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

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Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 261.26 EAN: 9780061137785 ISBN: 0061137782 Label: HarperOne Manufacturer: HarperOne Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 256 Publication Date: 2007-12-01 Publisher: HarperOne Release Date: 2007-11-20 Studio: HarperOne
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Editorial Reviews: In the The Misunderstood Jew, scholar Amy-Jill Levine helps Christians and Jews understand the "Jewishness" of Jesus so that their appreciation of him deepens and a greater interfaith dialogue can take place. Levine's humor and informed truth-telling provokes honest conversation and debate about how Christians and Jews should understand Jesus, the New Testament, and each other.
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: Read this book Comment: If you love Jesus, you should read this book. If you keep these type of books around to refer to them, buy this book. Otherwise, borrow it from the library or share the cost with friends. It does have some helpful information, but is not comprehensive in telling us about first century Judaism. It is more helpful than not, so it gets three stars. Customer Rating: Summary: Must reading for any thoughtful Christian - or Jew Comment: 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. Customer Rating: Summary: Jesus is Jewish! Comment: 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. Customer Rating: Summary: Towards Mutual Understanding Comment: This is a first-rate publication that takes the reader into the Jewishness of Jesus in a vivid manner while sensitive to Jewish-Christian differences. The book is both scholarly as well as pastoral for it seeks to establish common links and points of commonality between the religions. A must-read for anyone interested in Christian-Jewish dialogue today....and for understanding the outlook of much of the New Testament. Customer Rating: Summary: Creating a necessary dialogue Comment: Relations between Jews and Christians have improved significantly since Louis Brandeis was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by Woodrow Wilson in 1916, an action that sparked widespread hatred against Jews across the country. In fact, one of the sitting justices, a Christian, shunned Brandeis by not talking to him and even leaving the room whenever the new justice spoke. Despite the overall decline in anti-Semitism in America, occasional incidents, including attempts to convert Jews to Christianity, still occur. However, they should remind us that we must continue to be vigilant against its reappearance. For example, a year or so ago, an inebriated Mel Gibson, surrounded by three adoring women at a bar in a California city, was quoted by a reporter mouthing angry attacks against Jews who,he claimed, were causing many geopolitical problems in the world. In the fall of 2007, the conservative author and political activist Ann Coulter, told a TV news reporter that Jews need to be "completed," a code word for being converted to Christianity. Similarly, on Martin Luther King's birthday in January of 2007, a conservative Republican state legislator to the Virginia legislature, after having nonchalantly told black Americans to "get over" slavery, repeated the erroneous view still held by some fundamentalist and bigoted Christians that Jews killed Jesus Christ. A few weeks after this unfortunate incident, the Richmond Times-Dispatch featured a story in which it showed a Jewish delegate giving the Republican legislator a warm birthday embrace after he entered the floor of the Virginia House of Delegates. So much for the oft-held belief that Jews lack the capacity to be forgiving and compassionate!!! Fortunately, there are serious scholars in our midst who can help us challenge the lingering prejudices and hatreds against Jews and point the way to a possible dialogue to gain a better understanding between our two faiths. In her excellent book, "The Misunderstood Jew," Dr. Amy-Jill Levine writes eloquently about the importance of Christians seeing Jesus as the Jew that he always was. She is concerned that some Christians view Jesus as a Jew only in a superficial sense. In fact, she writes, Jesus was a Jew from his birth to his death. Moreover, he ate, talked and dressed like a Jew and obeyed the laws faithfully during his entire lifetime. Dr. Levine's book offers excellent advice to believers who are troubled by the gospel writer John's statement that "the only way to the Father is through his Son," a statement that clearly implies to me that Dante's circles of hell may lie ahead for those who do not accept Christ as their Savior. Importantly, she provides a view of the Good Samaritan that is historically at odds with the way in which most Christians see the story, but which offers, I believe, a credible and suitable ending for both faiths. Some Christians may have forgotten that the ancient Hebrews gave them many gifts, including the idea of monotheism, the wisdom and learning of the great Hebrew prophets, the Psalms, the Ten Commandments and lastly, and very importantly, Jesus himself who became their Christ. Importantly, as evidence of his Jewishness, Dr. Levine writes that Jesus' reference to the two commandments cited in the gospel of Mark 12:28-34--love God with all your heart and soul and love your neighbor as yourself--are in the Old Testament books of Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and Leviticus 19:18. Thus, they were not original to Christians, but provide compelling evidence that Jesus embodied the teachings of the ancient Hebrew prophets which some Christians often forget or do not choose to acknowledge. In fact, similar verses as these should help establish the basis for constructive dialogue between the two faiths. "If possible," she writes, Christians and Jews need to "read the Scriptures in an interfaith setting." Furthermore, Dr. Levine writes that the "elimination of anti-Jewish readings must come from theologians, from those members of the church who conclude that anti-Judaism is wrong and who insist on Christian sensitivity on the issue." Above all, she says that "we must make every effort to see through each other's eyes, hear through each other's ears, and interpret with a consciousness of each other's sensitivities." Perhaps if we can begin the serious dialogues such as Dr. Levine advocates, we can further eliminate more instances of anti-Jewish feelings that continue to lurk in the minds of some people. As a lifelong Christian,I highly recommend this book. Lee Rice More Reviews