The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus [Hardcover]

Amy-Jill Levine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 28, 2006

Country Western singer Kinky Friedman often performs a song entitled "They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore," and New Testament professor Amy–Jill Levine would agree. In fact, her career is dedicated to helping Christians and Jews understand the Jewishness of Jesus, thereby deepening the understanding of him, and facilitating greater interfaith dialogue. In this book, she shows how liberal Christians misunderstand Judaism, misunderstand the New Testament, and thus yank Jesus out of his Jewish context and wind up promoting hatred of Jews. Only with the deeper understanding this top Jewish, Southern–born New Testament scholar provides can we hope to respect each other's beliefs, as well as enrich our own.

Through a extremely busy teaching and speaking schedule, Levine has honed her message at synagogues, Catholic conferences, Jewish Community Centers, denominational meetings, in the classroom and in her highly successful Teaching Company audios and videos. Levine is brilliant, charming, funny and forceful, and uses these traits to give a completely fresh perspective on Jesus and the New Testament. In addition to offering new insights with great skill, she has the remarkable ability to be tough, pointing out how even liberal Christians can be unwittingly anti–Semitic in their understanding of what Jesus stood for.Her truth–telling here will provoke honest dialogue on how Christians and Jews should understand Jesus and our New Testament heritage.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. It is a simple truth that Jews and Christians should be close friends, since they share common roots and a basic ethical system. But the gulf between the groups seems vast. Levine, professor of New Testament studies at Vanderbilt, presents a strong and convincing case for understanding Jesus as "a Jew speaking to Jews," and for viewing Christianity as a Jewish movement that ultimately swept the world in its influence and authority. But with this expansion came an insidious anti-Jewish sentiment, fed by some New Testament texts (wrongly understood, the author urges) and the emerging political power of the Christian church. Levine does a masterful job of describing the subtleties of anti-Semitism, across the years and across the religious spectrum, from the conservative evangelical mission to convert the Jews to the liberation theologians who picture Jews as adherents to an older, less merciful religion. In the end, Levine offers a prescription for healing and mutual understanding; a chapter titled "Quo Vadis?" outlines steps that can be taken by Jews and Christians alike to bridge the divide that has caused so much suffering over the centuries. Written for the general public, this is an outstanding addition to the literature of interfaith dialogue. (Jan.)
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From Booklist

Levine, a professor of New Testament studies at Vanderbilt, joins the ranks of Bart Ehrman, John Dominic Crossan, and others in the search for the historical Jesus. In the first several chapters, Levine treads familiar ground, discussing Jesus within the context of Judaism and examining how Christianity evolved from a Jewish sect to a gentile church. This information can be found in other, more clearly written sources, but what Levine does very well is discuss Jewish-Christian relations throughout the millennia, even as she provides a context for discussion. Though Levine clearly shows how Judaism has become a scapegoat of Christianity and offers many examples of Judaism's tenets taken out of context by church writers, she is not writing to stir up trouble. What she wants readers to understand is that lifting Jesus from Judaism is not helpful to either group and that there are plenty of ways to focus on similarities. As Levine concludes, "As different as they are, church and synagogue have . . . the same destination whether called . . . the kingdom of heaven or the messianic age." Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne; First Edition edition (November 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060789662
• ISBN-13: 978-0060789664
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #197,765 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

115 of 122 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Quite valuable, with a few qualifiers, January 3, 2007

By 

Jean E. Pouliot (Newburyport, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (Hardcover)

That Amy-Jill Levine is a Jewish professor of New Testament studies was a surprise to me. Why would a Jew teach the stories told of the Christian Savior? But when I thought about it, why not? Didn't I take courses in Old Testament from a Christian professor?

Which helps to make Levine's point. Our biases unconsciously affect our categories. And, as Levine argues in "The Misunderstood Jew," our categories often make Jews the bad guy in order to make Jesus look good.

I have been a Christian religious education teacher for a number of years and I recently received a Masters degree in theology. But I found Levine's thesis at once fresh and engaging, if not completely convincing. Her basic idea is that Christians, usually in an effort to make Jesus more palatable to secular, pro-feminist and pro-multicultural worshippers, often do so by making his Jewish culture more rigidly pietistic, misogynistic and insular. Take the divorce issue. It is not uncommon for progressive Christian preachers to state that Jesus's prohibition against divorce was actually a pro-feminist attempt to counteract the misogyny of Jewish custom. These customs (we are told) allowed men to put women aside for trifling faults, such as bad cooking. But Levine shows that the portrayal of Jewish customs is based on a single utterance by rabbi engaged in testing the hypothetical limits of just causes for divorce. Hardly was this statement the mainstream view of Jewish scholars or rabbis. But by claiming it was, Christians can water down Christ's absolute prohibition into a pro-female statement. Levine's familiarity with the New Testament is evident. In the case of divorce, she uses the gospel texts themselves to make a compelling case that the divorce question was not intended as a referendum on male domination, but a return to the Creator's intent as expressed in Genesis.

Levine takes on other Christian biases about Judaism's supposed hatred of the poor, its hyper-ritualism, supposed ban on corpse-defilement and many other issues. She relentlessly cuts down the forest of false opinions and bad scholarship to bring Jesus more into focus as a Jew of his time.

In some senses, I think Levine goes too far, even when she has a point. She disagrees with Christians who refer to the Old Testament as the "Hebrew Scriptures" on the grounds that the books were not all written in Hebrew, that Orthodox Christian Churches use the OT's Greek translation, and that Protestant and Catholic Churches include different books in the OT. Fair enough. But she goes into wince-inducing territory by claiming that using the term "Hebrew Scriptures" is subtly anti-Catholic. Also, one wonders what becomes of the Christian Jesus when he is blended so seamlessly into the background of his culture. Is it unfair to think that Jesus opposed some of the religious tendencies of his day? Must we assume (as Levine does) that no Jews were involved in his arrest and death? Perhaps one could see Jews as exhibiting the same tendencies - both good and bad -- of all religious people, including my own Roman Catholic coreligionists. Isn't it a human thing (not a Jewish thing) to confuse particular style of piety with love of God?

