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The ThinkND Podcast
Minding Scripture, Part 10: The Jewishness of the New Testament
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Episode Topic: The Jewishness of the New Testament
How can a deepened knowledge of Judaism nourish the theological imagination of Christians? Why are anti-Jewish readings of the New Testament just bad readings of the text? We welcome a distinguished New Testament scholar, Amy-Jill Levine, who is the world expert on the Jewishness of the New Testament, to tackle these engaging questions.
Featured Speakers:
-Amy-Jill Levine, Vanderbilt University
Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/ba5518.
This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Minding Scripture.
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Meet Amy-Jill Levine
1Picture shaped the lives of millions of people around the world Yet scriptures, both the Bible and Quran, only gain meaning when they're interpreted by the human mind. Minding Scripture, a podcast from the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, explores the meeting of reason with the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I am Gabriel Said Reynolds, professor of Islamic Studies and Theology in the World Religions, World Church program at Notre Dame. Joining me are the co-founders of the podcast, Professor Francesca Murphy. Welcome.
Speaker 2Very pleased to be here.
1And, uh, Professor Svenonius. Welcome.
Speaker 3Thanks. Looking forward.
1And it's really a delight to have a special guest on this episode, Professor Amy-Jill Levine, University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, and Mary Jane Wurtsen, Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. Welcome, Amy-Jill.
Speaker 4Glad to be with you.
1Professor Levine is the author of numerous celebrated books, and I'll mention just a few of them here to get us going. She's the author of The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi. Also, along with Marc Brettler and the many scholars who contributed to this foundational work, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, she worked on editing that book. And along with Ben Witherington, a commentary, I guess, on the Gospel of Luke. Is that right, Amy-Jill?
Speaker 4That's correct.
1She's also the author of children's books, which include Who Counts? 100 Sheep, 10 Coins, and Two Sons, The Marvelous Mustard Seed, Who Is My Neighbor? And for Abingdon Press, uh, a number of studies including Light of the World: A Beginner's Guide to Advent and Entering the Passion of Jesus: A Beginner's Guide to Holy Week. So she's a very distinguished scholar, and it's just terrific to have her with us today. We will be discussing the Jewishness of the New Testament. She's probably the leading authority in the world to discuss this topic. We'll be asking questions such as, to what extent do the authors of the Gospels employ traditional Jewish styles and arguments? What can we know about the Jewishness of Jesus himself? What of Saul, later Paul, after his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus? And how can the church be enriched by fully appreciating its Jewish origins? So those are some of the questions we will address today. And I think, Francesca, you'll start us off.
Speaker 2Yes.
Why Study Jesus
Speaker 2I'm very pleased to be talking to you today. Can you describe for us and for our audience how you became interested in the New Testament and in Jesus?
Speaker 4Ah, well, shouldn't everybody be? You know, if you, if you see a picture of the Vatican or a statue of the Virgin Mary, um, most likely you would say, "What is that or who is that?" I grew up in southeastern Massachusetts in a neighborhood that was predominantly Portuguese Roman Catholic, and I was intrigued by the forms of worship in which my friends engaged. We all went to public school and then talked about worship afterwards. Um, I was interested in the churches they attended I was interested in my friend's rituals. I was bound and determined to make my first holy communion because I wanted the dress, and then a little girl said to me on the school bus one day, "You killed our Lord."
1Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4How do you put together this, this wonderful tradition with these gorgeous churches and these wonderful statues, not to mention the bunny and Santa, and then this horrible teaching? So I was curious as to how, how the church was proclaiming beautiful things as well as hateful things. I was seven years old at the time, this is before Vatican II, and I started asking questions then, and I'm continuing to ask questions now, well over 50 years later
Speaker 3So when you started to kind of engage with these topics from an academic perspective, was there one scholar, one book that played a particularly important role in shaping the direction that you ended up taking of the New Testament and Jesus?
Speaker 4The rabbi from my hometown synagogue at the time, Rabbi Dr. Bernard Glassman, who had actually written a dissertation on Shakespearean England and antisemitism ostensibly without any Jews being present, began formal instruction for me in New Testament studies, suggested other books that I should read. So I started formal academic studies more or less in high school by grabbing anything that I could find. I remember buying a copy of Peake's Commentary on the Bible and thinking, "Wow, this is really interesting." Um, it's like, it's a bit outdated now, but at the time it was fabulous. And then when I went to college, I went to study religion, and my professor at Smith College, Carl Donfried, who still remains a mentor to me, he's a Pauline expert, so he introduced to me the Jewishness of Paul. He got me interested in gospel studies, and then I went off to graduate school to study with W.D. Davies and eventually finished up my dissertation with D. Moody Smith. And all the way through, people did not discourage me from working on the Jewishness of Jesus or working on the Jewishness of the New Testament.
Speaker 2Was that in the pre-Sanders era or, uh, was it post-Sanders?
Speaker 4Well, it was before, it was before Ed Sanders came to Duke, but he was already publishing some of his material in the late '70s and early '80s. And as I'm reading things like not only his Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition, which nobody cites anymore, but it's a fabulous book, and then his relocating Jesus within a Jewish context-
Speaker 2Yeah
Speaker 4and he and others who were part of what was called the New Perspective on Paul, that was influential for me, but it also struck me as just so marvelously obvious that I kept wondering how come people were saying this is so earth-shattering. Well, of course that, that had to be the case. And then I thought, "Well, maybe we can go farther than this, particularly in gospel study."
1So speaking as the Islamicist, I'm guessing Sanders is a critical scholar in recapturing s- the, the, the Jewish context of the New Testament. Is that
Speaker 2right? Yeah, he wrote two great books, so Jesus and then Palestinian Judaism and Paul and Palestinian Judaism, and it just, it turned the whole field around.
Early Jewish Context
1Okay. But didn't, didn't things start earlier? I don't wanna drag us down to too basic questions, but I mean- Wasn't there controversy around Harnack and things, and, uh, Greek versus Semitic things and stuff like that?
