Geza Vermes the Synoptic Gospels and John

Vermes is a scholar from whom I and most New Testament scholars owe a tremendous debt, but an indomitable work ethic and voluminous learning to not exempt anybody from errors, for instance Vermes writes:

The main problem facing a sympathetic, yet religiously detached, historian who confronts the New Testament results from the fact that the pocket book which contains the specifically Christian Scriptures offers two substantially different pictures of Jesus. All their subsequent theological colouring about Messianism and redemption notwithstanding, the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, the Synoptic Gospels, still allow a genuine glimpse of a first-century AD Jewish holy man, portrayed as a preacher, healer and exorcist, delivering special moral exhortations concerning the impending arrival of the 'kingdom of God.' By contrast, the Fourth Gospel, that of John, and the letters of Paul sketch an increasingly other-worldly saviour figure, the paramount centre of all the religious speculation of the primitive church. When one sketch is super-imposed on the other, it becomes clear that they have hardly anything in common. Geza Vermes. Jesus in His Jewish Context (SCM Press, 2003), 126-127

Vermes, desiring to be sympathetic to Jesus himself and as he states in the previous paragraph, to show the tragedy of his life, separates him from a self-identification that Vermes thinks to be false. Because Vermes wants Jesus to be a hero for the human race, Jewish or not, he separates him from the claim to be Messiah. For Vermes, all such theologizing was mythological and had very little to do with Jesus' own claims.

The error of this is that all four gospels include their historical kernels about Jesus' historical life in the context of a story which assumes, states, and intends to demonstrate that Jesus was the Messiah. The events themselves are inseparable from the assumption throughout each gospel that Jesus is, indeed, the Messiah. If one wanted to consistently carve all of the Messianism from the gospels to get at their history, there would literally be nothing left.
To say roughly the same thing, but in a different key, the events would not have been written down had not Jesus' early followers had the idea that Jesus was the Messiah. A careful reading of the source material, as well as of early Christian history, demonstrates that, whether right or wrong, Jesus claimed to be more than a mere holy-man, but to be in some way, God's agent in history, the Messiah. The gospel writers were not inventors, they were devotees.