The Misunderstood Jew: the Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, Amy-Jill Levine, Harper Collins, New York, 2006
In the introduction, Amy-Jill Levine tells of her Catholic friends and school when she was growing up. Her parents had told her that the church was like a cousin to the synagogue: they worshipped the same God, and believed in the golden rule. She says that she also knew that although the New Testament could be read as anti-Jewish, it did not have to be read that way. Her fascinating story of a Jewish theologian becoming a lecturer in a Protestant University becomes even more fascinating when she is able to speak of the Gospel passages with far deeper knowledge than most of us have. We claim to acknowledge the Jewishness of Jesus, but now that I have read this book I realise how little about Judaism I really knew. As Levine says,
church homilies and sermons… and even respected academic monographs depict, both explicitly and implicitly, a Judaism that is monolithic, mired in legal minutiae, without spiritual depth, and otherwise everything (they hope) Christianity is not.(p119)
In her section on stereotyping Judaism, she lists several overstatements or misperceptions and slanders against first century Judaism that appear with some consistency in classroom and church. Seven of them, she claims, are endemic in the Christian popular imagination. She is so accurate. I have taught or been taught all of them. As she says, the proclamation of the church can, and should stand on its own; it does not require at artificial foil, and anti-Jewish bias, or an overstated distinction. I would love to attend some of her New Testament classes in Nashville, Tennessee. At least I can read her book, and I hope some Eremos members will too.