A Very Jewish Jesus

The Christmas season, as Christians like to call it, tends to highlight the routine ways Christians and Jews fail to understand and respect each other. Even enlightened Christians are apt to forget that some of us are not busy celebrating the birth of Jesus; and Jews can feel alienated and annoyed by the omnipresence of Christian imagery—not to mention all the really bad music on the radio. What better time for a book that speaks to both groups and sets forth a new understanding of Jesus as a profoundly Jewish spiritual teacher? In The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, Amy-Jill Levine, a professor at the Vanderbilt Divinity School, paints a vivid portrait of Jesus as a man who was not only born a Jew, but whose teachings and actions were entirely consistent with first century Jewish belief. Levine feels that Jesus is too often seen by Jews and Christians alike as representing a fundamental break with ancient Jewish traditions. There is a long history of Christian biblical scholarship that defines Christian ideals in opposition to ideas about Judaism that are false—for example, that Judaism is a religion of rigid, oppressive laws, while Christianity is a religion of grace. Such errors have fostered distrust and contempt between the faiths, even in the absence of rank prejudice. Levine wants to reclaim Jesus’ Jewishness, not to score points in some Christianity vs. Judaism debate, but to enhance the understanding of both faiths and to promote their peaceful, respectful coexistence. Levine certainly comes well equipped for her task. She is a highly respected New Testament scholar, and she’s also a Jew who embraces her religion. While growing up in a heavily Catholic neighborhood in a suburb of New Bedford, Mass., Levine developed a fascination with Christianity. In the introduction to The Misunderstood Jew, she recounts fond, funny memories of envying her playmates’ First Communion dresses and wanting to grow up to be pope. She enjoyed many of the stories of the New Testament, hearing in them familiar echoes of Jewish lore. She felt deeply wounded when, at age 7, a Christian friend told her, “You killed our Lord”—a reference to the belief that Jews were responsible for the Crucifixion. Levine has devoted her professional life to helping Christians and Jews see their commonality in the same clear way she saw it during childhood. In addition to her academic career, she has worked directly with interfaith programs at churches and synagogues in the United States, Europe and Asia. She has no qualms about putting her scholarship in the service of cultural change and declares her agenda up front in The Misunderstood Jew: “Unless we Jews understand the beliefs and practices and histories of our Christian neighbors and unless Christians understand Jews and Judaism—we’ll never achieve the shalom (“peace”) that the children of Abraham (including Muslims) all claim to be seeking.” To that end, The Misunderstood Jew undertakes an extended examination of the New Testament, especially the Synoptic Gospels, with a view to helping the reader understand just how thoroughly embedded Jesus was in his own religion. She works her way through many of the best known stories and parables, placing them in the context of first century Judaism. She offers an exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer, explaining its roots in Jewish tradition, and she points out that the fundamental principle of the Golden Rule was already a part of Judaism long before Jesus appeared. When asked whether such analysis is really useful to the ordinary Christian, Levine says, “Those who argue that all they need for understanding Jesus is an open heart and an open Bible are, I think, not treating the Gospels with the respect they deserve. Jesus lived in a particular time and place, and he taught a particular community—not Greeks, or Mayans, or Aleuts, but Jews in Galilee and Judea.… Anyone who seeks to understand Jesus should take seriously his own cultural context, and seek to hear him through first century Jewish ears.” Levine is a rigorous scholar, and this kind of close biblical analysis could be heavy going in different hands, but she has an engaging, crystal-clear prose style that makes the book a pleasant read. She’s not afraid to be accessible, and she manages to haul in references to such pop figures as Adam Sandler and Kinky Friedman in a way that doesn’t seem forced. The book is by no means simplistic, though, and Levine doesn’t shy away from criticizing theological error, no matter how well intentioned. For example, she takes exception to some Christian churches’ attempts to embrace Jesus’ Jewish heritage by holding a seder, or Passover meal. “For the church, the seder is replaced by the Eucharist, as the Gospel of John intimates when it speaks of Jesus as the ‘Lamb of God.…’ If the Christ is the paschal lamb, then it would be not only historically inaccurate but theologically unwarranted for Christians to celebrate the seder.” Levine also has some surprisingly harsh criticism of other elements of liberal Christianity, most notably liberation theology, which she feels has been especially egregious in portraying Jewish tradition as oppressive, in order to promote the notion of Jesus as a radical champion of the poor and of women. Her comments on Judaism’s misconceptions about Christianity, it must be said, are far more general. She confines herself largely to exhorting Jews not to come to interfaith dialogue with a sense of grievance and to value the New Testament as a window into historical Judaism. Though she is at pains to point out that neither faith needs to sacrifice its beliefs in the service of interfaith harmony, and that ultimately Christians and Jews must “agree to disagree,” The Misunderstood Jew endorses a vision of ultimate unity. “As different as they are, church and synagogue have the same goals, the same destination, whether called olam habah, the kingdom of heaven, or the messianic age. The two cars pull into the same station, and they have the same stationmaster there to welcome them.” It’s a rosy picture of interfaith hand-holding, and seems a bit naive in light of complex present day religious hostilities. Anti-Semitism still lingers throughout much of the Christian world, while a sizable portion of the Muslim world sees Christian and Jew united in a hateful alliance against Islam. But in this time when religion is frequently employed to foster bigotry and knee jerk emotional response, The Misunderstood Jew is Levine’s statement of faith in knowledge and the power of love. “The world is not lacking in opinions,” she says. “It is, however, lacking in both education and empathy.”