Geza Vermes, renowned Jesus scholar, dies at 88

Geza Vermes, a translator of the Dead Sea Scrolls and renowned for books exploring the Jewish background of Jesus, has died at 88.
He died on Wednesday, David Ariel, president of the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, said today.
Vermes had an early interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a cache of documents written between 200 BC and AD 200 which were discovered in caves at Qumran, near Jericho, between 1947 and 1956. Vermes published the first English translation of the scrolls in 1962.
The scrolls gave an insight to Jewish practices and thought at the time Jesus was preaching, and they informed a series of books by Vermes on the historical Jesus.

The first, "Jesus the Jew," was published in 1973, followed by "The Authentic Gospel of Jesus" (2003), a commentary on all of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.
"Jesus expired on a Roman cross and was buried," Vermes wrote in the latter volume. "But his disciples saw him in repeated visions, which persuaded them that he had been raised from the dead before ascending to heaven."

His last book, "Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea, AD 30-325," published last year, was Vermes' account of the development of Christian doctrine up to the formulation of the Nicene Creed.

In a review of the book, Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, praised Vermes as "the unchallenged doyen of scholarship in the English-speaking world on the Jewish literature of the age of Jesus, especially the Dead Sea Scrolls." However, Williams said the book gave no answers on why Jesus became an object of worship, revered by Christians as God.
Other books included "The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective" (1977); "Jesus and the World of Judaism (1983); "The Religion of Jesus the Jew" (1993); and volumes on key moments in Jesus life including his birth, trial and the resurrection.