Amy-Jill Levine is possibly the best-prepared and most widely experienced interpreter to take on the challenge of reading the parables of Jesus from a Jewish perspective. One of the features of the birth of a critical approach to the Bible in the nineteenth century was the poorly focused location of what has come to us as text within the original life settings that produced those texts. As we now recognize, one of the many weaknesses of those early decades was the dominance of highly sophisticated German-based Christian scholarship, eventually imitated by other European and American Christian scholars. There was little or no dialogue with the millennia of Jewish literary, legal, and storytelling traditions.
Indeed, some of the founding figures (for different ideological reasons) rejected the possible contribution of the Bible's Jewish roots. The fundamental work identifying the sources of the Pentateuch (Julius Wellhausen, 1844–1918) was confessedly anti-Semitic. One of the founders of the form-critical approach (Rudolf Bultmann, 1884–1976), although deeply committed to the Jewish cause and a member of the Confessing Church during the period of National Socialism, claimed that there was little in the Hebrew Scriptures that could guide his interpretative process of “demythologising” the New Testament.
Levine has spent decades interpreting the New Testament and teaching Jewish studies at Vanderbilt University, a research institution founded and inspired by Christian (Methodist) traditions. In recent years, she has been the welcome guest of Christian audiences in the United States and all over the world. She is a yearly visitor to my native Australia, largely sponsored by Catholic universities and Catholic education offices. The latter sponsorship is important, as she addresses and creates enthusiasm among large audiences of educators who are in a position to introduce a right-headed approach to the Jewish roots of Christianity to future generations.
She has already made a lasting contribution (with Marc Zvi Brettler) to the epoch-making Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), an edition of the New Testament providing highly informative Jewish background to the NRSV text via well-placed footnotes, and a collection of outstanding essays by Jewish scholars that bring the book to a close.
The subtitle of the book under review must be taken seriously: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi. Most of Levine's earlier work has dealt with the literary and theological traditions of formative Christianity, with a focus on the Gospel of Matthew. This book moves in a different direction. Her study of the Lost Sheep, Lost Coin, and Lost Son, the Good Samaritan, the Kingdom of Heaven Is like Yeast, the Pearl of Great Price, the Mustard Seed, the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, the Laborers in the Vineyard, the Widow and the Judge, and the Rich Man and Lazarus is an exercise in identifying, through the parables, the person and teaching of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. She locates him firmly in the world of his first-century Jewish origins as a “controversial rabbi.” Her contribution, despite its chatty nature, should be the source of considerable discussion, as are most discussions of the figure of the Jesus of 4–30 CE. All such studies, despite passionate claims to “objectivity” from very learned authors, necessarily transmit something of the “subjective” impressions of the author. It must be so; Jesus is simply too important for the lives (and deaths) of too many for this not to be the case.
In terms of the theoretical underpinning of her approach to the complex criteria used by contemporary scholars to uncover that figure, she has little time for methods that have emerged among learned groups that determine the issue before it is genuinely discussed on the basis of the text because of already made ideological decisions about what Jesus could have and would have said. This criticism is aimed at the Jesus Seminar, and others who claim to be working in a similar “objective” fashion. At all times, Levine reads the gospel texts with great care, skillfully using the possibilities of the Greek in the New Testament texts, its Semitic linguistic background, the technicalities of Jewish halakah and haggadah, and their possible setting within the day-to-day life and teaching of a Jewish rabbi.
Anyone who knows Levine personally will hear her voice behind the “in your face” dialogue, the off-the-cuff popular Yiddish and United States vernacular, and the regular sorties into her own life experiences. Her freshness addresses the gospel texts in a fashion that speaks very directly to her readers. I suspect this comes from the contexts within which much of this material has been shared: the lectures, conferences, and discussions with “hands-on” people in the Christian tradition, mentioned above. Her readings of the parables are driven by a desire to clear away some of the clutter that has gathered around these “short stories of Jesus” over the Christian centuries.
She is especially concerned with the Christian interpretation of Jesus' parables and the idea of the moral superiority of the “new” religion that has its beginnings in Jesus, as opposed to the Judaism to which he belonged. On the whole, she is concerned with three aspects of Christian interpretation of the parables:
1. Claims that Jesus' teaching rejects Jewish purity traditions
2. The use of Jewish literary and legal traditions that are too late to have had any impact upon the teaching of Jesus in the early part of the first Christian century
3. An understanding of Jesus that separates his person and his teaching from Jewish traditions, however “enigmatically” he may have interpreted them
Others have described the contents of this book. My task is to respond to it as a Christian interpreter. Levine has searched high and low to find examples of Christian interpreters who trace a rejection of Jewish purity practices somewhere in almost every parable she examines. She clearly has a justifiable “ax to grind.” But too much time is devoted to this question across the book, and little credit is given to Christian scholars who do not have recourse to this strategy. On this issue, it is important to recognize what Levine is doing: tracing the short stories of Jesus, the rabbi. She insists that he identified fully with Jewish practices, and that the purity laws are an essential part of Jewish self-identity. They are important distinguishing features of Jewish life and practice. Jesus would have lived them, just as a devout, practicing Catholic is identified by abstaining from eating meat on a Friday and going to Mass on Sunday. For Levine, Jesus of Nazareth fitted into his world, however much Christian interpreters have claimed that he challenged Jewish purity laws.
