Book Review: The Authentic Gospel of Jesus by Geza Vermes

This is a reference book.

I don’t believe you can ever ‘finish’ books such as this because they’re so scholarly and fascinating even if you’re not a great follower of religion.

The great idea was to collect, classify, and comment on every word attributed to Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke in one book, enabling the reader to rediscover the religious message practised and preached by Jesus.

The statements are divided into nine categories / chapters: 1) Narratives and commands; 2) controversy stories; 3) words of wisdom; 4) parables; 5) biblical quotations; 6) prayers; 7) Son of Man sayings; 8) sayings about the Kingdom of God; 9) eschatological rules of behaviour.

The comments are illuminating, pithy, and sometimes amusing. For example, Geza Vermes points out that Matthew’s understanding of the text of Zechariah 9:9 is idiosyncratic. Matthew overlooks that in the poetry of Zechariah ‘a colt, the foal of an ass’ is a literary parallelism meaning a single donkey and not a mother together with her young. In Matthew 21:7, the gospel writer speaks of two animals