Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Géza Vermes" in English language version.
The historical Jesus can be retrieved only within the context of first-century Galilean Judaism. The Gospel image must therefore be inserted into the historical canvas of Palestine in the first century CE, with the help of the works of Flavius Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls and early rabbinic literature. Against this background, what kind of picture of Jesus emerges from the Gospels? That of a rural holy man, initially a follower of the movement of repentance launched by another holy man, John the Baptist. In the hamlets and villages of Lower Galilee and the lakeside, Jesus set out to preach the coming of the Kingdom of God within the lifetime of his generation and outlined the religious duties his simple listeners were to perform to prepare themselves for the great event. [...] The reliability of Josephus's notice about Jesus was rejected by many in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it has been judged partly genuine and partly falsified by the majority of more recent critics. The Jesus portrait of Josephus, drawn by an uninvolved witness, stands halfway between the fully sympathetic picture of early Christianity and the wholly antipathetic image of the magician of Talmudic and post-Talmudic Jewish literature.
Geza Vermes, Hungarian-born British religious scholar (born June 22, 1924, Mako, Hung.—died May 8, 2013, Oxford, Oxfordshire, Eng.), was a leading interpreter of the "historical Jesus" as a Jewish holy man and of the Dead Sea Scrolls; Vermes's volume The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (1962) was generally considered one of the finest translations of those ancient manuscripts.