But Levine takes a subtle hermeneutical stance. It is important for Christian readers of the New Testament to accept the literary and theological context that Matthew, Mark, and Luke use for the setting of a parable in Jesus' life story. For example, Luke 15:1–2 generates the interpretative setting for the parables of the lost sheep (15:3–7), the lost coin (15:8–10), and the two lost sons (15:11–32). The Lukan agenda in reporting these three parables is determined by this introduction: “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them’” (Luke 15:1–2). This setting is an essential element in the Christian interpretation of its Sacred Scriptures, but Levine, in her search for the controversial rabbi, insists that all such “settings” for the parables, provided by the gospel writers, must be dismissed if we hope to reach back to Jesus (on Luke 15:1–2, see Levine's comment “Luke misleads by turning the parables into allegories” [27]; see also her criticism of Luke's “domestication” of the Parable of the Widow and the Judge [235–41]). But what is the “inspired Scripture” for the Christian: what we find in Luke 15 (and elsewhere where the Evangelists provide an interpretative setting), or Levine's reading of what she recreates from the life setting of the historical Jesus?
For Christian readers, this is a very significant hermeneutical principle. If Christianity were founded only on what can be discovered about the historical Jesus, then its foundation would be fragile indeed. Without the sublime interpretation of the universal saving significance of the death and resurrection of Jesus so eloquently developed by the apostle Paul in the 50s of the first Christian century (see for examples Romans 3:21–26 and 5:12–21), there would not be much to Christian soteriology. Without the Johannine preexistent Logos, one with God (John 1:1–2), who came into the world to make that God known (1:14–18; 3:13–16; 17:3), especially in his loving self-gift (13:34–35; 15:12, 13, 17; 19:30), only to return to the glory that was his before the world was made (17:5, 24), there would not be much to its Christology. But neither the Pauline soteriology nor the Johannine Christology is articulated by the historical Jesus, however much he may have inspired them both. The same must be said for the Synoptic interpretations of the Jesus story.
Historically, Levine may be right about what Jesus of Nazareth thought of Jewish purity traditions. But there is rabbinic evidence that Second Temple Judaism and its aftermath had differing understandings of those traditions, and abundant evidence that the early Christian Church found them impractical. The latter hardly needs arguing, as it is found in gospel texts (see, among many examples, Mark 7:1–23) and in the tensions found in the early church reported by Paul (see Gal 2:11–14), and Luke's Acts of the Apostles (see, for example, 10:1–48; 15:1–21). Here a difficult interpretative issue emerges: did the early church invent its eventual abandoning of the purity laws as it opened itself to a Gentile mission, or did this practice have some basis in the life and teaching of Jesus?
I also call attention to a certain sleight of hand in Levine's use of Jewish traditions in order to make her case. Regularly and rightly she is critical of Christian scholars (e.g., Joachim Jeremias and more recent commentators) who have used late Jewish traditions, and retrojected them into the life and teaching of Jesus. This is an important exegetical principle that should always be followed with care when Christians turn to Jewish sources. We are tempted to make favorable links across the centuries. When in doubt, such sources should not be cited in support of a Christian interpretation. Levine, however, falls into the same trap. She knows her Jewish sources very well, and uses them very adroitly. She also frames her use of them carefully, indicating that it “may” be late, and that the tradition found there “may” have influenced the world of Jesus. I offer a few examples: her use of the third-century Mishnah (39, 229–30), tractates from the fifth-century Babylonian Talmud (263), the Talmudic tractate Baba Qamma (260), the post-Talmudic Semachot de Rabbi Chiyah (217), the eleventh-century Midrash on Psalms (39–40, 217), the equally late Song of Songs Rabbah (275), and her occasional use of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, an original pre-Christian document that contains many later Christian interpolations. I ask that we all play by the same rules.
I do not wish to leave readers with any illusions. This is a valuable book, and deserves to be widely read, but with careful attention to the above Christian hermeneutical principles. Levine's insistence upon the centrality of the Samaritan, and not the purity concerns of the priest and the Levite, is exactly right (70–106), as are many of her interpretations.
The final chapter on “the power of disturbing stories” (275–82) catches what lies at the heart of the parabolic teaching of Jesus. In my opinion, one of the reasons for Jesus' eventual execution was his parables of the kingdom. His main agenda was not Jewish purity laws, but to question a widely accepted understanding of God, God's kingdom, and what God asks of us. Amy-Jill Levine has made this very clear. However, like all of us, when she gazes into Sacred Scripture, she sometimes finds there a mirror image of her own face.
