Customer Reviews

The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Prof. Amy-Jill Levine is a Jewish woman who attends an orthodox synagogue in Nashville and who occupies an endowed chair of New Testament studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. If you make a habit of watching the various Jesus TV shows that appear around Christmastime and Easter, you've probably seen her on camera. A-J, as her students call her (I was her student for my M.Div., and still consider myself such) is an engaging lecturer with an appealing sense of humor and a simply awesome command of the various themes, facts and passages of the New Testament. And she treats the New Testament a lot better than many Christian professors, clergy and laity treat the Old Testament.

Which brings me to her latest book, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus. It is precisely, I think, because of A-J's deep appreciation of Jesus as a specifically Jewish man, and the plainly Jewish character of the New Testament, that leads her to describe and rebut Christians' historic and ongoing habit of thinking of Jesus as some kind of "counter-Jew" who sought to radically change his own religious traditions and teachings or even overturn them. Even worse has been the use of the New Testament by Christians to justify anti-Judaism, which is a very short step from anti-Jew; neither position is simply tenable with the identity and life of Jesus.

This book is not another bewailing of how Christian Germany came to commit the Holocaust. In fact, the Shoah gets only a very brief mention in her book. A-J isn't writing to point the finger at Christians for our sins. She simply wishes to introduce the reader to the Jewish ordinariness of Jesus himself and of his place and time. Just as importantly, A-J explains simply and thoroughly the errors of both the Church and the Academy in drawing conclusions about presumed monolithic Judaism; both blocs have generally supposed that whatever Jesus seemed to oppose must have been normative in Judaism of his day. That is, clergy and scholars alike haven't studied Judaica to speak of, but nonetheless think that the New Testament describes Judaism both accurately and exhaustively. It just is not so.

As well, A-J exposes how modern theological fads (liberationism, feminism and many others), have so idealized Jesus away from his personal Jewishness that he becomes a heroic figure exemplifying whatever the faddists a priori wish him to be. Jesus' own people then become the paradigm for whomever the faddists wish to oppose in the present day, and the dysfunctions and injustices of today - whether patriarchy, colonialism, or various exploitations - are retrojected as the norm of first-century Judaism. Jews are then portrayed, sometimes explicitly, as domineering oppressors of class, gender, the outcast and the marginalized. Hence, in seeking to identify Jesus with the Palestinian cause today, one liberationist makes explicit an identity across two millennia between the Israeli "occupiers" of the West Bank and the Jews who (presumably) killed Jesus.

Finally, the book appeals to Jews not dismiss the Christian testament as wholly antithetical to Judaism's history and current practice. A-J explains, for example, how the Lord's Prayer (called the "Our Father" in Catholicism) is a Jewish prayer through and through. (I remember this explanation from my first New Testament class with her, too.) Noting that after two thousand years of history it is too much to expect that Jews today will feel comfortable in praying it, she uses it to point out how Christian faith and practice is still pervaded by Jewish traditions and that there are many positive points of contact that adherents of either faith would be better off to appreciate.

I recommend the book without reservation. It's the best religious-topic book I have read in several years.

This is the best book available today about the Jewishness of Jesus. Amy Jill Levine points out that many of the Gospel stories would hit home with more of us if we read the New Testament with the eyes of a first century Jewish person. She points out the Jewishness of each line of the Lord's Prayer and its similarities with the Mourner's Kaddish in Judaism. She also shows that the parable of the Good Samaritan will be more powerful when we realize that the role model of the story is the enemy of the Jews.

Similarly, the parable of the tax collector and the self-righteous Pharisee praying in the temple has a bigger punch when we remember how despised tax collectors were and how unlikely it would seem that a sinful, self-centered tax collector would repent and turn to the Jewish God.

There is also an important chapter about anti-Judaism in the New Testament. Levine feels that the issue of whether or not there is anti-Judaism in the NT cannot be decided by the historian, but by the individual. Some will see it in the text, some won't.

I wanted to argue at this point. I wanted to say "What about authorial intent? Can't we study the salient passages in their contexts to see if the authors intended an anti-Jewish polemic?"

But Levine would rightfully note that we all have different reactions to what we read. Even though she rejects this notion, I still see it as a family disagreement.

There is also an important chapter about the dangers of stereotyping Judaism. Levine notes that when we preach the gospels, we talk about the harsh legalism of the Pharisees, the strain of women under the law of Moses, the idea that the Jewish people rejected Jesus because he wasn't a warrior messiah, the idea that the Jewish people were obsessed with the idea of keeping pure from outsiders, and the impossibility of keeping the law of Moses. Levine points out that these are stereotypes, this is NOT the way the Jewish people looked at their lives.

