Géza Vermes

Géza Vermes was born in Makó, in Hungary, to a family of Jewish descent that had given up religious practice; all three were baptised as Catholics when he was six, a step he described as an attempt to escape the rising antisemitism of Europe — his mother and father were murdered in the Holocaust in 1944 all the same. Barred from Hungarian universities in 1942 because he was a Jew, he entered a Catholic seminary and became a priest after the war, refused by the Jesuits and the Dominicans on account of his Jewish ancestry and admitted instead into the Fathers of Notre-Dame de Sion; in Paris he studied under the Jewish scholar Georges Vajda, and with Paul Demann and Renée Bloch fought the antisemitic content of Catholic teaching, arguments the Second Vatican Council would later take up.

He left the priesthood in 1958, said of his baptism that he had never been anything but a Jew in a temporary outer garment, and in 1970 formally returned to Judaism as a member of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue of London. His doctorate of 1953 was the first thesis written on the Dead Sea Scrolls, his 1962 translation of them into English became the standard, and at Oxford he was the first Professor of Jewish Studies; his work on the Jewishness of the historical Jesus made him, by many accounts, the foremost Jesus scholar of his time.