Bending the Landscape: Original Gay and Lesbian Writing: Science Fiction

Amazon.com

This second volume of Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel's Bending the Landscape anthology series focuses on science fiction stories (the first book covered fantasy, and the third will cover horror). The editors asked contributors to "imagine a different landscape... some milieu that had not happened" and then address the theme of Alien or Other, with the Other being a lesbian or gay man. Since the writers include men and women, gay and straight, the results are fascinating and kaleidoscopic.

One of the best stories in this stellar bunch is Ellen Klages's "Time Gypsy," a "lesbian time-travel-romance-revenge story" about a scientist who discovers love in an unlikely way. L. Timmel Duchamp's "Dance at the Edge" is a heartbreaking story of visibility and strength, and Richard A. Bamberg looks at what it might be like to be the last gay person on Earth in "Love's Last Farewell."

Big name authors like Charles Sheffield, Nancy Kress, Stephen Baxter, and Elizabeth Vonarburg contribute stories as well. The science fiction volume, like all the Bending the Landscape anthologies, addresses universal themes of otherness, love, and loss. Great reading for the 21st century. --Adam Fisher

Book Description

Volume II of the award-winning collection of gay and lesbian short fiction exploring the horror genre.

On the heels of the phenomenal success and acclaim of Volume I (Science Fiction), Bending the Landscape: Horror brings together a tantalizing slew of truly "horrific" tales guaranteed to provoke, entertain and inspire fear. Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel have, once again, compiled an exciting array of never-before-published stories both from talented newcomers and award-winning genre veterans. In Kraig Blackwelder's Coyote Love, a man wakes up in a stranger's bed, not knowing how he got there. Terror ensues as the reader is shown just how far a person is willing to go to deny reality. In The WereSlut of Avenue A, Leslie What shows us that change is not always a good thing as we witness what may or may not be a physical transformation into something inhuman. These stories, written by writers both gay and straight, incite fear and spur thought. Contributors include Brian A. Hopkins, Holly Wade Matter, A.J. Potter, Carrie Richerson, Mark Tiedmann, Alexis Glynn Latner and more.

Customer Reviews:

Science Fiction Stories Imagine Best and Worst Futures for Gays & Lesbians.......2006-06-27

Gay-themed SF collections are nothing new, but they're usually conceived as gay literature first, science fiction second. Editors Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel, both known in the SF field, have reversed this equation with impressive results in BENDING THE LANDSCAPE: SCIENCE FICTION.

The most compelling stories in this collection--as SF and as gay literature--use the settings of science fiction as a lens through which to view current day gay and lesbian issues. TAles like "Sex, Guns and Baptists" by Keith Hartman and "Who Plays with Sin" by Don Bassingthwaite project a future with gay characters trying to get along in a world even more homophobic and controlled by conservative and fundamentalist forces than the present day. It's the kind of "if things go on like this" story that science fiction has always done so well.

Other standout stories use an alternate history approach to the past. "Time Gypsy" by Ellen Klages features a lesbian researcher traveling back to the repressive 1950s in an excellent story that combines time travel, romance, and revenge. Stephen Baxter's "Sun Drenched" asks what if a gay and straight astronaut were stranded together on the moon, back in the days of the Apollo program.

The best story in the collection, Kathleen O'Malley's "Silent Passion," combines the classic SF theme of interaction with alien species, with the classic gay lit theme of maintaining the integrity of relationships in the face of a hostile culture. The result is a deeply moving and suspenseful tale, and demonstrates the best that can result from such a themed collection.

Other stories demonstrate the problems of a topical approach. Too many stories reduce the gay and lesbian aspect to the inclusion of a queer character, where too often the character could have been heterosexual with no overall effect on the story.

Despite a few weaker stories, though, the collection as a whole is quite strong and well worth a read for both the science fiction and gay literature aspects.

