[8][10] All three were baptised as Roman Catholics when he was six;[6] referring to his parents' conversion, he defined it as a way to escape from the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe[6][7][10] (see also Interwar period).

In an interview with Rachel Kohn of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1999 he stated: "In fact, I never was anything but a Jew with a temporary sort of outer vestment.

[7] Later he moved to Paris, where he studied under the Hungarian born French Jewish scholar Georges Vajda, a graduate of the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest.

[7] He studied then at the College St Albert and the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, where he specialised in Oriental history, civilisations and languages.

In 1953, Vermes obtained a Doctorate of Theology with the first dissertation written on the Dead Sea Scrolls and its historical framework.

[7] Together with a third collaborator, Renee Bloch, they battled doggedly against the anti-Semitic content in Catholic education and ritual of the time.

[7] After researching the Dead Sea Scrolls in Paris for several years,[8] Vermes had met Pamela Hobson Curle,[7][10][12] a poet and scholar, disciple of the Neo-Hasidic Jewish philosopher Martin Buber,[7][10] and the two fell in love.

[14] He is one of the leading scholars in the field of the study of the historical Jesus (see Selected Publications, below) and together with Fergus Millar and Martin Goodman, Vermes was responsible for substantially revising Emil Schurer's three-volume work, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ,[15] His An Introduction to the Complete Dead Sea Scrolls, revised edition (2000), is a study of the collection at Qumran.

On 23 January 2012 Penguin Books celebrated at Wolfson College, Oxford, the golden jubilee of Vermes's The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, which has sold an estimated half-a-million copies worldwide.

The Gospel image must therefore be inserted into the historical canvas of Palestine in the first century CE, with the help of the works of Flavius Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls and early rabbinic literature.

In the hamlets and villages of Lower Galilee and the lakeside, Jesus set out to preach the coming of the Kingdom of God within the lifetime of his generation and outlined the religious duties his simple listeners were to perform to prepare themselves for the great event.