Levine also calls for true interfaith dialogue. This means avoiding statements like "All Jews think ..." or "All Christians think ...." It also means recognizing that both Jewish and Christian traditions have texts that might rub the other dialogue partner the wrong way. Levine counsels us to speak out when someone makes a derogatory comment about Jewish people or Christian people. There is no room for hate at the table of faith. I agree.

And yet there is a clear message in the New Testament that Jesus Christ is superior to the institutions of Judaism, especially in the book of Hebrews and in certain texts from Galatians and the gospels. I think this is an important message. The Jewish writers of the New Testament were transformed by their faith in Jesus Christ. They felt so passionately about their Messiah that they even stated that faith in Him was superior to anything else Judaism could offer. As a Jewish believer in Jesus as Messiah, I wholeheartedly concur.

Nevertheless, Ben Witherington is surely right when he calls this book the best book written on the Jewishness of Jesus. I personally need to be careful in the future about making sure I don't stereotype Judaism in my treatment of the Gospels.

This book is a wake up call for all Christians to no longer rely on what they have heard from the pulpit about the Jewish culture and faith during the lifetime of Jesus. The Misunderstood Jew should be required reading in every seminary. Finally a scholar breaks down the complex issues that strain Jewish/Christian relationships and provides suggestions for moving forward with intelligent dignity for both backgrounds of faith. Probably the most important religious book of this decade.

Amy-Jill Levine's The Misunderstood Jew is a worthwhile read, although one that is bound to discomfort many of its readers. It is also a book that boasts a title that does not fully do justice to its theme. Yes: the book includes Levine's attempt at providing a thoroughly Jewish portrait of the historical Jesus who is, not surprisingly, the misunderstood Jew of the book's title. However, the book includes much more as it seeks to place its portrait of Jesus within the larger contours of Jewish-Christian relations over the centuries.

Levine writes from the perspective of an observant Jew; she also writes from the perspective of someone who not only teaches at a Christian theological seminary, but who clearly has affection for many (but by no means all) things Christian. That combination--in tandem with the fact that Levine appears to be wonderfully free of "group-think"--makes this a refreshingly unpredictable book, one in which Levine examines a number of controversial questions, and (rather than following a "party-line") formulates her own answers. For that reason, I have a hard time believing that any given reader of this book will agree with all of the positions she stakes out: thus the "discomfort" most will experience (Christian and Jewish readers alike) as they work their way through the pages of The Misunderstood Jew.

Speaking personally, I was delighted with Levine's willingness to call the World Council of Churches (and their member denominations) to account for what she regards as anti-Judaic elements in at least a handful of WCC publications, particularly those written from the perspective of liberation theology. I was also intrigued with Levine's politically-incorrect willingness to question the reluctance--in many liberal Christian circles--to refer to the contents of the Hebrew Bible as "the Old Testament". Indeed, the book's final chapter ("Quo Vadis") in which Levine provides an alphabet's worth of guidelines for Jewish-Christian dialogue, should be required for any Christian or Jew interested in engaging their religious counterparts in a thoughtful, respectful way.

On the other hand, I was not entirely convinced by Levine's arguments against the adaptation of the Seder meal for Christian use. Nor was I at ease with all of the interpretive assumptions Levine makes as she builds up her portrait of the historical Jesus, a task which--to be fair--has provided endless challenges to all who have engaged it. Even in such places of disagreement, however, Levine's basic fairness and decency--her willingness to look at more than one side (and more than one dimension) of the issues she examines--makes this a book worthy of the reader's investment of time and energy. In the case of those readers (like myself) who preach the Gospel Sunday by Sunday, the fundamental challenge she issues--that the Church not bear false witness against Jews and Judaism-- is one that should not be ignored.

Countless times I've listened to Christian sermons where the speaker parses one or two of the Greek words and attempts to bring perspective to the text by describing the Jewish cultural context and paradigm of the time. In nearly all cases where this practice is on display, the "illumination" is merely self-serving to reaffirm the wishful thinking of the speaker and the dogma he defends. It's nearly always obvious the speaker really has no understanding or context of his own; their usually invalid description of Jewish culture is merely used to reaffirm their beliefs rather than seek knowledge and insight.

