Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 ADExcerpt on Vermes, Christian Beginnings:
By Peter Brown
Princeton University Press, 806pp, £27.95
Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea AD 30-325
By Geza Vermes
Allen Lane, 288pp, £25/ebook £14.99
Vermes states that his book, his twelfth on the subject (beginning with Jesus the Jew of 1973), is "an attempt to sketch the historical continuity between Jesus portrayed in his Galilean charismatic setting and the first ecumenical council held at Nicaea in AD 325, which solemnly proclaimed his divinity as a dogma of Christianity." It is thus an account of the slow but steady transformation of "Jesus the Jew" to "the Christ deified at the Council of Nicaea"; that is, from an "itinerant spiritual healer, exorcist and preacher", a type well known and well documented in the Palestine of his day, to a divine figure, the second person of the Trinity, and in the Greek formulation of the Council — amid uproarious controversy — as homoousios or "of one substance with the Father."