Amy-Jill Levine
Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2021
157 pp., $17.99 (paper); $17.99 (ebook)
Abingdon Press has an excellent introduction to this book and to Professor Amy-Jill Levine that can be accessed here. I purchased the book and did not buy the DVD and Leader Guide that goes with this. I believe that this is a book that might be better read in a group than individually, as I did. The book goes fast.
Amy-Jill Levine knows what she's talking about. If you look her up you will find that she is Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace and University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita, and Professor of New Testament Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University. We learn from her biography that she is a renowned scholar and teacher, and that she has written five books on Christian theology and coedited the Jewish Annotated New Testament. We also learn that she taught New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute and was the first Jew to do so. She attends an Orthodox synagogue. Given the span of her work and interests, it might be better to say that the five books she has written deal with Jewish and Christian or monotheistic theologies. And who am I to argue with her?
I got a little anxious when I read that she self-describes as a "Yankee Jewish feminist" who taught New Testament "in a Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt." It's a great thing to be a Jewish feminist with an understanding of the New Testament, but "Yankee" and "the buckle of the Bible Belt" do bother me.
Amplify Media is running a study and learning session on Professor Levine's Signs and Wonders: A Beginner's Guide to the Miracles of Jesus and has resources available to help with individual and group study. You can access that here.
The Difficult Words of Jesus has an introduction, six chapters, and an afterword. It's short on footnotes. The introduction lays out the approach that the author intended to take, but I believe that the chapters depart a bit from that. The afterword also struck me as a departure. Amy-Jill Levine keeps the conversation going throughout the book, and real conversations wander. I can imagine having dinner with her and a few others and there never being an uncomfortable silence. And for all of her considerable academic qualifications, this is an easy-to-read book.
It helps greatly that the author comes to the texts that she is examining with several translations of the Bible close by and the courage to ask some hard questions and suggest alternate readings and understandings. It also helps that she is familiar with divergent Christian traditions and reasoning and that she usually refrains from judging. She examines Mark 10:21, Luke 14:26-27, Mark 10:44, Matthew 10:5b-6, Matthew 25:30, and John 8:44a.
Levine's examination of Matthew 25:30 fell easy to me because I tend towards universalism, or the idea that there is no eternal hell or damnation. The look at Mark 10:44 ("Whoever wishes to be first among you must be a slave to all.") helped give me a different understanding of the text than she intended, and I struggled to understand what the problem is that she is addressing. The fault there is mine, not the author's. The sixth chapter of the book takes up John 8:44a ("You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father's desires.") and ends inconclusively after Levine makes a strong case for Christians taking on the responsibility of dealing with anti-Semitism in our churches and faith communities. The brief afterword is a kind of backstop or safe space that encourages further study, but it falls short on making concrete suggestions on how to proceed. Perhaps it is not Levine's place or purpose to tell others how to manage their homes, but we would benefit from a gentle push.
Along the way through the book there are a few surprises. Levine makes a passing comment that Jewish law is, or was, easy to follow without going into detail. In another place she says that John Chrysostom (347-407), the archbishop of Constantinople whose theology and insights still inform Orthodox Christianity, complained that Christians in Antioch were attending synagogue worship in his day. This yells for explanation. That explanation may begin with her point that Jewish-Gentile theological relations in Jerusalem prior to and during Christ's lifetime were not as bad as many Christians believe. There are places where she says that something in the Christian Bible is not true or accurate but does not explain why or how what is being said got there or what the context for the phrase is. She's great with translations and suggesting logical alternate translations that give the reader a new, and usually better, understanding of the text. Her reminder to Christians that Abraham was not a Jew is made almost in passing, but there is much in the book to help Christians remember that monotheism extends beyond Judaism and Christianity.
Christians who understand that the 66 books of the Hebrew and Christian Testaments were given by divine inspiration and inerrantly reveal the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation, and who believe that whatever is not contained therein is not to be enjoined as an article of faith (loosely quoting from the Articles of Faith of the Church of the Nazarene and understanding that this is a commonly held Christian view), will struggle with this. Levine sometimes anticipates arguments against what she is saying and counters those views. If Levine is correct and the text is wrong, then the text is not inerrantly revealing the will of God. Then what?