In any event, Levine has done a signal service to Christians as well as Jews with this book. Anyone who gives voice to the unspoken biases that inform our religious education and worship does a good that deserves praise.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Jesus without the Schmaltz, August 9, 2007

By 

Paul O'Shea (Sydney Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (Hardcover)

If this review reads as though it has been written by a smitten fan, it is; because this reviewer is delighted at last to find, read and enjoy with undisguised pleasure, a book written by a Jew, who places Jesus firmly within his Jewish environments. And to do it succinctly, with wit and a deep appreciation for both Judaism and Christianity.

Amy-Jill Levine is a "woman of valour" in the world of Christian New Testament scholarship, and her book is a mitzvah for Jews and Christians. She is a modern Orthodox Jew, observant and informed as much about her own faith tradition as she is about the beginnings of the Christian movement. Levine brings to the table a wealth of knowledge about the late Second Temple period, the Jewish mileau surrounding the life of Yeshua/Jesus, and the complex beginnings of the Christian movement. Her razor sharp erudition is applied to the person of Jesus the observant and faithful Torah Jew using mishnaic and later rabbinic texts to give the reader a very comprehensive picture of the world/s in which Jesus lived and moved. Reading the Gospels from a Jewish perspective and with a critical eye to "weeding" out inaccurate (usually Christian) interpolations gives this foundation period in Christian history a wonderfully refreshing and academically satisfying perspective. I found her exegesis of John 4 a typical example of Levine's scholarship; theology - both Jewish and Christian, biblical and post-biblical, early Christian and Rabbinic literary analysis and criticism, historical contexts and implications for dialogue and teaching.

The second part of the book deals with common misunderstandings and misuses of the Gospels by both well-meaning and less well-meaning people, when it comes to Christians attempting to understand the one they call Saviour/Christ/Messiah. Only through honest study that challenges Christians to look critically at their sacred texts, can a more complete picture of Jesus emerge. And that is often done with some cost, as Levine details over a number of chapters. She does not shy away from wrestling with current issues of Antisemitism, the zealous, but naive, support of some Christians for Palestine at the cost of demonising Israel, and the perennial temptation of painting Jesus as the great liberator from Jewish oppression. With deft and skilled agility, Levine dismantles the myths and replaces them with fact and biblically based exegesis, commentary and plain, old fashioned common sense.

At the end of this slender volume I felt I had been given a valuable tool for working with students, providing both Jews and Christians with a text that could be used in joint study of the most famous Jew to have ever lived. People of faith will not be threatened by Levine's work. On the contrary I found her book only served to enrich my understanding of Jesus placing him firmly within his own people and religious culture. It has certainly made me keen to read more. My only regret is that the book was not longer.

60 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Different approach to Jewishness of Jesus, December 25, 2006

By 

J. F Joyner "jim_joyner" (Spartanburg, SC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (Hardcover)

I have heard the author in her programs published by the Teaching Company's Great Lecture series, and once I saw Professor Ben Witherington III's endorsement, I put this book on the top of my holiday reading list.

Dr. Witherington endorses her book as "simply the best book ever written about the Jewishness of Jesus and his earliest followers." Dr. Levine's book is a different approach to this category, and I can appreciate Dr. W's generous endorsement of his friend's book. It does not, however, cover very much of the available historical information a seeker really needs to learn about the Jewishness of Jesus. It seems more like a book one should read if s/he doubts whether s/he her/himself, or Christianity, has fully understood the implications of the Jewishness of Jesus, and is interested in a detailed challenge about how thoroughly out of sight is Jesus' heritage among American Christians. I am now persuaded that even those who talk up Jesus' Jewishness have not gone far enough in understanding the implications of this historical fact.

I came away from my reading with the idea that Dr. Levine's primary mission in writing this book is to confront anyone who purposely or unintentionally "divorces Jesus from Judaism, and then uses the story of Jesus to condemn all Jews." While she discusses neo-nutso-Nazis' and other hate groups, she also addresses those who are not hostile to Jews, and even well intentioned.

I finished my reading frustrated over how difficult she and other academics make it to define Jews and Jewishness and especially Judaism. Any serious reader can accept the fact that Judasim was not monolithic, but it seems Levine, like other scholars, must mentally paralyze the rest of us in order for the rest of us to not hold generalized ideas about Second Temple Judaism and Jews. I also came away with the idea that Dr. Levine was so impassioned about her mission that criticism of Jews as presented in the New Testament just could not possibly have accurately reflected commonly-held or legitimate criticisms of (Second Temple) "Judaism" - I think I am supposed to understand myself as being anti-Jewish if I accept these New Testament characterizations.

One thing Dr. Levine makes clear, and I believe this after reading the Dead Sea Scrolls, is that Second Temple Judaism did not believe in works justification. A compelling explanation has yet to be offered up by her or others as to the Apostle Paul's presentation of Law and Gospel, but one will come forth some day. It's just impossible to read Second Temple Jewish writings and still believe that they held to some crude form of works righteousness - this is an example of willful ignorance on the part of Christians, ranking right up there with "King James only" and the 5 cents tax on emails under consideration by Congress.

My Southern Baptist pastor has reached out to our local Jewish community. I hope to give him a copy of this book, and I hope he will read it then in turn pass it on to his friend, Rabbi L___. This book seems well suited to that purpose.

Overall, it's a good book to read.