23 Facts About Geza Vermes

Geza Vermes, was a British academic, Biblical scholar, and Judaist of Hungarian Jewish descent—one who served as a Catholic priest in his youth—and scholar specialized in the field of the history of religion, particularly ancient Judaism and early Christianity.

Geza Vermes is best known for his complete translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls into English; his research focused on the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Ancient Hebrew writings in Aramaic such as the Targumim, and on the life and religion of Jesus.

Geza Vermes' written work on Jesus focuses principally on the Jewishness of the historical Jesus, as seen in the broader context of the narrative scope of Jewish history and theology, while questioning and challenging the basis of the Christian doctrine on Jesus.

Geza Vermes was born in Mako, Kingdom of Hungary, in 1924 to a family of Hungarian Jewish descent: Terezia Riesz, a schoolteacher, and Erno Geza Vermes, a liberal journalist.

The Geza Vermes family was of Jewish background but had given up religious practice by the mid-19th century.

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Geza Vermes was accepted into the Order of the Fathers of Notre-Dame de Sion, a French-Belgian order which prayed for the Jews.

Geza Vermes studied then at the College St Albert and the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, where he specialized in Oriental history, civilizations and languages.

In 1953, Geza Vermes obtained a Doctorate of Theology with the first dissertation written on the Dead Sea Scrolls and its historical framework.

Also in Paris, Geza Vermes befriended and worked with Paul Demann, a scholar, like him, of Hungarian Jewish origins.

Geza Vermes was married and the mother of two children, but her marriage was in the process of ending.

In 1958, after her divorce, and after Geza Vermes left the priesthood, they married, remaining together and often collaborating on work, until her death in 1993.

Geza Vermes renounced Christianity and embraced his Jewish identity, although not religious observance.

Geza Vermes took up a teaching post at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Geza Vermes was one of the first scholars to examine the Dead Sea Scrolls after their discovery in 1947, and is the author of the standard translation into English of the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Dead Sea Scrolls in English.

Geza Vermes is one of the leading scholars in the field of the study of the historical Jesus and together with Fergus Millar and Martin Goodman, Vermes was responsible for substantially revising Emil Schurer's three-volume work, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, His An Introduction to the Complete Dead Sea Scrolls, revised edition, is a study of the collection at Qumran.

Geza Vermes had edited the Journal of Jewish Studies from 1971 to his death, and from 1991 he had been director of the Oxford Forum for Qumran Research at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

Geza Vermes inspired the creation of the British Association for Jewish Studies in 1975 and of the European Association for Jewish Studies in 1981 and acted as founding president for both.

Geza Vermes was awarded the Wilhelm Bacher Memorial Medal by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Memorial Medal of the city of Mako, his place of birth and the keys of the cities of Monroe LA and Natchez MS.

Geza Vermes received a vote of congratulation from the US House of Representatives, proposed by the Representative of Louisiana on 17 September 2009.

Geza Vermes was a prominent scholar in the contemporary field of historical Jesus research.

Geza Vermes described Jesus as a 1st-century Jewish holy man, a commonplace view in academia but novel to the public when Geza Vermes began publishing.

Geza Vermes suggests that, properly understood, the historical Jesus is a figure that Jews should find familiar and attractive.

Geza Vermes expounded this theme in the controversial television miniseries, Jesus: The Evidence.