A Welcome Surprise.......2003-07-14

I was prepared to be disappointed by this anthology, for so many sci-fi stories that deal with gays are not very imaginative, but there were only a half-dozen or so stories in this collection that missed the mark. Nancy Johnston's "The Rendez-Vous" deals with a woman who may or may not be the victim of nocturnal alien abductions. Kathleen O'Malley's "Silent Passion" shows us that even beings from another planet can teach us a thing or two about humanity. Charles Sheffield's "Brooks Too Broad for Leaping" is a surprisingly shocking view of what it would be like if the only place for gays and lesbians were the military. Elisabeth Vonarburg's "Stay Thy Flight" is the true gem here: a story almost incomprehensible in the beginning which goes on to depict a form of life we could never imagine, and how it is drawn to a human female. A thought-provoking anthology in the truest sense of the word.

Skillfully Subverting Genres.......2003-05-03

Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, is the first of a three-part series of "original gay and lesbian writing" edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel (not very coincidentally, a participant in Outworlders, a local Atlanta GLBTQ sci fi / fantasy fan group and the parent group to a book group I belong to.) After choosing Storm Constantine's The Sign for the Sacred as our group's first fantasy selection, we turned to Bending as a book that would cover science fiction but also appeal to a variety of tastes. Also playing into the selection was the fact that the book had been awarded a number of extremely prestigious awards and Stephen Pagel would possibly come to our meeting to discuss it (which he did!)

When I started on Bending, I really didn't quite know what to expect; most of my affection for science fiction comes not from books but from movies and television, so I really didn't know how much of it I would enjoy. I soon discovered that my wariness was unfounded, for not only did I enjoy the science fiction, but the designation "science fiction" didn't really cover what I was reading -- I found a lot of what I considered "fantasy" as well. I also discovered that Griffith and Pagel made some truly excellent story selections.

Bending features stories which, so Pagel told us himself, cover the full spectrum of science fiction -- everything from futuristic private eye stories to time travel escapades to stories of alien worlds to explorations of cyber consciousness and gender identity. Clearly, this was not a book simply thrown together or with the lowest common denominator in mind. Instead, it's a book in which writers of all sexual orientations explore situations that explore one of science fiction's enduring themes, "the Alien, the Not-Self, the Other," with the "other" a lesbian or gay man (interpreted, so the book's introduction admits, "liberally.")

There were a lot of stories in Bending that I loved and several which actually reminded me strongly of Storm's stories. For example, "The City in Morning" by Carrie Richardson reads like a chapter from a lost Storm Constantine novel. "On Vacation" is a subtly hilarious tale of aliens living on earth a la Men In Black. Far and away my favorite story, which I must have reread a dozen time the day I first read it, was the beautiful, elegant and sweetly heart-rending "Silent Passion" by Kathleen O'Malley. Set in A.C. Crispin's StarBridge universe, to which O'Malley has contributed two books), the story is one I summed up to a friend as featuring "giant gay, signing, alien crane-creatures" and their interaction with gay human couple, whose relationship turns a new corner when the narrator is finally able to move beyond the pain of human intolerance. It's a beautiful, life - and love-affirming story which I doubt I will ever forget and which I plan to lead me on to O'Malley's two StarBridge novels, which, so Pagel tells me, feature these same amazing crane-aliens.

Knowing there are two more Bending anthologies (fantasy and horror), I am sure I have many more great tales ahead of me.

a very enjoyable collection.......2003-03-29

There was only one story in here that I didn't like, though I don't remember the title. The rest of the stories were all accessible, easy to read, and very interesting. "Time Gypsy", about a scientist who travels back in time to the 1950's, was one of the best, along with "Dance at the Edge", which was a little more far-out, but with the same depth of concept and character. None of the stories in this anthology is lacking: they are all mature, and deal with their collective theme in a nuanced, enlightened manner. The first story, "Sex, Guns, and Baptists", and Shariann Lewitt's "A Real Girl" are also standouts.

Bonus: read Lewitt's bio in the end of the book. She always seems to have fun writing "About the Author" segments.

