The T & T Clark Blog

The True Herod 2 - Herod Before He Was King

The second installment of the True Herod blog posts features an extract from Chapter 5: 'Herod Prior to his Appointment as King (73/2-40 BCE).' Vermes provides some fascinating detail about the character of Herod in terms of ancestry and ethnicity, with illustrations of coins from Herod's time. Note that, unlike his more self-promoting descendents, they do not feature his image, but rather 'innocuous decorative motifs'.

Enjoy the extract. To read on, you can buy the book 22nd May 2014 from here: http://bit.ly/1nqNp6i

The True Herod I

Geza Vermes was a formidable scholar, most renowned for his ground-breaking work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Before his death he was Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford, UK, and he was a world expert on the studies of Christian origins. To celebrate the publication of Geza Vermes' last work The True Herod, published posthumously, we are doing a series of blog posts which will include extracts from the published work, comments from scholars on Vermes's work, and insights into how this beautiful and fascinating book came into being. To start it off, this first blog post features the preface and foreword to The True Herod, written by Geza himself.