My review of Amy-Jill Levine's new book, Jesus For Everyone: Not Just Christians

A New Testament scholar who is Jewish and deeply skeptical

My review appeared yesterday in the Englewood Review of Books…

Amy-Jill Levine’s latest book, Jesus For Everyone: Not Just Christians, is written for an elusive audience—what was once called the “educated layperson.”

Originally titled “Jesus for Atheists,” certainly a more provocative (and possibly more commercially viable) title, Levine eventually conceived her book more broadly—for those who have come to be known as “nones” and “dones,” as well as for many others. Levine writes that she would even like to introduce Jesus to Jews, not only because Jesus was a Jew but because much of the New Testament is part of Jewish history.

Levine is uniquely qualified for this unusual task. She is, after all, Jewish, an “outsider” (as she describes herself) who finds “enormous value in the gospel.” But Levine brings more than her Jewish identity to her writing. She is a widely respected New Testament scholar who taught for many years at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, and her students included “undergraduates and divinity students, priests and pastors, rabbis and imams.” She is also the author of more than 20 books, many of them about Jesus, his teachings, and the world in which he taught.

But background and training are not the only advantages that Levine brings to this project. As she notes, her students—their questions and insights—are often foremost on her mind as she writes. The book was written for them, but (as the acknowledgments at the end of the book make clear) also for the dozens and dozens of adult classes in churches throughout the United States where Levine has also taught.

With all that, a reader might expect the project to have been a smashing success, and yet something about Levine’s background and training gets in the way too. As she explains early on, she is not a believer (“as that term is used either in a Christian context or more broadly in the sense of ‘belief in divinity’”), though she is a member of an Orthodox synagogue and finds meaning in the rituals and gatherings. “I live,” she writes, “as if there is a God, and I take seriously the idea that all humanity is created in that divine image and likeness.” Beyond her unique brand of agnosticism, she asks a lot of questions. “I was not raised on ‘the Bible says it, I believe it’ diet. I was raised with the meat of asking questions and the fruits of skepticism.”

Questions, skepticism, and an occasionally acerbic sense of humor give Levine a perspective on Jesus that can be difficult to read, especially for those in more traditional Christian settings. But Levine’s writing rewards those who stay with it, those who are looking for more than easy answers.

Levine’s determination to understand Judaism in the first century makes her analysis of Jesus’s various encounters and parables especially valuable. More than once, I would think of sermons I’ve preached that I wish I could do over. My explanations, I now see, were embarrassingly wrong. In Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, for example, I have sometimes made too much of the scandalous nature of Jesus’s conversation with this woman. But, as Levine points out, “nothing—nothing—in rabbinic literature forbids men and women from speaking with each other.” Furthermore, as Levine points out, the Samaritan woman’s supposedly scandalous personal life did nothing to deter her fellow Samaritans from taking her word about Jesus. Examples like this one can be found in every section of the book.

Those sections—which form the outline of the book—include economics, enslavement, ethnicity and race, health care, family values, and politics. With each topic, Levine sets out not to find the right reading of a particular story, but rather to set Christians straight about false views of first-century Judaism and to offer several possible readings of each text. For Christians in traditional settings, this approach can prove exasperating (as reader reviews in Goodreads, Amazon, and elsewhere make clear), but Levine takes seriously her task as a teacher: She asks more questions than she answers. It is the student, in her view, who must find meaning in the text.

Each of the sections in the books contains Levine’s own translations of familiar gospel stories. In the section on economics, for example, Levine provides her own idiosyncratic translation of the story about the rich young ruler. What she describes as a “fairly literal” translation of the text often leads to a Yoda-like sentence structure. Here is an example: In Mark 10, after Jesus’s brief encounter with the rich young ruler, he turns to his disciples and says, “How with difficulty the ones having possessions into the kingdom of God will go.” Reading these and other “fairly literal” translations, I was reminded of the temptation of most translators to smooth out the biblical text, making it easier for the reader but perhaps missing something critically important in Jesus’s words. Levine’s intent is clearly not to make her renderings easy. She wants the reader to linger over the text.

How does Jesus emerge from this careful reading of the text? That’s hard to say. But I will say this much: Levine refuses to make Jesus look good by making Judaism look bad. And she scolds biblical interpreters who have done so—sometimes by name. Levine reminds the reader, for example, that Jesus does not denounce slavery. Jesus’s parables, she writes, “reveal, all too clearly, the horrors of slavery,” and yet Jesus does not condemn the practice. He, like the apostle Paul, seemed to accept slavery as a given in the first-century world. Jesus’s views on divorce and remarriage are similarly more complicated than most readers would like (or than most readers have been led to believe). In the end, Levine’s portrait of Jesus is, well, complicated.

I found Levine’s approach to be smart, provocative, and challenging, rather than clarifying. I can imagine that some adult classes (like those I have taught over the years) or Christian book clubs would struggle with Levine’s latest offering. But for a serious student of the Bible, someone who can accept a complicated rather than a clarifying reading of the text, Levine’s approach can be wise and helpful, sometimes even deeply satisfying.