32: A Jewish Annotated New Testament with Marc Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine

Jewish History Matters

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Marc Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine join us to discuss the Jewish Annotated New Testament: what it means to have a “Jewish” version of the New Testament, how we can effectively understand the New Testament as a “Jewish” book within its historical and social context, and why all this matters in terms of scholarly developments as well as the relationship between Judaism and Christianity today.

• Purchase the Jewish Annotated New Testament on Amazon

Marc Brettler is the Bernice and Morton Lerner Professor of Jewish Studies at Duke University’s Department of Religious Studies. He’s published widely on the Bible on topics including metaphor, the nature of biblical historical texts, and gender issues. His many books include the Jewish Study Bible, which he co-edited with Adele Berlin; How to Read the Jewish Bible; The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically and Religiously; and The Creation of History in Ancient Israel; among many others.

Amy-Jill Levine is University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies and Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and College of Arts and Sciences; she’s also an Affiliated Professor at the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations at Cambridge. Currently she is teaching at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. AJ’s books include The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus; The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us (co-authored with Douglas Knight); The New Testament, Methods and Meanings (co-authored with Warren Carter), Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi; Entering the Passion of Jesus; and, most recently The Gospel of Luke (co-authored with Ben Witherington III).

Marc and AJ, as two tremendously prolific scholars of the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, each have deep knowledge of the historical context of the New Testament as well as of how it has been interpreted over the centuries. Together, they edited the Jewish Annotated New Testament in 2011, and they subsequently produced a second, expanded edition in 2017.

The Jewish Annotated New Testament has four main components: The text of the New Testament itself (using the New Revised Standard Version translation), introduction to the Gospels and Acts, and to the Epistles and Revelation, introductions to each of the books and extensive annotations to the text, and over 50 essays on topics including the historical and social context of the New Testament, Jewish religious movements of the Second Temple period, Jewish practices and beliefs, the relationship between Jews and Gentiles, and Jewish responses to Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus, and Mary the mother of Jesus throughout the centuries.

The Jewish Annotated New Testament, as we discuss in this episode, highlights the historical and religious context of the New Testament as a set of Jewish texts—that is to say, texts written about Jews and in many cases by people who were themselves Jews, knowledgeable in Jewish theological traditions and textual interpretation. Throughout history, too many people have forgotten (or consciously ignored) that Jesus was a Jew, as were all of his first followers; or, they have sought to instrumentalize this history for polemical purposes. There has been, of course, a great deal of serious scholarship on the New Testament over the centuries, but the NT has also been at the center of sometimes violent debates between Jews and Christians, too. It thus represents a particularly interesting though sometimes problematic text, especially when we keep in mind that several passages have prompted dangerous anti-Jewish stereotypes and narratives at the heart of centuries of animosity. At the same time, one can point to the changing dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations especially after the Holocaust, in part through Christians, as individuals and as Church communions trying to come to terms both with what the New Testament says about Jews and how those texts have been interpreted. In a certain way, part of what I think is so interesting about the Jewish Annotated New Testament is that it is very much a product of our time: a synthesis of the newest academic scholarship, first of all, and it also represents the possibilities of Jewish-Christian relations today.

With this history and context in mind, Marc and AJ have accomplished the remarkable feat of presenting the New Testament in a scholarly, readable, and accessible format for Jews, without any kind of aim of proselytizing—indeed, they are both themselves Jews. It’s also a valuable resource for Christian and indeed for any readers who will want to better understand these texts and their historical and social context, and especially for religious leaders who want to be able to better understand and teach about Judaism, Jesus, his followers and Christian origins in the first and early second centuries of the Common Era. The annotations and essays distill generations of scholarship on the background and meaning of these texts, their contexts, and their reception and ramifications. When necessary, they confront those passages that have been a source for anti-Judaism. As a result, the book presents a useful resource for students, scholars, as well as teachers and religious leaders: In situating the New Testament within its historical context, the volume demonstrates how and why the New Testament matters in terms of our understanding of the development of Judaism in the first and second centuries, and also why and how this context is critical in terms of comprehending the emergence of early Christianity and the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity.