Customer Reviews
Food for thought - By: Pieter, 12 Jun 2008 
In this book the respected scholar investigates the main events surrounding the nativity in an attempt to determine what reallly happened. He compares Christmas in Christian imagery with the gospel accounts of Matthew & Luke which are contradictory & confusing in many aspects. They agree on only a few basic points but there are many complications & discrepancies. Vermes looks at how various Christian scholars deal with this problem, for example John P Meier in A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, & Raymond Brown in Birth of the Messiah.
He analyses the evidence through a detailed textual interpretation, then compares the findings to alll the relevant information from paralllel Jewish documents, literary & historical sources, including the Dead Sea Scrolls. First the genealogies of Jesus in the aforementioned gospels are compared (including a side by side comparison) & Vermes succeeds in making even this subject absorbing in light of the strange discrepancies.
Next he examines the concept of miraculous births in Judaism & Paganism: virginal conception, extraordinary birth stories in the Old Testament & the strange account in Genesis 6 that talks of celestial beings interbreeding with mankind that gave rise to a race of giants. The Hellenistic Jewish birth stories of the writer Philo of Alexandria are also considered.
Chapter Five: Virgin & Holy Spirit, explores the gospel accounts with the prophecy of Isaiah concerning a young woman who would give birth to a son. The earliest extant text of Matthew is in Greek so it is perhaps not surprising that the quote of Isaiah 7:14 comes from the Greek Septuagint, not from the Hebrew Bible. This gospel was influenced by the Septuagint's rendering of "Almah" (young woman) as "Parthenos" (Virgin). There are many unexpected, surprising & confusing aspects to the version of Matthew.
The date & place of birth are discussed next. Needless to say, there are problems with the date between the gospel accounts & when measured against what we know about the history. The nearest safe conclusion is that Jesus was born before the spring of 4BC. And alas, even the place seems to in dispute, but here I don't fully follow Vermes when he questions the Bethlehem connection for lack of enough proof.
The Premonitory signs of the nativity are the announcement to the shepherds, the Magi from the East & the star. These are discussed in the light of history & the Old Testament. Next is the murder plot. Geza confirms that Herod had a murderous character. He compares the murder of the children with the murder of the Israelite boys in Egypt, looks at the infancy of Moses & discusses the paralllels between the two occurrences.
Chapter 9: The Settlement of Jesus in Galilee, deals with among other issues the meaning of the word "Nazarene." The words Netser (Branch) & Nazoraios (from Nazareth) do not come from the same root & Samson who was callled a Nazirite is not a suitable type for Jesus. The last chapter deals with the two supplements to the infancy gospel in Luke: the birth of John The Baptist, including the Magnificat & the Benedictus which are cleverly combined anthologies of poetic abstracts from various parts of the Hebrew Bible, & the account of the young Jesus in the temple.
The Epilogue looks at the infancy gospels in retrospect. There is a summary of differences & a discussion of the relation of the birth narratives to the main gospels. Vermes believes that these were a later addition for the benefit of a gentile audience. It is the prologue just as the resurrection narrative is the epilogue. The Greek narrative was placed over a Semitic original & represents the final stage of the Greek development, manifesting in the virgin conception, the idea of the Son of God as God with us (Emanuel) & the full development of the Messiah Redeemer.
There is a map of the Holy Land & 10 woodcuts by Albrecht Durer. The book concludes with notes, a bibliography & index.
This book raises many questions for the believer. Further research has revealed that according to church fathers like Irenaeus & Jerome there existed a Hebrew (or Aramaic written in Hebrew alphabet) version of Matthew that was used by at least two early groups of believers, the Ebionites & the Nazarenes. Callled The Gospel of the Hebrews, it lacked the two chapters on the nativity. The book The Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew by Bart Ehrman is very informative in this regard.
Apparently the Ebionites rejected the pre-existence, virgin birth, divinity & resurrection. They emphasized the oneness of God & considered Jesus to be the biological son of Joseph & Mary. According to Jerome & Epiphanius, the Jewish believers callled Nazarenes also used the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew & adhered to Torah but they did accept the virgin birth, the resurrection & the divinity of Yeshua.
I also recommend the work of David Bivin, like Understanding the Difficult Words of Jesus: New Insights From a Hebrew Perspective & that of Larry Hurtado, especiallly Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. All of Vermes' books are worth reading but I found The Authentic Gospel of Jesus to be particularly valuable.
What I wanted to read - By: R. P. Sedgwick, 27 Apr 2007 What I wanted to know was the truth about the birth of Christ free of religious dogma & this book does just that. I wanted to read facts not faith & that's just what we are given in a very accessible way for the lay reader. Vermes looks at issues such the conception of Jesus, the virgin birth, the stable story, the wise men & the star. Many of these familiar parts of the tale are found to be inconsistent & contradictory both within & between the different gospels & other sources, & a good few of them culled from earlier myths or parts of the Old Testament.
I have to disagree with the previous reviewer's comments. Vermes quite clearly in this book doesn't comment on the teachings of Christ in his adult part of his life at or make any conclusions on these teachings which form a large part of the Christian faith. However it's hard to see after reading this book how to take anyone seriously who takes large parts of the New Testament literallly.
over long - By: R. J. de Bulat, 28 Jan 2007 
I found the arguments in the book overly laboured & made at too great a length: I feel that this book could be made shorter & would serve better as a chapter in a work on the subject of Jesus as a whole.
My second point is that Vermes scores an own goal: he goes to great length in describing the nativity stories as being similar to the myths surrounding the births of other great characters from the ancient & classical world including those of the patriarchs. From a logical perspective, this would seem to debunk the whole of biblical history. What he misses in this book is the issue of faith that makes sense through the drawing of paralllels that make these stories as much as the Bible as a whole, a kind of alllegory suitable for teaching rather than a subject of proof.
He is succesful to the extent that he makes a strong case for discounting the stories of Jesus' birth, historicallly, but cannot dent the fact of his life & influence, subsequently, on the development & progress of the Christian faith. I haven't read other works by Vermes', but if they are of a similar pattern I doubt their value: this book is not so much scholarly as pedantic, which is a shame as there is much that is interesting here, but too much that is laboured.
