Faith and Religion
Geza Vermes talks to Diarmaid MacCulloch
Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea, AD 30-325
11:00am | Thursday 13 September 2012Tickets: | Duration: | Venue: |
£N/A | 1 Hour | St Mary Magdalene Church |
This was an Oxford Literary Festival 2012 Event.
Click here for this year's Events and Information
Prof Geza Vermes has been described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘the greatest Jesus scholar of his generation’. Here he talks about his new book to renowned historian Prof Diarmaid MacCulloch, himself author of A History of Christianity and presenter of a recent BBC2 series of the same name.
In Christian Beginnings, Vermes re-examines all the surviving texts to show the evolution of Jesus from Jewish prophet to His place at the heart of a new religion. He explains how Jesus’ teachings were spread by Paul and John and by their successors and how an anti-conformist Jewish sub-sect rose to become the official state religion of the Roman Empire. Vermes gets beyond the myths and legends to uncover the true figure of Jesus and the birth of Christianity.
Vermes was born in Hungary in 1924. He was the first Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford and is one of the world’s greatest experts on early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls. MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at St Cross College, Oxford. His A History of Christianity won the $75,000 McGill University’s Cundill Prize, the largest history book prize in the world.