Speaker 4Yeah, Harnack had a real strong Gentile orientation. Um, I don't wanna say negative things about people who are no longer here. Okay. But let's say he had a very strong Gentile orientation. But over against that, somebody like George Foot Moore, um, was already recovering the Jewishness of the New Testament context. Plus you had from the 19th century people like Abraham Geiger, who were also interested in who were the Pharisees, and how do we set Jesus in this, this setting? It turns out there's a fellow named Joseph Klausner, who was actually quite prominent in Israeli politics, and he had written a book on Jesus of Nazareth as a Jew very early on. And then it turns out he's a cousin of mine, which I had no idea- until I went home from college one day and I mentioned this fellow. My mother said, "Oh, I think we're related to him." And she pulls out all these pictures of him, and I went, "Wow! Apparently I'm genetically programmed to do this work."
Speaker 3So that means you're also related to the, uh, to the great Israeli novelist Amos Oz, right? Who is, I believe, uh, yeah, a-
Speaker 4We'll, we'll claim him as part of the mishpacha- but, you know, very, very distant.
Speaker 3Right. No, Klausner, right. Klausner was a very interesting, uh, historian slash, uh, yeah, l- like a literary figure, right, in the Jewish contributions to the early contextualization of Jesus within his Jewish context.
Speaker 2Okay. So can you tell me, Klausner is obviously Jewish, but others that I know more about, like Sanders, are sort of Anglicans or Methodists. And so could you explain to our audience what you as a Jew bring to Christians in their understanding of Jesus?
Speaker 4The way you phrased the question sets up this kind of ideological predetermination that Jews would somehow read differently than Christians, as opposed to, quote-unquote, "how academics read." So whenever historians do what we do, I, I mean, I think you will agree with this, we all bring biases to it because we determine what questions we want to ask, and we determine what data are relevant for the answers. I'm interested in Jewish background material, but one does not have to be Jewish in order to be interested in that, uh, any more than one needs to be Christian to be interested in the Gospels or Paul. For a number of academics, they might have come out of Protestant backgrounds or Roman Catholic backgrounds, but in a number of these cases, when I'm reading their books, I would have no idea what their religious orientation is. Sometimes it's overt, and sometimes it's, "Oh, I'm just reading Paul." And I might think, "Is this person an atheist? Is this person a lapsed Catholic? Is this person Greek Orthodox?" I don't know.
Speaker 3Hmm.
Speaker 4So I would like my scholarship to be able to stand on its rigor by whatever terms general scholarship plays, rather than just say, "Oh, this is a Jewish perspective," let alone the Jewish perspective.
Speaker 3Could I ask, uh, pushing back a little bit on the idea that a Jew might kind of bring something in particular or that there is a kind of a Jewish reading, say, of Jesus or the New Testament, you co-edited this, uh, remarkable work, this, the Jewish Annotated New Testament, which if, if I'm not mistaken, includes contributions specifically by Jewish scholars.
Speaker 4Yes, about 70 of us.
Speaker 3So right. So there you do have a publication project that is conceived of as, both as scholarship, but also as, I guess, confessional, though I say to a certain degree. There you do have collections specifically of Jewish scholars. So what is the, what's the idea there? If, you know, we do aspire to a kind of objectivity of scholars and, uh, to a bracketing of biases, then, then what, what, what is the logic behind the choice to produce an annotated New Testament, uh, in which all of the contri- contributions are by Jewish scholars?
Speaker 4Right. Fair question. I would not use the word confessional here because I know a number of the people who contributed have no confession if, if confession means a particular theological belief.
Speaker 3Mm-hmm.
Speaker 4They're not anti-theological. That's just not how their minds work.
Speaker 3Sure.
Speaker 4Part of the problem, even in the question, is the distinction between Jews on the one hand and Christians and Muslims on the other. As I understand this, and, and for those of you who are experts in, say, Islamic studies or more properly in ongoing Jewish studies, Christianity and Islam are confessional religions. Jews are also a people, as Irish would be a people, or Kenyans would be a people, or Mexicans would be a people. So that removes from us to some extent the confessional definition. There may be one, but it is not a sine qua non for being, uh, identified as a Jew. What we thought we would do in this volume- Or several things. First, it's a thank you, uh, to Christian scholars who have welcomed us into the field and who have trained us. It's a thank you to groups like the Vatican and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and other, uh, and European bishop synods and so on, that have tried to put the stop on anti-Jewish teaching and preaching. We could not do what we did had the church not stopped some of its more... churches in general stopped some of their more problematic proclamations. We also wanted Jews to become familiar with the New Testament because we look at it primarily as a form of Jewish history, and it certainly impacted Jewish history because interpretations of the New Testament led to difficulties over the past two millennia for Jews and Judaism. We also figured that Jewish scholars, particularly those working in more secular institutions, would be better aware of places where anti-Jewish teaching and preaching and interpretation come from the New Testament because we've heard it and we've seen it. So here's one thing that minoritized groups know about. We know what the negative comments are because we've heard them. So therefore, where those particular problems come up or, or want to come up, we were able to pull out little gray boxes in the Jewish Annotated New Testament and said, "You might have heard X, but you rather, y- you're better off, uh, thinking Y and Z, and here's why." So not confessional, but experiential.
Speaker 2You have a sensitivity.
Speaker 4Yes.
Speaker 2You, you have a particular sensitivity to how many passages in the New Testament are read anti-semitically.
Speaker 4Many of us do, yes. And Mark and I, uh, Mark was, when we started this, he was at Brandeis, he's now at Duke. I'm still at Vanderbilt. We know what the questions are that, that our Christian students have, and we also know what Jewish students ask about New Testament materials. We know that from our courses, we know that from programs we've done in synagogues.
1There were interesting questions, cognate or related questions, about the study Quran, which maybe there we could speak of con- confessional in the Islamic context, but that maybe that's for another, another program. I think it was explicitly there only, only Muslim. I may be misunderstanding, but that, that's what I believe, that only Muslim-believing scholars, um, participated, and that that was sort of a principle for the work.