An eye-opening anthology........2001-06-19

A seemingly simple setup: combine two science fiction templates: an alien landscape - outer space, another planet, the fifties; and an Other - an alien, a foreigner, a renegade, a stranger in a strange land; now, the twist - the Other must be homosexual. How much can be written based on this premise? Volumes.

Start with the brilliant "Sex, Guns, and Baptists" by Keith Hartman, a wicked story of a world gone fundamentalist and a gay detective hired by a jealous wife to find out her husband's sexual orientation. Continue on in the same vein to Bassingthwaite's "Who Plays with Sin", a cyberpunk yarn as good as if not better than anything Gibson has ever written. Plunge into Klages' "Time Gypsy" and discover that the mindset of the fifties is just as alien as that of the previous stories. Examine the adage of "looks don't matter" in Wendy Rathbone's masterful "The Beautiful People." Nancy Kress contributes a thought-provoking tale of survival - at the cost of total isolation, in her "State of Nature." The cost that the artificial intelligence in Shariann Lewitt's (her "Rebel Sutra" is at the top of my reading list as I write this) "A Real Girl" must pay for her humanity is mind-boggling. The viewpoint character in Bamberg's "Love's Last Farewell" has already paid the ultimate price - he is the last gay man on Earth. Tiedemann's "Surfaces" dissects the popular tendency to partition humans into characteristics - and assign blame and praise to them instead of the person underneath. Steele's "The Flying Triangle" and Sperry's "On Vacation" take a more relaxed approach and depict a more accepting - or at least redeemable - humanity.

Out of the twenty-one stories in this volume, more than half deliver much more than promised, and none are really disappointing. In a few cases the authors choke on a message that is too large and fail to communicate it well, but these are rare. Overall, the original subject matter lends a new degree of richness, of credence, of power to the well-worn genre. Each character is so much more an expression of the author's mind, better fleshed-out and rounded because of the innovative undertones. An excellent, eye-opening anthology.

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Bending the Landscape : Original Gay and Lesbian Writing: Science Fiction

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Bending the Landscape Science Fiction Original Gay and Lesbian Writing Volume 1 : Science Fiction
Nicola and Pagel, Stephen. Griffith
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Bending the Landscape: Original Gay and Lesbian Writing - Science Fiction
Nicola; Pagel, Stephen: Editors Griffith
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BENDING THE LANDSCAPE: SCIENCE FICTION. Original Gay and Lesbian Writing
Nicola & Stephen Pagel (editor). Griffith
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Amazon.com

The Changing Faces of Jesus is a reflection on the ways that translations of Scripture have transformed believers' understandings of Jesus. Author Geza Vermes, a biblical scholar perhaps best known for his English translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, reviews the varying portraits of Jesus in Scripture, particularly focusing on the letters of Paul and the Gospel of John. The author contends that, "by the end of the first century Christianity had lost sight of the real Jesus and of the original meaning of his message." The real Jesus, a "religious man with an irresistible charismatic charm," was replaced by "Jesus the Christ, the transcendent object of the Christian religion." Vermes avoids the polemic tone often adopted by scholars who make similar arguments. Here is an example of the modest style in which this author makes his momentous claims:

As a historian I consider Jesus, the primitive church and the New Testament as part and parcel of first-century Judaism and seek to read them as such rather than through the eyes of a theologian who may often be conditioned, and subconsciously influenced, by two millennia of Christian belief and church directives.

This tone will help readers--even those predisposed to disagree with Vermes--to understand his argument that religious belief has skewed understanding of the central figure of the Christian religion. --Michael Joseph Gross

Book Description

A world-renowned scholar explores the New Testament writings about Jesus that have defined two millennia of Christian belief, worship, and speculation.

Geza Vermes is internationally recognized for his pioneering biblical scholarship as well as for his definitive English-language translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now, in his latest work, he takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the New Testament to reveal the true historical figure of Jesus hidden beneath the oldest Gospels.

