in strongestcontrast to Vermes's reconstruction ofJesus's Jewish and Aramaic message, suchas those that claim an extremely elevatedtheological status for Jesus relative to God,Vermes attributes to Gentile, thus pagan.

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culture—in John's case, a native culture; inPaul's case, the culture of those whom headdresses.

Christianity as a religion, Vermes ex-plains, is thus the result of a Jewish-Gentile hybrid, which spread in anincreasingly Gentile and pagan environ-ment, inevitably acquiring non-Jewishelements as it grew. The Hellenistic syna-gogue, home to Greek-speaking Jews(such as Paul), to the Septuagint, and tothose Jewishly sympathetic Gentiles whowere familiar enough with biblical storiesto understand the religious significanceof the Christian message—Jesus as theson of David, or the seed of Abraham,or the shoot of Jesse—scarcely figures inVermes s account. He seems to envisage aone-generation transition to the new faith.

The movement, in this view, was rapidlymutating, and it soon lost its appeal forJews. Its Gentile members, oflfended bythe Jews' rejection of what they took to bethe fulfillment of God's promises to Israel,became increasingly anti-Jewish them-selves. The Jews may have rejected thechurch; but in the view of the (now Gen-tile) church, God had first rejected theJews and put Gentile Christians in theirstead. For all these reasons—the centuriesof anti-Judaism in Gentile Christian the-olog>', the blends of pagan and Jewishthought found variously in the Greek NewTestament documents ostensibly aboutJesus, the necessary compromises withpagan culture made by Paul when tryingto take the message to the Gentiles—the features of the Jewish Jesus, Vermesconcludes, have been obscured. Untilfairly recently, they would even have beendenied.

BUT THESE DAYS a recognizablyJewish Jesus no longer startles oroftends. Indeed, as Vermes notes,

"the Jewishness of Jesus is now axiomatic... [even for] those New Testament schol-ars who can only pay lip service to it." Inthis regard, he says. New Testament stud-ies have changed significantly since 1973,when even the title of his first book onthis highly charged subject, /es-«.s the Jew,shocked some in the Christian world. Andthe field is drastically changed; indeed, itis "almost unrecognizable" from "the per-spective of 1945"—the year before theyoung Vermes, released from the necessityof hiding by the end of the war, beganhis advanced academic training in Lou-vain as a novice residing with the Fathersof Notre-Dame de Sion, a nineteenth-century order founded specifically to prayfor the conversion of the .Tews.

His concluding evocation of the year1945 recalled to me the poignant elosingline of his prologue, wherein Vermesremembers his parents, Ernest and There-

sia, both murdered in Hungary iu 1944,"innocent victims of the evil and madnesscalled anti-Semitism." Vermes's life andwork have thus spanned the two poles ofthe so-called Judeo-Christian traditionboth at their most violently alienated—the Sboah—and at their most irenic andcooperative—the current quest for theJesus of history; conducted both by inter-faith groups in churches and synagoguesand by historians in the academy.

In Providential Accidents, his autobiog-raphy, Vermes provides a more intimateview of the twists and turns by which heentered the cburch, survived fascist Hun-gary and the Nazis, studied in Louvain andParis, entered British academic life and alife outside the church, came to Oxford,

fought for almost forty years for firee accessfor himself and other scholars to the trea-sures of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and came tosearch for the historical Jesus. It is a trulygripping narrative. It begins as a kind ofBildungsroman, wherein Vermes relateshis progress through Hungary's Catholicschools. Forbidden entrance to universityby the anti-Semitic legislation of 1941, thesixteen-year-old Vermes "opted for theCatholic priesthood: with its six-year cur-riculum, this seemed to provide the onlyreal prospect for higher education." Thisdecision saved his life.

After the war ended, Vermes foundhimself in the study of a professor of Scrip-ture, whose books lay scattered in heaps inthe wake of the Soviet army. Attempting to

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bring order to this chaos, Vermes pickedup and saw, for the first time in his hfe,a Hebrew Bible. It was a transformingmoment. "This filled me with fascination,and an irresistible urge to learn Hebrew,"he relates. This accidental encounter sethim on the path to becoming who he is.And, of course, given his personal choices,his family, and his times, this decision tolearn Hebrew had a certain poignancy.One of his uncles, seeing the young semi-narian hard at work on a Hebrew gram-mar, wryly remarked: "I see you're nowbusying yourself with what you shouldhave learned as a child."

H IS MEMOIR IS also a love story.Its prologue begins with thisheart-stopping sentence: "Short-

ly before midnight on 9 June 1993 Irealized that my wife was dying." PamelaVermes brought Geza Vermes into a newlife. They met in 1955, and eventuallymarried, and collaborated in his scholarlypublications, and together found theirindi\'idual ways from Catholicism towardJudaism, she as a ''religious agnostie" (herself-designation), he as a non-observantthough highly identified Jew.