Misread Gospel Parables
1Well, you alluded to understanding and understanding better New Testament passages. I wonder, Amy-Jill, if you could maybe identify one or two gospel passages which are commonly misunderstood because we don't appreciate the Jewish context of the New Testament or the historical Jesus.
Speaker 4Yeah. Um, here are two of the most common. The first is regarding the famous Parable of the Prodigal Son, which is in the Gospel of Luke chapter 15. So in the story, the, the prodigal wanders off and blows all his money. I'm not sure he sinned, but he was certainly stupid. So he blows all his money, and a famine comes into the land, and he's starving, and he thinks to himself. And in the Bible, when you think to yourself, that's usually a form of conniving, right? Bibles don't do thought bubbles in a positive way. He says, "How many of my father's hired hands have bread and enough to spare, and here I am dying of hunger. I know what I will do. I will go to my father and I will say to him, 'I have sinned against God and against you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me like one of your hired hands.'" So he heads home, and the dad sees him in a distance and runs to him and throws his arms around him, and the next thing you know, there's, you know, rings and sandals and fancy robes and barbecue. And one standard Christian reading is the father represents God the Father, which is an okay reading. But Jews would have been shocked that God the Father would welcome back in such an effusive way the repentant sinner. And more than that, Jews would have been shocked to think that any father would welcome his son back so generously, that Jewish fathers would be strict and insist that the kid repent for the next 20 years and maybe then- So there's this negative view of the Old Testament God of wrath that gets projected onto the dad, and then the dad becomes the reversal of that, and a negative view of Jewish fathers, and the dad becomes the reversal of that. As opposed to saying, "Wait a minute, Jews are praying the Lord is my shepherd, and Jewish dads are, you know, like normal dads." In fact, they're pretty much hands-on 'cause they're supposed to be teaching their sons a trade and whatnot. So the parable becomes an anchor for anti-Jewish teaching and preaching, and then Jesus comes along and says, y- you know, "Don't think like the Jews. Think about a merciful God and think about loving parents." That's one. The other is from the Parable of the Good Samaritan, also in the Gospel of Luke chapter 10, where a man is waylaid by robbers and beaten and left half dead in a ditch, and a priest and a Levite see the guy, and they walk by and around him, and they won't touch him. And the standard Christian reading is that the priest and the Levite avoid the guy because they're worried that if he's dead or if he dies while they are attending to him, then they will become ritually impure for having touched a corpse. So therefore, they are following Jewish law by ignoring the guy in the ditch The parable says nothing about purity laws, and there's absolutely nothing in Jewish history that would give them that excuse. Um, Jewish law says saving a life trumps every other law. The Mishnah says that even a high priest or a Nazarite, people in utmost states of religious purity, have to deal with corpses by the side of the road. The Book of Tobit in the Old Testament Apocrypha, or the Deuterocanonical work for Catholic and Orthodox communities, Tobit's a saint 'cause he spends two chapters burying dead bodies. Josephus, our first-century historian, says in his book Against Apion, Contra Apionem, that Moses commanded us to attend to dead bodies. And the priest is not even going up to Jerusalem where he, where he would need to be in a ritually pure state. He is going down from Jerusalem. So bringing in all this stuff about ritual purity and then having Jesus somehow do away with it is a bad reading of Jesus. It's a bad reading of the parable. And indeed, when Jesus comes into contact with people who are ritually impure, such as people suffering from leprosy or a woman suffering from what looks like a, a vaginal or uterine hemorrhage, he doesn't do away with purity laws. To the contrary, he restores people to states of ritual purity.
Speaker 3Maybe I could follow up with that. That, that's, uh, those are kind of fascinating examples, and, um, maybe to summarize, I'd say part of the corrective here lies in highlighting, bringing to the fore perhaps a, an anti-Jewish bias that m- readers might have been bringing to the New Testament and a kind of assumption, say, about Jewish fathers or about, uh, legalism, and then also contextualizing Jesus within a Second Temple context in light of Josephus, in light of the Book of Tobit, et cetera. Doing all of that work, is there-- w- would you say that there is something distinctive about the teachings of Jesus, or, or perhaps also, I mean, we've mentioned Paul already, uh, in the podcast, or about the teachings of Paul that mark a significant divergence from the Judaism of the time? Or does the work of contextualization and removal of an anti-Jewish bias, uh, end up essentially not enabling us to identify something distinctive or that marks a divergence in Jesus' teachings?
Speaker 4The question presupposes, as I'm hearing it, that there's some sort of normative Judaism over against which we can set Jesus and Paul. But there's no, quote-unquote, "normative Judaism" at the time. The people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls were distinct from the Pharisees, who were distinct from the Sadducees, who were distinct from the group around John the Baptist, who were distinct from Philo, who were distinct from Josephus, and each one makes its own contribution. So does Jesus say some things that I don't find elsewhere? Sure. But I can say the same thing about the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Pharisees and the Sadducees and so on. Jesus does have a particular package that would make him distinct. He is not only a teacher, he is also a healer. He is not only a healer, I think he's also a visionary. In other words, I think he had visions like, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven," or a vision of the heavens opening up and a voice coming down at the baptism. So that would make sense to me. Paul was also a visionary or a mystic, if you would prefer. I think Jesus thought that he was somehow divinely commissioned to help prepare his people for the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God. The term for that would be a Messiah. Not everybody's walking around thinking they are directly commissioned by God, but it wouldn't surprise me that John the Baptist had the same idea. Jesus is gathering people around him, which means he's separating families. He's engaging in what anthropologists would call fictive kinship groups. "Who are my mother and brothers and sisters? Those who hear the will of God and do them," as while, while Mary and the brothers and sisters are standing outside trying to get in. He pulls the apostles James and John away from their dad, from the fishing boat. He separates spouses. Uh, "Unless you leave father and mother and wife and children," that's Luke, "to join my group," and so on. I think he's celibate. Most Jews aren't, which is probably one of the reasons we still have Jews. So he, he's got his own distinctive package, but elements of that package can be found with other groups. The people who were responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls were also engaging in fictive kinship relationships, for example.