How was this Palestinian charismatic transformed by later generations into the heavenly savior elaborated by the Christian Church? Vermes acts as a sensitive, learned, and thought-provoking guide. His brilliant account presents the fruit of both a lifetime's scholarship and a lifelong quest to understand a solitary giant among Jewish prophets.

Customer Reviews:

Vermes fails in methodology, exegesis.......2007-06-14

The Changing Faces of Jesus, partly an update of Jesus the Jew, goes into all the New Testament writings, whereas Jesus the Jew concentrated on the Synoptics, Matthew, Mark and Luke. The Changing Faces of Jesus is a sad book, and often a bad (because unscholarly) book. Vermes many times abandons scholarship to make belittling comments. For example (1) on p. 215, discussing the twelve-year-old Jesus debating with the Temple teachers `in his Father's house', where Luke is presenting Jesus as the Son of God, His Father, in a quite unique way, Vermes sees no more than a family story such as every Jewish family tells about its precocious son. (2) When Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey (in the gospel writers' view showing Jesus as fulfilling Zechariah's messianic prophecy), Vermes' understanding is (in Jesus the Jew) - that was the least tiring way. (3) The crucial issue in the split between Christians and Jews was the question of the Messiah. This is reflected in chapter 9 of St John's gospel, where the man who accepts Jesus as Messiah is `put out of the synagogue'. Vermes says (page 30, n.1) that all that that means, as any good `contentious' Jew will understand, is - if you don't like your local synagogue you just go down the road to the next one. (4) Again, speaking of the commandment to love one another, but missing the point of the special Johannine resonances (`as I have loved you'), Vermes says (page 44): "John's Gentile Christians required a course for primary school pupils in which the simplest details had to be spelt out". (5) Vermes tells us that if he were Jesus, things wouldn't have turned out as they did; he would have written his own story, instead of leaving it to his followers, and so on (e.g. pp. 264,269,270). He ends (p. 270) by having Jesus say, "You've been told to expect everything from me. I say, you must save yourselves". This is totally false to the NT, and no less so to the Old Testament. Vermes calls his whole Epilogue (pp 269,270) a Dream. It is simply a triviliazed childish fantasy. The above issues hardly need scholarly refutation. As a serious New Testament scholar, I object to this parody of scholarship.

Even when he attempts serious exegesis, Vermes' interpretation of the New Testament is continually at fault. On page 118, he dismisses the title of `Servant' given to Jesus as being of no significance. Yet throughout the NT the Servant Songs of Isaiah and many other Isaianic themes are key sources from OT times for the Person and role of Jesus. [A strong current of Jewish writing is beginning to recognize this, basing itself on the most recent Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship. Thus Israel Knohl writes in The Messiah Before Jesus, Univ. of California Press, pb, 2002, p 16: "Thus, the messianic interpretation of Isaiah 53 was not ['not' is in italics in the original] discovered in the Christian Church. ... we should consider the possibility that the depiction of Jesus as a combination of the 'son of man' and the 'suffering servant' was not a later invention of the Church. Perhaps the historical Jesus really did see himself in this way ... ". See my review of Knohl's book.] Again, on p. 78 Vermes repeats arguments, against the scholarly consensus, that the hymn in Philippians 2.6-11, explicitly attributing to Jesus the text which Isaiah 45.23 addresses to Yahweh, must be a late insertion into Paul's letter. On every count this is unlikely. In Philippians itself the idea occurs again, and it is also equally strongly suggested in the text of Romans 10.9 (probably another pre-Pauline confession): "if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord (kyrios) ... you will be saved". Will we be saved by believing merely that Jesus is greater than Caesar? Must not `kyrios' here, applied to Jesus, mean `Yahweh'? See also, in the same sense, Romans 10.13, 1 Cor 12.3, Col 2.6, etc.