The easy answer that requires hard struggle---the one that I think Levine is suggesting---is that people of faith make doubt and dialogue with God part of their living faith. Levine is good when she talks about love and faith as being involuntary. "As I understand it," she says, "faith is something to which one is called---a vocation---and not the conclusion of a logical argument." She even makes a case for a kind of predestination, a conservative position for someone who is on the liberal side of the spectrum, before she backs out of the gray area she has created. And she is open to more than the 66 books referenced above.
Here I want to suggest that predestination might be a theological fact, but who is predestined to salvation may only be known to God. If I am somehow correct in this, I then have to question my own universalism. What happens to everyone else? Levine doesn't take up this question in the way that I am formulating it, but she lets this flow into the more common (and perhaps more interesting) question of free will. She wants to interrogate everything.
Levine makes a common contrast between a morally and ethically driven Judaism that encourages inquiry and that is not motivated by guilt and fear and a Christianity that claims to hold answers and final authority and often does inspire guilt and fear. She does not say this, but it seems inescapable that any religion claiming such authority will always be in battle mode and will experience fracturing and factionalism over time. One of the leading concerns in the book is how Scripture is used (or misused) to hurt and oppress others. Levine knows that Christians will be defensive on these points and is firm but understanding as she makes her case that this happens and why it happens.
I think that Levine also understands that many Christians want something like the Judaism that she is describing. There are at least two problems here that I see. One is that there are lines of Jewish thought and practices that are not so open to questioning and that also carry the weight of assumed final authority. The commentary that I use in understanding Genesis comes from Rashi, the great Jewish scholar, and it is not "Gentile-friendly." Zionism, not to be equated with Judaism but claiming Judaism as its own nonetheless, oppresses Palestinians on the basis of particular readings of ancient texts. Another problem is that we don't yet have a way forward in creating a liberating monotheism. It isn't Levine's job to suggest a way forward, but if we don't find liberation in the sacred texts and a level of agreement on their meaning then there is the danger of people either losing their faith (or their attachment to the texts) or giving up and settling for fundamentalisms.
Readers beware. Every door that is opened in The Difficult Words of Jesus seems to lead to a wall. How can predestination square with universalism? How can faith be a calling to some but still accessible to all? Where is the line between understanding the difficult words of Jesus and finding the basis for them in the Hebrew Bible and believing that all that is in the Hebrew Bible anticipates the Christian Bible? How do Christians search for themselves in the Hebrew Bible and avoid cultural-religious appropriation and feeling defeated? The truth that Levine hits hard on is that it is up to us to do the work and that we can live in faith communities without accepting all of their explanations and practices.
No book of this length can take up every difficult passage in the Christian Bible. Levine does a great job of giving readers a method to approach what we find difficult, but I'm not sure that many Christian scholars are available to us and are doing the work that Levine is doing and making it readily available to us. We need people with her knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic and her familiarity with both the Hebrew and Christian texts and her ability to put complex ideas and arguments into common language. We need to get past trying to solve problems and learn how to live and work with contradictions.
That said, I wish that Levine had dealt with atonement theology and the forecast or prophesy of the destruction of Jerusalem that appears in the Christian Bible. Did Jesus have to die on the cross? How should we understand the destruction of Jerusalem? What have both done to Christian-Jewish relations? I am disappointed that Levine did not engage with the theologians who have worked with liberation theology in Latin America and Africa, and in particular with those who connected the Hebrew and Christian bibles in their work. Levine is open to alternate readings that are on the road to liberation, but she doesn't spend much time discussing these. I do wish that she had referred to Islamic texts and perhaps stayed away from some of her humor. I get that she's not an authority on the Islamic texts, but she could have quoted from scholars who are. And I do understand that many people need her humor as they work through the difficult passages that she is wrestling with.
I worry that the Christians who will most benefit from Levine's work won't read it because she is a questioning Jewish feminist and scholar. I'll close with an ask---if you have ever found passages in the Christian Bible difficult, please give this book a read.
Here is a taste:
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