Evolving Scholarship Debates
Speaker 2It's interesting 'cause it's like, you know, one of the books which, um, everybody read when I was an undergraduate was Geza Vermes', uh, Jesus the Jew.
Speaker 4Yep.
Speaker 2And so really what I'm hearing you say is that the scholars of Vermes' generation were bringing out something new, but they were also kind of naive as well, because there wasn't such a thing as a Jew either, a Jew, an, a normative Jew in the 1st century.
Speaker 4Right, and I, I think Ver- Vermes got that. Uh, Vermes set Jesus in the context of what might be called, um, Galilean charismatic- Yes Like who needs a circle drawer- Yeah Hanina ben Dosa. Yeah, I remember
Speaker 2that. Yeah.
Speaker 4Um, so, right, so he did have a Galilean versus Judean model- Yeah um, and whether that actually works or not, that's now coming into some question because there's such enormous traffic between Galilee and Judea, um, and, uh, under the Maccabees, Judeans moving up to Galilee and resettling, plus, um, people coming for pilgrimage to Jerusalem or even for economics to Jerusalem. So I'm not sure there's such a Galilee and Judean divide, but, but Vermes did recognize that there were charismatics and they were distinct from, say, Pharisees. Vermes also had a strong expertise in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and he was able to put Jesus within that type of contextualization. We know more about archeology now than we did when Vermes was writing. Um, we know more about trade routes and questions of the extent of Romanization. We have different questions that we ask because we have different theories that we can apply to the text. So scholarship will always develop and, you know, 20 years from now we will be asking different questions. When I was being trained, probably you as well, the Q hypothesis was really huge- Exactly. That there, there must be some- Right. There, there's, right, but this Q, which, which nobody has ever
1seen,
Speaker 4right? Which is the material common to Matthew and Luke that's not in Mark. Thanks to the splendid work of people like Mark Goodacre, now the whole Q hypothesis has come under some reevaluation and in doing the commentary on Luke with Ben Witherington, the more I kept looking at Luke, the more I kept thinking, "You know, I think he has a copy of Matthew, and I don't think he likes Matthew very much, so he's gonna redo Matthew." So, so now I'm a, I, I'm a Q apostate.
Speaker 2No, I've, well, I've been a Q apostate for a long time, and I, I think generally the biblical scholarship of our time when we were undergraduates and maybe in graduate study, it was full of certainties.
Speaker 3Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2I mean, we were taught these things as facts, JPD and Q, and we had all these certainties which all seem to have dissolved in the past 30, 40 years, and that's, it's much... I don't think anybody would write a book called Jesus a Jew any longer because it kind of presupposes we know more than I think we today might. What do you think?
Speaker 4Well, I mean, it, John Meier's project seems to be continuing right? Uh, right. So what is it, five volumes now and counting? But, you know, even if you use a title like A Marginal Jew, then you have to figure out what the center is. I think they're all marginal. So even if you're somebody like the high priest, you know that there are other people who really don't like you and they think that they're at the center and you're somehow wrong or on the periphery. And not much has changed when you look at the Jewish world today.
Speaker 2Yes, yes. Everyone arguing with everyone else.
Speaker 4Right. Two Jews, three opinions, which is why putting The Jew annotated together is so difficult because all these essays had to be edited, and Mark and I would sometimes go back and forth with the author saying, "We think you need to rephrase this because a non-Jewish audience may not understand the reference or because a Christian audience might hear this as a negative comment or as an insulting comment."
Teaching Against Antisemitism
Speaker 2I've been reading, uh, Vermes and Sanders and many other Jewish readers of scripture, you know, for many decades and tried to put these ideas across to my students. And I would say I've had at least as much failure as success. My experience is probably very different from yours. You're probably better at this than I am. But I find, uh, that you can get people to kind of pretend to agree with you, but it's a very surface kind of level of agreement. And, uh, they'll say, "Oh, yes, Jesus was Jewish. I see." And then actually they don't really believe you. And so I wanted to ask you, what is the most successful way to help Christians stop reading scripture through an anti-Semitic lens? Because I've tried, you know, many things, and I find that the, the best I can often do is pretend agreement, not real agreement.
Speaker 4And there are reasons for that.
Speaker 2Yes.
Speaker 4So the best thing that I've found if, if you want a one-liner, is if you have to make Judaism look bad in order to make Jesus look good, that's not saying very much about Jesus. You can do better. But in the back of The Jewish Annotated, I have my top 10 list of unfortunate things that Christians have said about Jesus' Jewish context. So I have a checklist. But I do get pushback on occasion. So I wrote an article a couple of years ago for my friend Adele Reinhartz, who's a Johannine scholar, right now the president of the Society of Biblical Literature. She's a Canadian scholar. And she was putting together a book on John and the Jews, and she asked me if I could give her an article, and I said, "You know, I, I don't think I've got anything more. I think John and the Jews has been done to death and then some." And then the, the Unite the Right episode in Charlottesville happened, and I was watching and listening to sermons that Sunday, and everybody talked about racism, and nobody talked about these folks claiming, "The Jews will not replace us," and these people circling the synagogue that Friday night. So I started asking some of my friends who were prominent in the Christian world, "How come it's all about racism for you, and you didn't say anything about Judaism?" And they pushed back, and they said, "Well, that's not really a problem, and we've more or less taken care of anti-Semitism, and we're not proclaiming anti-Semitic material in our courses and whatnot." So I wrote an article in which I used the theories of white privilege and white fragility- And I mapped them onto Christian privilege and Christian fragility. Christians do not hear their own anti-Judaism. They presuppose normative values which are, in fact, anti-Jewish and normative teachings which are anti-Jewish. And then when they are called on it, you get the same sort of pushback that some white people might give when their systemic racism is flagged. Like, "It wasn't my fault. I didn't mean it. You're overstating. Some of my best friends are Jews. We sang 'I Have a Little Dreidel' in elementary school." And, and all this pushback rather than actually dealing with the fact that some of their preaching and teaching is, in fact, not only ahistorical, it's actually anti-Jewish and quite rotten. Mm. So how then does one deal with fragility? Well, in the same way we can help those in privileged positions actually recognize their privilege when it comes to issues of race or gender and sexuality, um, I think we can do the same thing when it comes to Christians recognizing that some of the stuff that they hold dear, that they were taught by their Sunday school teachers or in vacation Bible school may, in fact, not be good, and it's a sign of maturity and courage to be able to address it rather than to continue to deny it.