Vermes simply will not accept that to understand the person and the role of Jesus one has to go back to the typology, the prophecies and the history of the Old Testament (including the Apocrypha), as every New Testament author does, and not forward for between two hundred and six hundred years after the life of Christ to the rabbinic teachings which are conditioned by their explicit rejection of the New Testament witness to Jesus as Son of God, Messiah, God. His references back to the Old Testament in Jesus the Jew are less numerous and less significant than his forward references to this much later rabbinic literature. The Changing Faces has no index of biblical references. Vermes' relative neglect of the OT, from which the NT Jesus springs, is indefensible. For some idea of the massive OT sourcing of the Jesus story, see the Index of `Loci Citati vel Allegati' [textual quotations, references, and influences from the Old Testament used in the NT] in Nestle-Aland's Novum Testamentum Graece, which can be expanded indefinitely.

It is false methodology to depend primarily on the thinking of the rabbinic writers (for all that they may contribute occasional useful information) as the source of the authentic portrait of Christ, in preference to the Christian NT authors, Jewish to a man (with the possible exception of Luke), believers in the OT as their only scripture, familiar with the world of ideas found in the Dead Sea Scrolls (see Fr Joseph Fitzmyer's The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian Origins, Eerdmans, 2000), contemporaries or first or second generation successors to the immediate hearers and followers of Jesus.

Yet again: Vermes's comparison between Jesus and the Jewish holy men Honi and Hanina ben Dosa simply fails. They may match a St Francis of Assisi, but emphatically not Francis's Master, the Lord Jesus Christ. I quote only one comparison. Vermes (p. 252) sees no difference between the run-of-the-mill `bat qol' to "Hanina `my son'" and the `bat qol's to Jesus at his Baptism and Transfiguration where the heavenly messages are: "You are my Son, the Beloved, the Only-Begotten; with you I am well pleased ... This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him" (Mark 1.11; 9.7, NRSV). These recall Isaiah 42.1, Ps 2.2, Genesis 22.2 (the Aqedah), the Exodus appearances to Moses, Deut 18.15. Is this said to Honi or Hanina? Did they bring in the Kingdom of God? Were they acclaimed as Messiah? Did they rise from the dead? Were they acclaimed as God?

Vermes denies, in the face of the evidence, all of these Christian claims. He is forced to believe this instead: that Jesus, bloodied from the scourging, crowned with thorns, crucified as a deluded messiah/king, dead, "[Jesus] yet rose in the hearts of his disciples who had loved him and felt he was near" (quoting Winter, pp. 174,175). This is incredible and impossible invention on the part of Winter/Vermes by which they seek to explain away the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ and the disciples' devotion to preaching unto their deaths the truth of this resurrection. Winter/Vermes are simply lamentable.

The OT foreshadowings are fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and not in any other Jewish holy man (see the despairing and nihilistic book by Dan Cohn-Sherbok, The Jewish Messiah, T & T Clark, 1997). Judaism has only ever produced one candidate as Messiah, Son of God, God-with-us - Jesus Christ. Both methodologically and exegetically, the Christian position stands.

[This Review has figured on the Amazon UK website since 4 January 2007]

The Mangled Face of Jesus.......2006-05-11

Publisher's Weekly complains that "The book sometimes engages in speculative reasoning". "Constantly" is more like it. One has to realize when one goes into this book that Vermes has a giant theological ax to grind. Having converted from Catholicism to Judaism Vermes rejects any concept of the divinity of Christ and as a result takes his ax to the corpus of the NT, chopping out the parts that don't agree with his theological view and leaving a meager shred he considers the "true Jesus". The entire book can be summarized as follows: a) Vermes rejects any concept of the divinity of Christ b) Vermes finds many references to it in the NT c) Vermes hacks out all those references as "not fitting the original theology" d) Viola! The "real Jesus".

Doesn't the book of John clearly equate Christ with God? Whack! Off it goes. What about the Pauline epistles? Whack! Off they go but a handful. Doesn't Philipians, one of the few he accepts, equate Christ with God in chapter 2: 6-11? Chop, off goes that part. What justification is there to remove it? "Because it makes more sense" that way. (p. 86)

This wouldn't be so bad if Vermes were at least honest up front about his theological viewpoint and not so dishonest along the way. The book abounds with falsehoods and contradictions and Vermes makes some astoundingly ignorant statements at times.

