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This brief interview caught my eye partly because of the year that I spent in Hebrew and Jewish studies at Oxford, partly because it is an attack on Joseph Ratzinger’s scholarship. While at Oxford, I never had the pleasure of taking a course with Professor Vermes, but I certainly came to know his reputation. I have no difficulty in crediting his claim that the Holy Father’s knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, and other Semitic languages might be better than it is. But I think that it is a mistake when Prof. Vermes, perhaps as a deliberate slight, attributes a lack of knowledge about Biblical scholarship later than 1970 to Benedict XVI. I don’t know if Papa Ratzinger is the most scholarly of popes since Papa Lambertini, but it wouldn’t be a far-fetched claim.
Prof. Vermes seems to think that the consensus of certain contemporary scholars amounts to the fact of matter; so Benedict, by defending orthodoxy, has written a book which will pressure Catholic biblical scholars to deny the facts before their eyes. This is really a ludicrous position. In order to assess the worth of any consensus, one first needs to know who the scholars are that make up the consensus. Especially in a field of study as controversial and hotly debated as Biblical and New Testament studies, I think that we can never ignore the pre-scholarly, as it were, bias of the investigators. The one solid fact of the matter in this case is that the evidence can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways. Just as in philosophy, what we first of all need to consider is whether the scholar has a made a case consistent with the facts; we ask whether his account is internally coherent. Then we look at the “costs” and benefits of maintaining that consistent account; we hesitate to commit to neat solutions in one area that require us to make ridiculous conclusions in another area.
It should come as no surprise that an apostate such as Vermes denies that “the historical Jesus” is the “Christ of faith”. The costs are obviously too high for him. Vermes couldn’t acknowledge Benedict’s interpretation of the evidence as true without damning the whole of his apostate (and scholarly) life. As far as such a position goes, that’s fine. What I don’t like is when Vermes claims that Benedict rejects the historical method (i.e., the facts) when he doesn’t like where it’s going - i.e., Benedict believes it goes somewhere other than Vermes does. This is either hubris or a pointed and sneering disdain for Benedict’s position as being (in Vermes’ estimation) outlandish.
But this discussion is old. Ronald Knox gives his take on the subject in his 1913 book, Some Loose Stones. Scholars of Vermes’ bent have, for well over a century, claimed that their debunking readings of the New Testament get at the facts while those other scholars (and few and pitiful they are!), who are no less concerned with the historical method and yet who find that their investigations and discoveries support orthodoxy, are blinded by repressive traditions or tyrannical papal monarchs. John Allen strikes me as not having picked up on that fact in this interview.
For further reading, see Ambrosius’ review of Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazereth.
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
One of the great things about our time is that it really has become news that the pope is Catholic. I have to laugh a little at Vermes’ indignance when he finds that the pope is defending… traditional and Orthodox views! Shock and horror! Even when they fly in the face of certain CATHOLIC Biblical scholars!
The only thing I would say about your review, Iosephe, is that I’m not sure it’s fair to presume that Allen is himself so ignorant of the dynamic between the pope and the so-called contemporary Biblical scholars. He himself doesn’t say terribly much. Allen is a careful one; I wouldn’t say that I fully trust him to defend orthodox Catholic truth, and I don’t really know why he wanted to interview this Vermes guy in the first place when his views should have been fairly predictable as you say. Nonetheless, he may understand more than you give him credit for.
Yes, he may.
Then again, my impression from the line of questioning - “So did he succeed? Did he?” - was that he didn’t appreciate this point.
I think it’s a somewhat subtle point. We’re used to deferring to consensuses of all sorts, especially medical and scientific. I couldn’t say for sure, of course, but I imagine that the overwhelming weight of consensus is, in fact, with Vermes and not with a position like Benedict’s.
I’m also inclined to think that Biblical scholarship is a place where liberal Catholics feel especially entitled to strut their stuff. Since the demise of the bad old Pontifical Biblical Commission, as it existed under Pius X, a Catholic has been able to say pretty much whatever he wants about the Bible. In other words, I take Vermes as an ally of the sort of position that someone like Allen and his National Catholic Reporter crowd would endorse. Probably not all the way, but at least more along those lines than along Benedict’s lines.
It’s really a pretty good book (Ratzinger’s), from the perspective of traditional scholarship, not outstanding perhaps, but certainly offensive to the pieties of contemporary scholarship. Ambrosius and I have both read it. I recall that as far back as God and the World (a book length “conversation” between Peter Seewald and Joseph Ratzinger), Ratzinger was talking about the possiblity that John’s gospel was actually the oldest of all - he mentions this as a thesis, not which he accepts, but which can be reasonably supported, though the view is, needless to say, terribly unpopular.
The funny thing about biblical scholarship is that many of the modernists practicing it have such a narrow focus on the critical wavelength of their art that they are completely unaware of scholarship in other areas of expertise that quite inadvertently supports the traditional view.
A case in point: for well over a hundred years now, the idea that the traditions of the apostles were maintained in oral form for some period of time before some of them were written down is taken as sufficient to cast doubt on those writings (e.g., the Gospels). However, serious anthropological and sociological studies of oral transmission in “pre-literate” and “semi-literate” cultures (cultures where having a vast oral memory was highly valued, as in the Mediterranean in Christ’s time) are capable of passing on vast amounts of information with consistent accuracy over hundreds of years. The accuracy is far in excess of what transpires with the copying and reproduction of documents. To this day, in parts of Asia (even in Italy, with the reciters of Dante’s works) there are those whose sole living is to recite impossibly long epics. That’s not so amazing: what is amazing is that they are soon put out of business by their AUDIENCES if they forget a single thing—which means their audiences accurately remember these vast works, such as the Epic of Gesar (Tibetan) or the Koran, etc.
I actually have read Jesus of Nazareth, or at least a lot of it; it seems like I practically never finish a book these days unless it’s a novel. But yes, I also thought it was quite good. Not so much a single extended argument as a series of observations and reflections about various passages of the Gospels, but altogether quite good. And yes, it certainly is true that the “overwhelming weight of consensus” is against Ratzinger, at least if we were specifically polling Biblical scholars, so you may be right about Allen. But I guess the problems with contemporary Biblical scholarship seem so obvious to me that it’s hard to suppose that Allen could be unaware of them. And you know, a lot of the more famous consortia of Biblical scholars — the Jesus Seminar, for example — have been quite controversial, and obviously people like Bultmann and others that Ratzinger argues against in his book, have been seriously contested by orthodox scholars.
In other words, the point doesn’t seem that subtle to me. And it seems pretty obvious that a lot of the claims of contemporary Biblical scholars lead us pretty rapidly and directly into heresy. But you may be right that this doesn’t seem as obvious in certain circles. Allen’s so often praised for his fair-mindedness, but he has his own blind spots, and this might tap into one of them.