1I, I wonder if-- Sorry to jump in here, but I, I wonder if part of the problem, not historically, which is a much longer and sadder story to e-embrace the whole history of antisemitism, but the, just the current problem may be in part to just bad theological education. I mean, it seems to me the better educated you are about the New Testament or Christian theology generally, the harder it is to divide Hebrew Bible f- or oppose it to New Testament. You know, I find many of my students at, at Notre Dame, they mean very well, but they, they don't actually know their theology very well, and so they just assume the God of the Old Testament Hebrew Bible is a bad guy and, um, Jesus is great
Speaker 4I get that too, and our students are majority Protestant, but I, I just proof text 'cause it's, it's the, the quickest way of doing it. I say, "Fine, um, the Lord is my shepherd who leads me beside still waters and restores my soul." It's just Psalms. But you are condemned to the outer darkness where there's wailing and gnashing of teeth. That's Jesus. You know, which one do you want? Um, you thought the flood was bad? Have a look at the Book of Revelation.
Speaker 3Right.
Speaker 4So it's just all nasty proof texting.
Speaker 3Right.
Speaker 4And if you can just show them it's nasty proof texting, you can get somewhere. I, I do introduce them to, to Marcion, this fellow who, I mean, half the Christian world probably followed him sometime around 140 or so, um, who thought that the God of the Old Testament was a stupid, insufficient, foolish God, um, and Jesus came to reveal this God beyond God. And the great church said, "No, the God who created heaven and Earth is the God whom Jesus calls Father." So we start working on that, and then when I point out to my students, just starting with Matthew, you can't understand Matthew unless you understand the antecedent scripture, which Matthew holds sacred. When the letter of Timothy says, "All scripture is inspired by God or God-breathed," the scripture that the author has in mind is what we would call the Old Testament, 'cause the New Testament hadn't been written yet. And then show some respect for this text, and then help them read it in such a way that they can understand it as having ongoing meaning.
Speaker 2What I hear you saying, Professor Levine, is correct me if I'm wrong, it's as if the naively anti-Semitic, not the nasty anti-Semitic, but as it were, the naively anti-Semitic reading of Christian scripture reads the Old Testament as if it doesn't have the prophets in it, and as if the pro- and as if prophecy wasn't a live option within Judaism. Uh,
Speaker 4that's not what I'm saying.
Speaker 2Okay. Sorry, I don't hear you right.
Speaker 4There is a sense that the Old Testament can be mined for Christological concerns. I think part of the problem in theological education, and this is why, uh, and I don't know how you do it at Notre Dame, but here I have had some colleagues who teach, quote-unquote, "Old Testament," um, which they call Hebrew Bible, which of course marginalizes the Catholics who have Greek stuff in their Old Testament. When you come into the Old Testament classroom, you have to park Jesus at the door, and it all becomes a more historical, critical material or at least an, a, a non-Christian material. I insist in my New Testament class on calling that text the Old Testament because in the New Testament class, the New Testament reads the Old Testament through Christological lenses. So I give my students permission to find Jesus on every single page from Genesis up to where they're gonna end at Malachi as opposed to ending at Second Chronicles. But I say, "You can find Jesus on every page, but you have to find more than that." So one way of preventing the dismissal of the Old Testament, which they're gonna do if they can't find Jesus in it, and that's a problem with theological education, is to say, "You can find Him there, but you have to find more than that." And then they have permission to look and they don't feel that their theology is being bracketed out somehow, and then they find more stuff. That works.
Kids Stories to Santa
Speaker 4I think part of the Christian problem with the Old Testament, again, I'm using that term deliberately, is because little Christian children get the message that the Old Testament means less good testament, and the reason they do in, in substantial numbers is because when they're little, they're doing Old Testament stuff 'cause it's got all the good animal stories in it and it's got, you know, Prince of Egypt and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Daniel and the Lions Den. It's, it's got great stuff. And then somehow around age 12, 13, particularly for churches that pull little kids out before the sermon, right? They have like the little event for all ages and the kids march out so that, you know, the adults can do their thing. When they start getting into the main church, presuming you can keep them there, they don't hear the Old Testament 'cause it's not preached very often, so they get the idea that Old Testament is for children and it's all a bunch of children's stories, and then they mark it up along with children's stories. So Daniel and the Lions Den and Noah's Ark gets up there with the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. You can dump it because it's immature and it's unimportant, and what's really important is Matthew and Paul. So part of it is how Christian liturgical work functions Right.
Speaker 2I, I think you misunderstood my question, but it doesn't matter. It was a great answer. Okay. It was a creative misunderstanding. Um, it is, it's such a great answer that I'm really glad you misunderstood me. Well, why don't we move towards a, a break, and this is a good opportunity for me just to remind you to review and to give a five-star rating if you think it deserves it to Mining Scripture. I'd also like to mention another
1podcast at the University of Notre Dame, the Ethics and Culture Cast. If you're interested in discovering more things going on, on at Notre Dame, the Ethics and Culture Cast features conversations with professors, and fellows, and scholars of the De Nicola Center of Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame, which is committed to sharing the richness of the Catholic moral intellectual tradition through teaching, research, and dialogue across the discourses Welcome back to Minding Scripture. We were discussing some of the Christian misunderstandings of reading the New Testament and the Old, and I think Sri you were gonna, um, ask a follow-up- Right. Well,
Speaker 3actually, during, in our conversation during the break, uh, Amy-Jill mentioned the other side of the coin, and, and so perhaps you could follow up about that when we think about Christian, uh, misunderstandings of Jesus and his Jewish context. As you mentioned in the break, we also need to think about Jewish misunderstandings.