He questions whether Paul was really the Pharisee he is portrayed to have been since, after all, "His principles as a Pharisee cannot have been held very profoundly, bearing in mind how easily... he could allow his Gentile followers (and himself) dispensation from observance of Jewish dietary rules and other Mosaic ritual precepts." Let's see, didn't Paul have some kind of conversion experience somewhere that radically changed his thinking?

Referring to the phrase "Son of God", Vermes categorically declares "No biblical or postbiblical Jewish writer ever depicted a human being literally as divine." (p 37) This is contradicted by II Samuel 7:14, which Vermes himself quotes earlier, as well as Psalm 2:7, 45:6 and Isaiah 9:6 all of which Vermes fails to mention.

On p 20 Vermes asserts " the most dismaying feature of the Fourth Gospel is its determined claim that the Jews were profoundly and universally inimical to Jesus." Anyone familiar with John knows that is patently untrue. Only 21 pages later Vermes himself writes "...John paints a Jesus who openly admits that he is the Messiah and is recognized as such by practically the whole of Palestinian Jewry."

I could go on and on and I still haven't finished the book.

Arrogance too is no small vice here. Vermes sneeringly castigates the supposed ignorance of the fourth gospel's target audience; "John's Gentile Christians required a course for primary school pupils in which the simplest details had to be spelled out." (p 49) Despite it being 2000 years later, Vermes is convinced he knows the gospel better than the apostle Paul, who he finds guilty of "twisting and sometimes undoing the genuine messsage of Jesus." (Meanwhile Vermes accuses Paul of "recurrent illogicality" p 76)

Of course, Vermes didn't invent this kind of arrogance -it's an unfortunate part of the European intellectual tradition, which is convinced it sees what happened thousands of years ago so much more clearly than did those poor benighted souls who, like Paul and the author of John, actually lived at the time in question. If that's your tradition, you may like this book. If not, and if you have any real familiarity with the NT, prepare to be appalled.

Who Was The Real Jesus?.......2006-02-13

Geza Vermes is a noted authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient works in Aramaic, and a controversial but respected authority on the life and religion of Jesus. In this short but insightful essay, he summarizes years of his own scholarship and attempts to pierce through the successive layers of translation, gloss and commentary in order to portray the true face of Jesus.

The Scriptures superimpose several portraits of Jesus on one another. The Fourth Gospel of John, written three generations after the facts, differs significantly from the Synoptic Gospels, while Luke and Matthew base their narrative on an early version of Mark (the existence of another common source, or Q as in Quelle, the German word for "source", is still a hotly debated topic). Starting with John's mystical vision of the divine Christ, and with Paul's mystery drama of salvation (the word "myth" is used several times in reference to Pauline Christology), the author introduces the figure of Jesus as he was perceived by the early heirs of his creed, by his contemporaries, and ultimately by himself.

As an entry point in each book of the New Testament, Vermes starts by surveying the titles ascribed to Jesus while replacing these titles in Jewish history and theology. In the Gospels, Jesus has many titles besides "Christ" or "Messiah": Prophet, Lord, Son of Man, Son of God, Son of David, King of the Jews and Emmanuel. Together Christians understand these titles as attesting to Jesus' divinity. Vermes argues that when used in other Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the time, these titles have other meanings, and therefore that they must have other meanings when used in the Gospels as well.

For instance he shows that the Hebrew Bible and post-biblical literature apply the title "son of God" first to every Jew, and later to pious Jews in general and to specially chosen individuals such as kings, prophets, holy men, and the Messiah. He then suggests that the identification of "son of God" with divinity is pagan in origin and was added after Christianity broke with Judaism:

"These concepts, coupled with the picture of children born of the union of Olympian gods and earthly women, known from classical mythology but divested of their pagan connotations, may have subconsciously played a part in the later Christian formulation of the divine sonship of Jesus within the thought world of Greek civilization."

