Dartmouth Events

"Jesus and Judaism: How Bad History Creates Bad Theology"

Abstract: Jesus and his first followers were Jews, thoroughly grounded in Jewish Scripture, ethics, theology, and hopes. To understand the New Testament is thus to recover Jewish history.  Yet ignorance of this history leads to New Testament readings that create or reinforce anti-Jewish views.  Understanding the New Testament in its historical context not only provides a corrective to anti-Jewish teaching but also offers a productive approach to Jewish-Christian relations?

Amy-Jill Levine is University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies, and Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and College of Arts and Science; she is also Affiliated Professor, Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations, Cambridge UK. Her 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), and the thirteen-volume edited Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Writing.  Her most recent volume is Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi. She has also just written, with noted children’s book author Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, Who Counts? 100 Sheep, Ten Coins, and Two Sons (a volume on the parables of Luke 15, designed for children).  Dr. Levine is also the co-editor, with Marc Z. Brettler, of the Jewish Annotated New Testament, now in a second edition.