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Geza Vermes' Christian Beginnings: A Historical Summary
In Christian Beginnings, Geza Vermes strips away two thousand years of doctrinal varnish to reveal a story not of timeless divine certainties, but of historical contingency, improvisation, and ideological evolution under pressure — a story as messy and human as history always is when honestly recounted.
The arc begins with Jesus of Nazareth, not as the "Word made Flesh" of later creeds, but as a gritty, charismatic Jewish prophet. Initially a follower of John the Baptist, he became an itinerant healer, exorcist, teacher, and eschatological herald in his own right, proclaiming the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom. His message was urgent, moral, and thoroughly Jewish. He gestured toward God, not toward himself. Divinity was not in his claims but in the power he channelled.
After his death — a humiliating Roman execution — his followers, buoyed by their conviction of his resurrection and interpreting it through the lens of Hebrew scripture, regrouped. But they did not yet preach the God-man of later orthodoxy; they proclaimed a vindicated, exalted man of God.
From this sprang the early Jewish Christian Church, centred in Jerusalem under James, Peter, and John — a rigorously Jewish sect, practising Temple worship, observing Torah, and awaiting the consummation of Israel’s destiny. The Didache — that earthy instruction manual for early Christian communities — captures this spirit: low Christology, high ethical seriousness, no Platonic metaphysical gyrations at all.
But a new dynamic was already abroad: Pauline Christianity. Paul, an outsider even in his own time, tore Christianity away from its Jewish rootstock. To Paul, Jesus' death and resurrection were not mere eschatological signs but cosmic events, redeeming all humanity. The traditional Law was no longer necessary. Faith in Christ, not fidelity to Torah, was the gateway to salvation. Paul’s Jesus hovers in a strange intermediate state: human enough to die, exalted enough to save the universe.
Meanwhile, in another key, the Johannine tradition emerged. Where Paul stretches Jewish categories, John snaps them. Jesus becomes the Logos — the pre-existent divine Word. Here is the full Hellenisation of the Christian message: Christ as cosmic principle, enfleshed and moving among men. In John’s Gospel, the carpenter of Nazareth fades into the eternal light of Platonic abstraction.
Yet all this might have remained theological squabbling in obscure communities, had not history itself swept in like a desert storm.
The First Jewish War (AD 66–73) ended with the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. Judaism without the Temple was a shipwreck. Rabbinic Judaism emerged from the wreckage: Pharisaic, textual, diasporic, resilient. But the Jewish Christian sects, marginal and suspiciously heretical, were cut adrift from this evolution.
Meanwhile, Gentile Christianity, with no stake in the Temple, expanded freely into the open spaces of the Greco-Roman world.
The Second Jewish War (Bar Kokhba Revolt, AD 132–135) delivered the coup de grâce. When Rabbi Akiva proclaimed Bar Kokhba the Messiah, Jewish Christians could not follow. They were anathematised, expelled from the synagogue, cut off decisively from Judaism. Simultaneously, the crushing Roman victory obliterated any remaining Jewish political autonomy.
Jerusalem became Aelia Capitolina, a Roman city forbidden to Jews.
Thus, by the second century, three distinct religions stood in uneasy relation:
- Rabbinic Judaism: resilient but battered.
- Jewish Christianity: fading into obscurity, fragmentation and extinction.
- Gentile Christianity: increasingly Hellenised, ambitious, as broad as the Empire.
Meanwhile, Gentile Christianity flourished. It absorbed Greek metaphysics, adopted Roman administrative structures, and reimagined itself not as a Jewish sect but as a universal, spiritual empire. The Gnostics, Marcionites, Montanists, and others offered competing visions, but through the many disputes the mainstream Church hammered out a tentative orthodoxy: increasingly high Christology — increasingly hostile to its Jewish roots and to the Jewish people.
Finally, under the looming shadow of the Roman state, the decisive moment arrived. In AD 312, Constantine’s imperial embrace transformed Christianity from persecuted sect into favoured religion. At the Council of Nicaea (AD 325), Jesus was declared homoousios — of the same substance as the Father. The human prophet of Nazareth was replaced by the cosmic Christ, eternal, begotten not made.
Christianity, in Vermes’ telling, was thus not the smooth flowering of an unbroken truth but the battered, hybridised survivor of historical maelstroms. It was a faith hammered into shape by catastrophe — the destruction of the Temple, the obliteration of Judaea, the Hellenisation of thought, and the demands of imperial unification.
The Underlying Thesis
Vermes’ unspoken but unmistakable message is that orthodoxy was not inevitable. It was the fossil record of historical survival, not the pure transmission of Jesus' original message. The victorious Christianity of Nicaea was a product of necessity, political compromise, and philosophical drift — not a simple unfolding of divine plan.
In that sense, Vermes’ Christianity is deeply tragic: the vivid, dangerous, radically-Jewish eschatological movement of Jesus transmuted into a temporal imperial metaphysics, a faith which, in conquering the world, progressively redacted its origins.