At this point, some Christians will remember 2 John 7: "Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist." Others, while not necessarily convinced by the argument, will appreciate the vast scholarship that Vermes brings to the subject and will use his perspective to further their knowledge of Jesus.

Intensely polemical.......2005-12-17

I confess I am baffled by some of the reviews here. The one thing this book is, is polemical. It is intensely polemical. Just two examples. He characterizes part of the introduction to the book of John as a "the forces of light defeat the (Jewish) forces of darkness." Read John 1 yourself; there is no mention of Jews, nor any suggestion that the "forces of darkness" are Jewish. And read his final short "dream" chapter if you are in any doubt. It is a Jewish apologetic through and through.

His examples of Hasids have also been sharply criticized by other scholars, and he relies on very late (ie medieval)sources for some of them. Some of his logic is tortured. Still there is lots of interesting stuff here. 4 stars for the content, 2 stars for the tendentiousness and prose.

A marvel of insightful scholarship and a delight to read.......2005-07-13

Most books about the historical Jesus fall into one of four categories. First, pious works of small persuasiveness which merely rehash dogma heard interminably since childhood. Second, romantic and preposterous tales of Jesus running off to the Cote d'Azur with Mary Magdalene, or alternatively, to the Mysterious East to study at the feet of various yogis, swamis, sadhus, pandits, fakirs, bonzes, and lamas. Third, anachronistic depictions of Jesus as a first century version of Ernesto "Che" Guevara leading a Judean liberation movement and murdered by the Fascist Roman power structure for his pains. Fourth and last, judicious and careful works of scrupulous scholarship by historians acknowledged as leading lights in their field by peers (e.g., E. P. Sanders, Paula Fredrikson), even those peers who may have scholarly disagreements with the author. This book belongs to the forth category.

Professor Vermes has devoted over half a century to the study of first-century Palestine and shares some of the results of his investigations in this book. It is entirely devoid of pedantry and alive with bracing insights into the world Jesus lived and died in. Some reviewers here have made much of what they take to be insufficient documentation, but citations are easily found in Professor Vermes' earlier works that this book draws upon. A history written for non-specialists need not be excessively freighted with notes and other scholarly apparatus.

Professor Vermes' method is to carefully dig away the layers of theological encrustation that formed over the narrative of Jesus' words and actions in the New Testament by a sort of painstaking literary archaeological dig. This is aided by careful study of other remaining records of the period including those by classical historians such as Flavius Josephus and Tacitus. Where Professor Vermes really shines is in his careful attention to and interpretation of writings by Jewish contemporaries of Jesus, some of which (e.g., the Dead Sea scrolls) have only come to light in modern times. Until relatively recently, these sources have been mostly ignored. Even when they have been studied, it has often been more for the purpose of extracting facile glosses then of providing illumination. The author draws a convincing portrait of first-century Palestine as a land febrile with apocalyptic and eschatological expectation. Prophets and wonder-workers of every description were active, and Jesus was fully a part of the matrix of first-century Judaism. Despite longstanding belief that it was envy and malice, first from the Pharisees and Temple priests, then from the Jewish crowds that caused the execution of Jesus; Professor Vermes concludes that apprehension for the safety of the crowds in Jerusalem during Passover caused the priests and officials to arrest Jesus and hand him over to the Romans. He was then put to death in the barbarous manner prescribed by Roman law and custom for seditionists and revolutionaries. His followers were left untouched however-a puzzling omission the Romans would scarcely have made had they thought Jesus a genuine revolutionary and his followers a real threat (or even potential threat) to their rule. When the Romans put down the slave rebellion led by Sparticus, the roads leading out of Rome were lined on either side with thousands of crucified rebels for miles around. All sources (including Roman ones) agree that Pontius Pilate was a brutal man, even by Roman standards. (He eventually would be removed from office because of his cruelty by the Emperor Tiberius, whose own harshness was legend.) He would not have hesitated the slightest in condemning a wholly innocent man to die out-of-hand. The idea that he meekly acceding to the wishes of a Jewish mob baying for Jesus' blood as attributed by the gospels is utterly fantastic by all evidence, including the rest of the gospels themselves. The disturbance provoked in the Temple precincts by Jesus among the moneychangers and merchants in the days prior to the Passover was sufficient to seal his tragic fate. He might have only been whipped and released with a warning--as was done to others who had disturbed the peace--had things happened at a less tense moment.