Speaker 4Absolutely. Thank you for, for letting me talk about that subject. I've been doing for the past, oh gosh, now 30 years or so, programs for synagogues or joint synagogue church programs, and we talk about Jesus in his Jewish context, and I hear from Jews unfortunate misunderstandings of Christians and Christianity and of the New Testament. So things like some Jews might say that whole Christian enterprise is just pagan, the idea of being the divine son, that's, that's Zeus fathering some hero like Hercules, and nobody would ever have believed in these miraculous births, and the idea of resurrection is nonsense. And to say, if you look at the Second Temple Jewish context where these stories begin, they all fit perfectly. So what happens if you take a contemporary liberal Jewish view and, and you retroject it two millennia ago? It doesn't fit. The more Christianity and Judaism came into their own thing as they separated, we lose those connections. So correcting Jewish misunderstandings about Jesus, correcting Jewish misunderstandings about Paul, who was not against Torah, he was just against Gentiles converting to Judaism. He wanted Gentiles to remain Gentiles, just to worship the God of Israel rather than to worship the pagan gods. To help Jews look at the New Testament as part of Jewish history rather than say-- I had an aunt who said to me years and years ago when I first started studying the New Testament, "Why are you studying that, that hateful, anti-Semitic book?" And I said to her, "Have you ever read it?" She said, "No. Why would I read that hateful, anti-Semitic book?" You know, so ignorance never helps anybody. So we have to correct Christian stereotypes about Jews and Judaism, both in the time of Jesus and today, and we also have to correct Jewish stereotypes about Christianity, both about Jesus and Paul, and about how they have been understood and how the New Testament has been understood over the past two thousand years.
Speaker 3Maybe I could follow up about that. I think on your faculty profile, you describe yourself as affiliating with an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, but being, uh, often, uh, unorthodox in your approaches. And I, and I take it that your, uh, interest in, interest is an understatement, your engagement with Christianity is part of, uh, what makes you unorthodox. In speaking with Jews about Jesus and about the New Testament, do you put forward Jesus as someone who, who can be helpful for Jews in thinking about their Judaism, or is it largely more a matter of avoiding, uh, uh, trying to, uh, kind of understand Jesus better in a way that will allow for kind of more positive engagement with understanding of Christians? Or is Jesus actually someone to learn from as a Jew?
Speaker 4Fair question. Um, I find the more I study the New Testament, the better Jew I become because it alerts me to gaps in Jewish history that you would find in the synagogue. We're very, very good in the synagogue up to the Maccabees, which is the second century BCE, and then like magic, we're in the Mishnah, and the whole first century disappears because there aren't any rabbinic sources from that particular time period. So in terms of filling in history, yes, I also find Jesus to be just an absolutely splendid teacher. I think the parables are just terrific, and they carry over time. They still work today if read appropriately. I think for Jews, the better thing for us Jews to do if we want to be better Jews is be- become more familiar with our own sources before we need to turn to the New Testament. We got plenty of our own stuff to read. Um, so I, I would start with, with the stuff that the Jewish community has said, "Yes, this is ours," rather than the New Testament, which the Jewish community has said, "This is not ours." But I do find if we want to understand our neighbors better as a sign of respect, then if we want our neighbors to understand Jews and Judaism as something more than the Shoah, the State of Israel, and an occasional production of Fiddler on the Roof, we might want to know a little bit more about what they're doing than Christmas and Easter that you get in the mall. That's that mutual respect thing, and if it helps us become better people with our, in our own tradition, so much the better.
1Well, m- maybe I'll follow up if this is a graceful transition about another sort of context in which you find yourself working, which is at, at Vanderbilt In, um, in Tennessee, I think you mentioned ear- at the beginning part of our program that you're originally from Massachusetts.
Speaker 3Mm-hmm.
1And, um, there you find yourself in the Bible Belt, but also in a, uh, I don't wanna get Vanderbilt upset with me by mischaracterizing anything, but a divinity school that may be more liberal progressive. Obviously, academic rigor is, um, is central to its identity as well. So, uh, could you speak a little bit about that? I understand also you, you've taught in Rome in a very different context with lots of Catholics all around. So maybe you could, yeah, share a bit about, uh, an anecdote or two or, uh, reflections on that.
Speaker 4Yeah. Uh, so Vanderbilt University Divinity School is predominantly Protestant. It's generally quite progressive on social issues. I was the founding director of something called the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality, and I directed that for 12 years, and that was designed to bring people who would have disagreements over issues of abortion or LGBTQI concerns, ordaining women, feminine language for God, how the body is understood, and so on, and we bring people to the table, particularly people who might disagree with each other, to surface issues and to avoid demonization of people on the other side. That program continues. We have a marvelous center, the Kelly Miller Smith Institute, for the study of the Black Church. We have a program in carceral studies. I myself have been teaching in a maximum security prison for over 20 years. So we're, we are remarkably liberal, we are progressive, and I love our politics 'cause I agree with them all. General Tennessee, Nashville's quite liberal. Nashville's the capital. It's also where all the country music gets recorded. Nashville's a lovely city. Over the county line, very few Jews, a lot of Church of Christ congregations, a lot of Southern Baptist congregations, and I find for the most part that they are extraordinarily welcoming and kind and compassionate and lovely. And they're, they're interested in Jews and Judaism for a number of people I've met. Um, I'm the first Jew they've ever actually encountered other than, say, on television, and they have lots of questions. Um, I have been asked where I had my horns removed, but only once here, and then once in, in North Carolina when I was doing my graduate work. So I find myself, to some extent, becoming an ambassador to more conservative Protestant churches, and they welcome me. I think the reason they do, and this is something my mother explained to me, 'cause my mother was very wise and, and had great understanding of the way the world worked. She said to me, "It's easier to accept differences if you're an infidel than if you're an apostate." So if I were a very liberal Protestant wandering into a, a very evangelical or fundamentalist church, I would be a heretic 'cause I would've had the truth and then lost it But coming in as an infidel, coming in as a Jew, I'm not expected to believe what they believe anyway. So if I agree with them on something, even the Jew gets it and they're very happy. And if I don't agree with them, I'm a Jew, what do I know? But I find them to be remarkably hospitable and remarkably interested in Jesus' Jewish context. Why? Because the more you know about that context, the more interesting Jesus becomes. And if I think he's interesting, in fact, if I think he's inspirational, which I do, and I'm not a Christian, then how much more so should people with whom I work then see him as even more inspirational and even more interesting?
