The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler

One of the most interesting shifts in Christian theology after the Shoah was in how the adjective Jewish was used. In the patristic era, to call someone’s work Jewish was to insult it: the work was too fleshly or legalistic. Since the Shoah, to call someone’s work Jewish is to praise it as appropriately this-worldly, concerned with the ordinary stuff of life, embodied. This 180-degree turn in rhetoric is summed up nicely in an anecdote Stanley Hauerwas likes to use. A former colleague of his, a rabbi, used to say, “No religion is interesting that fails to tell its adherents what to do with their pots and pans and genitals.” How Jewish. In a 20th-century sort of way.

Now The Jewish Annotated New Testament is here to help us all be more Jewish. Amy-Jill Levine (author of The Misunderstood Jew) and Marc Brettler have edited and annotated a study Bible that will enable us to keep Jewish perspectives in mind as we read the New Testament. Using it to prepare for preaching and teaching lately, I’ve been shocked (again) at how easily my mind settles into the default mode of anti-Jewish interpretation: If Jesus turns up as a feminist, it must be because the Jews of his time were misogynists. If he likes children, it must be because the Jews of his time did not. This volume might get some of us Christians out of the habit of painting a negative portrait of Judaism in order to praise Jesus. If it does, it will have done the church and the world a mighty service.

I am left with questions, however. Some have to do with the limitations of study Bibles as a genre. Levine and Brettler stuff a great deal of information into the margins of the NRSV text, but it often seems not nearly enough. They cite intertestamental and other Jewish texts that I have no knowledge of as though I do. Space clearly doesn’t allow for much more. Topical essays fill the gap to some degree, but not entirely.