As everyone knows, in the decades after the execution of Jesus, the early Christian movement spread throughout the Roman world to Gentiles as well as Jews. Tragically as things would turn out, it began to change form as it became ever more removed in time and space from Jesus' lifetime in Galilee and Judea. With repeated warfare and destruction in Palestine during the reigns of the Emperors Vespasian and Hadrian, the organized Jewish community was decimated and scattered, and could not serve as a check on the process of transformation. The virile Jesus, concrete in word and deed, became the pallid, spectral Christ of Faith; enthroned in heaven and silent in his eternal, sacred calm while his earthly viceroys spoke and ruled for him. A non-hierarchical movement that began in the Galilean countryside among independent tradesmen, small farmers, and fisherman, all of them Jews, became centered upon the abject and deracinated Gentile masses of Roman cities, most descended from slaves with the mark of servility still upon them. They were lorded over by a celestial bureaucracy that emulated the Empire at a time when it had become an absolute despotism, and the rights of Roman citizens had virtually disappeared. Most tragic of all, the fissure that opened between Gentile Christians and Jews (including Jewish followers of Jesus) would grow into a chasm of mutual enmity and suspicion, manifestations of which would range from slurs in the writings of Church fathers such as Saint John Chrysostom and reformers such as Martin Luther, to murder at the hands of medieval European peasants and their twentieth century descendants who served as camp guards, trusties, auxiliary police, German and foreign SS troops, and indifferent bystanders.

This book is rendered in clear, graceful, and gracious prose that displays the author's goodwill on nearly every page. His comments are touched with a gentle irony here and there that is certain to discomfit a certain type of Christian all the more for being so marvelously devoid of rancor or bitterness. This in spite of the profoundly tragic loss of Professor Vermes' family during the Holocaust. By way of comparison, the comments on display in negative reviews here tell all that we need to know about the writers' intellect, and rather more than cared to know about their character. (Accusations of poisoning wells and of draining the blood of Christian children to make matzos are the only things missing from these reviews.)

Ultimately, the Jesus we meet in these pages is the Jesus we always knew; the Galilean who preferred the rough company of the poor and "sinners" to anyone else, and who gave them the encouragement and strength they needed to endure and reform their hard lives. The man who was not concerned with mere perfectionism, but who simply sought to do the will of "our Father in Heaven", and who would have been astonished at any person or group claiming in his name to have surpassed or perfected the Law. The idea of founding a church appears to have been the furthest thing from his mind. When we glimpse him through the mists of time and the smoke of myth, we do not see the awe-inspiring figure crowned with golden riza and riding on the clouds of glory; still less do we see the scowling, terrifying Christ Pantocrator, i.e., Judge of the Universe. Thanks to decades of careful, patient work by Professor Vermes and other scholars, we see the man of gentle visage and steel-eyed determination who feared no one but God, and of whom none should be afraid. Those who claim to follow him today for the most part divide between the many who inwardly cringe with fear while claiming to love him, and the few who use this fear as a stick to beat the recalcitrant into line.

This work should be read by all who do not rest content with received notions from self-interested authority, but who wish to discover the truths of history and life.

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THE CHANGING FACES OF JESUS
Vermes Geza
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OJ1D12

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Changing Faces of Jesus
Geza Vermes
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OJANKE

THE CHANGING FACES OF JESUS ADVANCE UNCORRECTED PROOFS

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THE CHANGING FACES OF JESUS ADVANCE UNCORRECTED PROOFS
Geza Vermes
Manufacturer: Viking
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ASIN: B000GSKU7Y

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