Dialogue Across Divides
Speaker 3Could I maybe, uh, follow up? Uh, there are, there are so many different, I guess, vectors of engagement. Maybe, maybe one way to put it is you've edited The Jewish Annotated New Testament, as we mentioned, uh, and you've also, if I'm not mistaken, edited a series, Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings.
Speaker 4Yes, 13 volumes.
Speaker 3Right. Right. So no, no small task. Uh, and so I wonder kind of if you could reflect on these two kinds of approaches to the New Testament, Feminist Companions to the New Testament, Jewish Annotated New Testament, how the Jewish and the feminism are working together, and then maybe, uh, I mean, politics is such a, I guess, an overwhelming element of identity in, in modern America, but then it arguably, I guess, becomes tricky to kind of be navigating kind of Jewish Christian dialogue, Jewish Christian interaction coming from a liberal perspective, and then Jewish Christian interaction coming from a more conservative perspective. How do you sort these out? Do you find them being, uh... Well, how do you, how do you navigate, I suppose, the, the potential minefield in, in these intersections?
Speaker 4Yeah. Well, if you begin with the idea that everybody is in the image and likeness of God, and you avoid demonization, and you listen carefully to people whose views you do not hold, and they know that you're listening carefully, and you ask questions about understanding rather than say, "You ignorant slut, how could you possibly have said that?" I find every once in a while that my own presuppositions get challenged. I find an argument which is coherent, although I do not agree with it, and then I have to work a little bit harder to figure out, well, if it's coherent, then how do I change this person's mind, or how do I get this person to see the coherence in my own argument? Um, I'm not looking, whether doing feminist work or doing Jewish Christian relations work, for everybody to agree with me. That would make my life much easier. Uh, but I'm looking for a sense of mutual understanding and respect, so I can say, "I might not go there, but I can see where you get it." And if it's a political issue, which is something to be legislated, then to try to figure out what is the best common good that even if I disagree with your basic stance, how do we get to where we think the best social good would lie? And those become very helpful conversations.
Feminist Infancy Reads
1We were gonna maybe turn back to some questions about the Gospels. Francesca, did you wanna get-
Speaker 2I was going to ask if you have a feminist take on the infancy narratives, following on from Zvi's question.
Speaker 4I have multiple feminist takes on the infancy narratives 'cause
Speaker 2every- Can you tell us about it?
Speaker 4Sure. If you start with the Gospel of Matthew, which mentions four women in the genealogy, uh, and then you get to Mary Even there, it's open to multiple possibilities. The standard reading, um, although it's, it's more or less gone away because of feminist pressure, is that these women, Tamar, and Rahab, uh, and Bathsheba, and Ruth, were all sinners and Jesus comes to redeem them. Well, no, not so much. The men with whom they're paired might be more in that category, like King David. Or that they're all outsiders. Um, and some of that's true. Tamar's probably a Gentile, Rahab is definitely a Gentile. Ruth is a Moabite. Bathsheba's married to Uriah the Hittite, and he's the one who's mentioned. She's, she's simply identified as the wife of Uriah. Except Second Temple Judaism looked at these women as converts to Judaism, so outsiders maybe, but converts, yes. What I'm inclined to do is, and this is from my feminist view, but it's also my reading of Matthew, is I look at these women generally as acting in a righteous way when the men with whom they are paired do not. Judah is unwilling to marry off his younger son to Tamar after the first two sons die. This is a s- system called Levirate marriage. And she winds up, uh, seducing him, and then when she gets pregnant, he says, "Oh, fine, go kill her." And she's pregnant by, uh, Judah, and she's got his tokens, his, his driver's license and whatnot. And she says, "Look, here, I've, I've got your staff and, and your ring." And he said, "Yeah, she's more righteous than I am because I have withheld my son from her." And if you know Matthew, Matthew talks about righteousness. The Greek is dikaiosune all the time, and there's that word righteousness sitting right there in Genesis 38. I went,
1Wow,
Speaker 4these women represent the righteous ones. Let's look at the other women in, in the gospel and see if they are righteous so that when, for example, in Matthew 15, I get this Canaanite mother and Matthew calls her a Canaanite, I think, oh, but I've got a Canaan- I've got Canaanite mothers in, in the genealogy. That's what Tamar is. That's what Rahab is. I bet this Canaanite woman in chapter 15 is gonna be the righteous one, and Jesus is gonna have to be the one to learn a lesson. And by gosh, that's exactly what happens.
1Hmm.
Speaker 4That's a feminist reading
1Well, I don't know if this is, uh, too dramatic of a jump. Francesca, I was gonna ask about Islam. Is that okay, or did you wanna-
Speaker 2Yeah, that was very helpful, very interesting. Thank you.
1Okay. So I don't know how to contextualize this exactly, but maybe just to say that my understanding is that for many decades, people, I don't know if it's post-World War II, post-Shoah context, but there's been a lot of interest in Jewish Christian dialogue and, um, conversations. But more recently, you know, there's talk of trialogue now. This phrase Abrahamic religions is now become common, although I, I believe its genesis was really only in the 20th century, but now it's, um, it's the thing to speak of Abrahamic religions. Does that mean re-shifting your scholarly vision in some ways now to think about Islam together with Judaism and Christianity? Have you been involved in trialogues? Yeah, how does that change things when we now conceive of the Abrahamic religions?
