Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a theologian, a Hungarian Jew, most of whose family died in the holocaust,

he converted to Christianity, became a Catholic priest, and then 20 years later,

reconverted to Judaism.

This tortuous route to final personal belief

has been accompanied by an unquenchable academic interest

in the origins of modern European religion.

Appointed the first professor of Jewish studies at Oxford, he's seen as the man who managed

to disentangle the early history of Christianity from its Jewish foundations. It's made him one of the most

influential religious thinkers of our time, but he got into studying it in his own

words to have fun. His most famous book, Jesus the Jew Jew published more than 25 years ago

persuaded many people to rethink what kind of man it was who invented Christianity.

He is Gazer Fermez. So you embarked on these lengthy investigations professor into

exactly who Jesus was in order to have fun. Yes, having spent about five or six years of very hard labor on the study of first century

Palestinian Jewish history, I thought I had the time to take off a few moments and attempt to place the history of

Jesus and in general the Gospels into their genuine

historical context. But it all began didn't, because you said that Christmas was not quite what we all believed it to be.

Well, this is how it started because I was invited by the observer to help the writer to produce an article on the Christmas story.

And as a result, somebody invited me to write a book on Jesus.

Somebody rang you up and said, is there any more where that came from?

Absolutely.

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