And Vermes's storj' is also in part aninteniational thriller, especially with thehigh-level goings-on around the Scrolls.The full sordid tale of spite, seholariy self-ishness, and undisguised anti-Semitism,which kept access to the Dead Sea textsrestricted for decades to a tiny cartel,unwinds in his pages. Telegrams and let-ters fiy between Jerusalem, Paris, Oxford,Washington, and southern California'sHuntington Library-; careers crash; schol-arly hypotheses come and go like claypigeons in a skeet shoot. It is all great stuff,especially because we know the happyending: the scrolls—thanks in part to Ver-mes's efforts—are now open and availableto all interested scholars.

But owing to who he is, when he haslived, and how he has written, Vermesslife stor>' reads as well as a history ofJewish-Christian relations in the twenti-eth eentuiy (the worst century so far, asDiana Trilling once remarked), as well as ahistor>' of the academic study of thoserelations. His autobiography thus placeshis scholarship, and particularly his NewTestament scholarship, in a larger context.Readers of both can see not only howVermess life informed his work, but alsohow the myriad cross-currents of Jewish-Christian relations must inform any suehendeavor in the area of historical Jesusresearch.

A historian does not have to be Jew-ish in order to produce a Jewish Jesus:in 2001. thanks in part to the work ofVermes and scholars like him, a moreor less Jewish Jesus is the one whom any

historian, of any religious orientation ornone, pretty much expects to find. Thatchurches and synagogues, separately andtogether, are exploring and making theirpeace with the Jewishness of Jesus—again thanks in part to the work of Ver-mes and scholars like him—is, I think,an even more significant cultural fact. Itshows the beginning of a way forward outof centuries of mutual suspicion, resent-

ment, and—within living memory-much worse. For our culture, it is also themeasure of recuperation from the shockof the Renaissance and the secularizationof time and nature that followed in itswake, when the gap between history andtheology (for Jews as well as for Chris-tians) first started to make itself felt. Westill live in that gap; but we need not belost in it. •

Immorality PlayR U T H FRANKLIN

Flights of Loveby Bernhard Schlinktranslated by John E. Woods(Pantheon, 304 pp., $23)

TI HAT BAD BOOKS are the' books most widely read is anentirely mundane phenome-non of contemporary" culture.Everj' week the major book

reviews assess a dozen books in a varietyof genres, of varying quahty but deemedof sufficient significance or originalit\' orbeauty to merit a thousand words or so.With only a few exceptions, these booksthen vanish forever: good books get re-viewed, but bad books get bought.

Once in a while, though, books of "lit-erary merit" do take a spin on the best-seller list. These are often just bad booksin disguise—C<)rc//i!s- Mandolin, or AHeartbreaking Work of Staggering Gen-ius. With regard to style, both of thosebooks are credible imitations of the realthing; but unlike the "designer" handbagshawked on the street, what gives awaythese knock-offs is not their detailingbut the absence at their eore. Under theweight of all their trappings—pseudo-historical documents, lengthy digressionson esoterica, winking self-referentiality—they shudder with emptiness.

The best recent example of the dis-guised bad book is surely BernhardSchlinks The Reader. Schlink was a pro-fessor of constitutional law who wrotemystery novels in his spare time, but withthe publication of The Reader in 1995 heerupted onto the literar>' scene in Ger-many and around the world. The bookalready ranks among the best-selling Ger-man paperbacks of all time, and aroundtwo million copies have sold in the UnitedStates alone, fueled largely by Oprah Win-frey's endorsement. Der Spiegel deemed

Schlink's book "one of the greatest tri-umphs of German literature since thenovel The Tin Drtini." If Giinter Grass'sepic was the quintessential novel of thewartime generation. The Reader wasaimed squarely at the "second generation,"the luckj' but oppressed ones bom later.

There is every indication that Flightsof Love, Schlinks first collection of shortstories, may fare similarly. Sandwichedbetween J. K. Rowling and John Grisham,it has been a presence on the German best-seller lists since its publication last year.German critics have praised Schlink as a"master of the craft" and his stories as "vir-tually perfect." One wTiter for the Frank-furter Allgemeine Zeitung has mordantlyproposed that the stretch of highway be-tween Frankfurt and Stuttgart be nick-named "the Flights of Love Stretch," sinceit is the same duration as the playing timeof the audio version of Schlink's volume.Oprah's vast fiock will no doubt snap it upin its English translation.

Schlink's disguise is well-made. He isa master of appearances, but only of ap-pearances. His books appear to have seri-ous themes: in TAf iifarfer, the difficultiesof the second generation in reconcilingwith the Nazi past; in Flights of Love, thejealousies and infidelities and sublimitiesof love affairs. Both books owe the entiretyof their momentum to the machinationsof plot, but the plot is spun charminglyand contrivingly enough that you hardlyhave a chance to discover that the char-acters are vacant, virtually without inte-rior lives. Schlinks style is perfectly cali-brated to appeal, spare enough to earnthe intellectual-sounding description of

54 : OCTOBER 15, 2001

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