Talk on "The Quest for the Historical Vermes" by Alex Faludy

Join us for a talk on the Biblical scholar Géza Vermes with Alex Faludy.

Géza Vermes FBA (1924-2013) was an Anglo-Hungarian scholar and public intellectual of immense distinction. Vermes’s best-selling translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls into English made him a household name in the 1960s. His interpretive work on their meaning and significance won him appointment as the first ever Professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford. Vermes’s Jesus the Jew (1973) transformed public discourse around the identity of Christianity’s inspirer.

Vermes’s life was dramatic - with a narrow escape from the Hungarian Holocaust in 1944. After emigration from Hungary, despite a considerable public presence, he somehow managed to remain ‘elusive’ in personality and paradoxical in belief. This talk, a decade after his death, aims to reflect on his importance and to probe some of the puzzles of his character and biography.

Alex Faludy is an Anglo-Hungarian freelance journalist who is also an ordained Church of England priest.

This talk is free to attend and open to the public.

For more information, please contact Rowland Wymer.