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(soon to be Wolfson) <strong>College</strong>, and he remained a devoted member of the <strong>College</strong><br />
for the rest of his life. He was one of the last remaining Iffley Fellows who had<br />
witnessed the creation of Wolfson from the beginning.<br />
In his new post, he soon became widely known for a series of studies on Jesus<br />
within his Jewish environment, particularly Jesus the Jew, first published in 1973.<br />
The depiction of Jesus as an individualistic holy man who operated at a tangent<br />
to the religious currents of the Judaism of his day was further clarified by in a<br />
series of later studies. Apart from his University duties as Chairman of the Faculty<br />
Board of Oriental Studies and as a Governor of the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate<br />
Hebrew Studies (now renamed the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies),<br />
he devoted much energy to his role as editor of the Journal of Jewish Studies,<br />
establishing the international reputation of the Journal as a forum for scholarly<br />
discussion of Jewish history and literature, particularly of late antiquity. Not least<br />
among the achievements of his time in post in Oxford was the extensive revision, in<br />
collaboration with a small group of colleagues, of Emil Schürer, History of the Jewish<br />
People in the Age of Jesus Christ.<br />
Vermes was among the first in a humanities faculty in Oxford to seek to attract<br />
graduate students by setting up taught Masters courses in Jewish Studies in the<br />
Graeco-Roman period, and he attracted and inspired many doctoral students who<br />
went on to academic careers in many parts of the world.<br />
His output was hardly diminished after retirement from his university post in 1991.<br />
A series of studies sought to clarify his views on the significance of Jesus within<br />
Judaism. He produced an edition of the fragments of the Community Rule from<br />
Cave 4, in collaboration with Philip Alexander, with exemplary speed and accuracy.<br />
Among his many later publications were a series of studies of central elements of<br />
the Jesus story (on the nativity, passion, and resurrection), and, most recently, a<br />
history of Christianity from its origins to the fourth century.<br />
Vermes was awarded a DLitt by Oxford in 1988 and was appointed to a personal<br />
chair in Jewish Studies in 1989. In 1985 he was elected a Fellow of the British<br />
Academy and in 2001 he was elected to the European Academy of Arts, Sciences<br />
and Humanities. He received honorary degrees from Durham, Edinburgh, Sheffield,<br />
and the Central European University of Budapest, and in 2009 he was honoured<br />
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