Speaker 4Well, I'm not a big fan of the term because I find that it, it waters down the differences, and I think the differences are more important. The Muslim story of Abraham is not the same story as the story you get from Tanakh and then rabbinic materials. Although there were some links between, say, stories that the rabbis tell and stories that get picked up in Islamic materials. That's a different Abraham than one finds in the New Testament. Right. And this whole Abrahamic tradition thing just, it I, I, it's like talking about Hebrew Bible as opposed, or in, in your podcast title, we have the Bible and the Quran. Whose Bible? 'Cause the Christian Bible is not the Jewish Bible. Why isn't it the Tanakh, the Old and New Testaments, and the Quran?
Speaker 3Brevity, I think.
1Okay, now I'm gonna have to edit my introduction.
Speaker 4And, and for liberal Protestants, the Hebrew Bible. I've been in trialogues. I f- I found them generally unsatisfactory because it was too much going on. A lot of it became show and tell, which I'm not really interested in. Almost invariably, the Jews and the Muslims wound up on one side of the table, and the Christians wound up on the other side of the table, 'cause Jews and Muslims knew what it was to talk about law, and the Christians were like, "We're not really there." So I thought that was fun.
Speaker 3Right. Right.
Speaker 4And the Protestants were way on the outside, and the Catholics would somehow come over to the Jew and the Muslim table 'cause we got ritual we could talk about. My problem with all of this is I'm hesitant to talk about a tradition unless I can read the primary sources. And when I was in graduate school, after the Greek and the Hebrew and the Aramaic and the Coptic and the Syriac and the German and the French and the smattering of Latin and the smattering of Italian, they said, "It's now time to learn Arabic." And I, in retrospect, because I was so stupid, said, "No, I don't think I'm gonna need it to do New Testament studies." So since I can't read Arabic, I can't read the original, and I can't read the earliest commentaries, and I can't read the modern comment- many modern commentaries that are being produced by Muslims. So if I can't have that expertise, I really can't participate in the type of high-end dialogue that I can do when it's, when I'm dealing with Jews and Christians.
1Right, the more, more philological, more, um, granular sorts of textual studies.
Speaker 4Mm-hmm. Absolutely. And I don't know the history of the interpretation. I mean, you can do Bible study by looking at Bible, but in order to understand Judaism and Christianity, you, you need to know how these texts are interpreted
1Right. There, there's been-- I'll, I'll turn things over to you, Zvi, but just to mention, there's been some interesting books by Aaron Hughes and I think Jon Levenson on the problem of the Abrahamic common ground. Yeah, only in Islam does Abraham go to, to Mecca with Ishmael, for example, so there are interesting divergences, so.
Speaker 3Right. And I think, uh, yeah, you mentioned also something that you mentioned in the break, uh, Amy-Jill, about the possibility for certain kinds of, uh, say, m-more critical dialogues lies in the possibility to find common ground. That was the point that I thought that was really interesting. You mentioned in the break that there's a tradition of Jewish self-criticism, Jews criticizing Jews, that is made possible by, uh, the ethnic character of Judaism, so that one is a Jew even, uh, e-even if you're a bad Jew. And so, and that enables a certain kind of criticism. And then you mentioned a kind of foundation for dialogue with others, say, outside of one's kind of political identity is grounded in or can be grounded in a recognition of a common humanity and the image of God. Uh, and I suppose the positive spin or, or the kind of apology in the traditional sense for this idea of, of an Abrahamic religion's common ground might lie in, you know, precisely as o-offering a kind of a basis for constructive dialogue. But as you say, I suppose, right, it is these foundations or ki- kind of commonalities can also create their own problems or perhaps in some cases, uh, perhaps, uh, paper over differences. But there is, I suppose, uh, that desire to find that common ground that will enable the dialogue.
Favorite Gospel and Wrap
Speaker 3But I wanted to kind of perhaps end with a question about, you know, how you've thought about the New Testament. Gabriel mentioned at the outset having co-written a commentary on the Gospel of Luke. Do you have a favorite gospel? Is it Luke or, or did you simply come into that for other, uh, more contingent reasons?
Speaker 4Oh, I came into Luke because Ben Witherington III asked me if I would do this volume with him as part of the Cambridge Commentary series, and it is an experimental volume. It's the only volume we know of, of full commentary on a gospel written by a Jew and a, a very staunch evangelical Methodist Uh, Ben is a, a dear friend. He's been a dear friend for decades. Theologically, we agree on pretty much nothing. When it comes to Luke, we, we did not agree on much, although on occasion, we, we both agreed on something, and that shocked both of us. And what we thought we would do in this volume is show people what biblical scholars do. Typically, we, we make our case, and then in the footnotes, we put people who disagree with us, if we're honest, and sometimes we just ignore them entirely. Ben and I, we have conversation in this book. Ben thinks this, I think that. Ben gets one back, and then agreeing to disagree, we move on. So Ben thinks that pretty much everything that Luke reports actually happened. I have my doubts about a, a huge amount of it. Ben thinks that Luke is very pro-Jewish. I think Luke loves all things Jewish, but is not real thrilled with Jews, unless they follow Jesus. Ben thinks that Luke is a feminist. I, I wouldn't even date him.
Speaker 2You wouldn't date him? W- which, which of the gospel authors would you date?
Speaker 4Oh, Matthew in a heartbeat. But Luke, no, I don't trust Luke. And John, absolutely not, even if I could get water turned into wine. So what we try to do is show how biblical scholars do what we do, and sh- show it in a civil manner, rather than in the kind of nasty, academic way where, you know, so and so makes the following argument, but he's clearly wrong for the, you know. So we're trying to do this in a nice way to model how you can read the Bible and disagree with each other, and you can still remain friends.
1Well, Amy-Jill, it's not only been an honor, but really a pleasure. It's been fun. Thank you so much. I don't want to end things prematurely, as Fi or Francesca, I think we're about at the end of our time.
Speaker 2Yeah, I think we better wrap it up. It was, it was a lot of fun. Thank you.
Speaker 4Thank you very much. What a joy to talk with you all.
1Well, friends, thank you for joining us on Mining Scripture. Please spread the news about the podcast, and don't forget to rate and review. Be sure to be with us for the next episode of Mining Scripture, where divine word and human reason meet.