Ms. Levine, a Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt University is not just a scholar of early Christianity. She is a Jew who is also a Jewish scholar and expert on Jewish history. Ms. Levine's work is astonishing and eye opening due to her ability to put the NT and Jesus within the context of Jewish culture and how Jewish law was practiced by devout Jews of that time.

With Ms. Levine's guidance, text that is mere drudgery to wade through becomes alive with meaning and context. Most enlightening is Levine's analysis of where Jesus is acting in accordance with Jewish culture, while relating that context to the tangents often digressed upon by Christian ideologues who use these texts to define Jesus as either unique, a radical, or anti-Jewish when in fact the text is describing actions and words that fit perfectly into the Jewish culture of that time. Examples are the healing stories, the woman at the well, and especially the relationship Jews have with their law and religious leaders.

Like Robert Price's hypothesis that if Jesus existed, he most probably would have been a preacher from the tribe of Nazerites that roamed the country, Levine is easily able to construct Jesus within the context of Jewish thougt of that time.

Where Levine falters is her own bias, which is rampant throughout the book. Ms. Levine as a Jew despises anti-Semitism in all its forms, including the explicit and implied forms pervasive in books like the Gospel of John, a position in which I fully empathize. However, Prof. Levine makes the claim that we should interpret sacred scripture in a manner that minimizes hatred and divisiveness. This makes for an astonishing suggestion; rather than seek truth and knowledge, Levine argues truth and knowledge in sacred texts is impossible to determine so lets all interpret our dogma in as conciliatory a manner as possible, this is no better than the stereotypical pastor I described above who filters out truth to indoctrinate his listeners.

While I agree with Ms. Levine that knowledge regarding early Christianity is nigh impossible given the poor reportage and protection of manuscripts by early Christians, I can't support interpreting text in a manner that is inclusive just because we all want to get along; instead I would propose we endorse condemning the text that perpetuates hatred and wars, like "no man cometh unto the father but by me" as hate speech pure and simple, especially since the evidence that Jesus actually made such a claim is not only non-existent, but not even logical.

Given this bias, I still highly recommend getting this book because I can no longer imagine understanding the NT without guidance by someone like Levine who has the understanding and knowledge of the Jewish culture within which Jesus and the authors of the NT lived. Especially since Prof. Levine is very capable of distinguishing between knowledge, facts, and her opinion in her published work.

This book has an overt theme which is that Jesus of Nazareth was an observant Jew and a covert theme that Jewish society in the 1st Century CE was complex and quite diverse. Any close reader of the New Testament Gospels would say that of course Jesus was a practicing Jew. What is less clear, from the Gospels alone, is that the Jewish society in which he lived was very complicated and that Judaism then as now incorporated a wide variety of practices and interpretations of the Torah. Now the reader should be aware that Levine has written this book as biblical scholar not as a theologian. She generally stays away from theological issues such as the Divinity of Jesus, his virgin birth, and his redemptive sacrifice on the cross. She correctly classifies these as matters of faith not fact in the historical sense of the word. What she is concerned with is the Jewish context of the teachings of Jesus and how that context can help interpret what He was teaching.

As Levine makes clear traditional interpretations of the Gospels are often based on a lamentable ignorance of both Judaism and the social conditions of time they were written. For example, she makes clear that not all scribes and Pharisees were bad guys rather that the Pharisees as a sect of Judaism included people of all stripes from real good to real bad. Rather like any large religious group be they Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist. In the same vain she clarifies how the Temple at Jerusalem played an important and benevolent role in Jewish religious life although some Jews including Temple authorities failed to live up to veneration with which is was held. If Levine can be faulted it would be that she tends to down play the effect of the Roman occupation on Jewish society and how that society reacted to the message of Jesus in light of Roman oppression. Reading this book will enable readers of the Gospel to better understand the teachings of Jesus by understanding their Jewish context. It may even help readers to understand the human Jesus better.

I wish I had Amy-Jill Levine as my professor of New Testament back when I was in seminary. Her insights and provocative comments (provoking thought not reaction) are challenging and faith-forming. (I heard her lecture for a week at Chatauqua a few years back and regard those lectures as furthering my Jewish-Christian sensitivities.) "The Misunderstood Jew" would be an outstanding read for a church-synagogue study group. Her critiques of liberals and conservatives open an avenue for dialogue that could take the conversation beyond ideology. As much as I like the work of Borg, et. al., I must confess that Levine has opened my eyes to some inherent anti-Jewish biases liberationists and liberals bring to their work.