comments here<\/a> on Professor Geza Vermes\u2019 patronising review of the Pope\u2019s book on Jesus. Vermes is a Jew who was saved from the concentration camps by a Catholic family as a boy. He converted and was ordained a priest. Eventually he left the priesthood and the Catholic faith. Since then he\u2019s made a career writing books saying that Jesus was just another fanatical Jewish itinerant preacher, and all that \u2018incarnate God\u2019 stuff was later interpretation and interpolation by the Christian Church that had been heavily influenced by Greek thought.<\/p>\nWhy do people take these guys so seriously? Vermes\u2019 scholarship is shoddy. I reviewed one of his books for Amazon some time ago, and was shocked at how much he begged the questions, built great theories on tenuous suppositions and whenever the text contradicted his theory he simply said, \u2018that must be a later interpolation.\u2019 Why? Because Dr Vermes says so. His assertions were not backed up with solid evidence. Every Biblical scholar I\u2019ve spoken to about Vermes\u2019 work is embarrassed by it. Still he churns out his popular \u2018scholarship\u2019 for an audience that wants to disbelieve the Christian gospel. In my opinion his \u2018scholarship\u2019 is only one step up from the DaVinci code.<\/p>\n
Modernistic New Testament scholarship is a house of cards. Sneeze and it all falls down.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the real scoop: if students applied the same critical tools and critical mindset to the work of the Biblical scholars as they are expected to apply to the Scriptures we\u2019d get some really interesting results. As it is, we are supposed to doubt every word of Scripture because it was all written from a biased point of view, but we\u2019re supposed to accept every word of the scholars because it must be objective, scientific and \u2018scholarly\u2019. I\u2019m not buying it. Geza Vermes (and others of his ilk) are as biased as can be, and any first year theology student should be able to see it.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Carl Olson comments here on Professor Geza Vermes\u2019 patronising review of the Pope\u2019s book on Jesus. Vermes is a Jew who was saved from the concentration camps by a Catholic family as a boy. He converted and was ordained a priest. Eventually he left the priesthood and the Catholic faith. Since then he\u2019s made a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":557,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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