Vermes places Jesus and his mission within the context of "charismatic" Judaism; that is, not the solemn rituals of the Temple or the fine legalistic distinctions of the priestly classes, Levites succeeded by Pharisees, but the more tumultuous, if not downright rowdy, practices of humbler folk. This was a prophetic strain of popular Judaism, as hospitable to the laying on of hands and rain-making as it was to outright miracles and visionary ecstasies, and it tended to be inimical to established orthodoxy, sometimes vehemently so. When the prophet Amos excoriates the high priests and temple functionaries and declares "I hate, I despise your festivals," he is speaking as a forerunner of this populist tradition. As Vermes notes, Jesus's sayings and deeds — especially his "miraculous and paradoxical acts", to use the phrase Josephus applied to the prophet Elisha — take on nuance and shading, appear less as isolated instances, indeed gain both in power as well as in provocative ambiguity, when they are viewed in this charismatic context. Vermes believes that "without a proper grasp of charismatic Judaism it is impossible to understand the rise of Christianity," and here he sets out to prove it.  

One of the features of this charismatic Judaism which links it directly to Jesus lies in its emphasis on healing, especially when linked with forgiveness of sins. Such healing, of course, occurs frequently in the Gospels; and when Jesus heals the paralytic who has been lowered through the roof because of the press of the crowd, Jesus says to him, "My son, your sins are forgiven." Another aspect involves miracles and here too there are parallels, such as the miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fishes. Charismatic prophets from Elijah and Elisha onward have been credited too with raising of the dead, as Jesus did with Lazarus; indeed, the mere touch of Elisha's bones was enough to bring a dead man back to life. Again like the prophets of old, Jesus exhibited what Vermes terms "ecstatic demeanour", as the account of the Transfiguration in Matthew 17:2 shows — "in their presence he was transfigured; his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as the light".  

Vermes is especially persuasive on the subject of healing. From the prophet Elisha to the Essenes, whose name derives from the Aramaic word for "healers", to the Therapeutai of Egypt, Vermes demonstrates how Jesus stands as a healer in an ancient line; nor was he alone among his own contemporaries. There was, for example, Honi-Onias, "the circle-drawer", so-called because he prayed to God for rain within a circle he sketched in the dirt (and by the way, so stubbornly long-lived is Honi-Onias that he crops up a millennium later under a different name in Sufi texts written in Arabic). There was also Hanina ben Dosa, as adept at healing as he was at warding off demons: when he was bitten by a poisonous snake while praying, it was the snake that dropped dead. Through his incisive portraits of such charismatic figures, often enlivened by pithy anecdotes, Vermes brings a half-hidden, quite unruly and somewhat disreputable milieu swarming back to life; and yet, this is, of course, the milieu Jesus himself inhabited, the world not of the high priests and the scholars of the law but that of fishermen, publicans and harlots, the downtrodden and the disregarded. 

Given this scruffy background, how did Jesus, Jewish preacher and miracle-worker, come to be transformed into the Christ, a figure equally human and divine?  Steadily, from about AD 100 to 325 — or what Vermes calls "the Gentile period" — Jesus the Jew turned into Jesus the Greek. By tracing this evolution, beginning with the Gospel of John and the Pauline epistles and then proceeding at a brisk pace over some two centuries of theological wrangling and controversy, Vermes comes to the Council of Nicaea and the notion of "consubstantiality," embedded in the Nicene Creed. One of the ironies of the Council is that the very concept of homoousios was proposed by Arios — he of the Arian heresy — who quickly withdrew it, however, when he decided that it smacked of Manichean tendencies.