c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Amy-Jill Levine is a New Testament scholar at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and a self-described “Yankee Jewish feminist.” As a child, she told her mother that she wanted to be pope.

In her new book, “The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus” (HarperSanFrancisco; $24.95), Levine, an Orthodox Jew, tackles 2,000 years of Jewish-Christian relations.

She talked about Jesus’ parables, the challenges of interfaith dialogue, her childhood experience of anti-Semitism, and whether she’s still interested in being pope.

Q: You write that Jesus can be a bridge between the Jewish and Christian worlds. How so?

A: After 2,000 years, Jesus may be able to serve as a bridge rather than a wedge between church and synagogue. He is, after all, someone that both church and synagogue share.

Here I’m speaking as a Jew and as a member of an Orthodox synagogue. When I read Jesus’ parables or much of the Sermon on the Mount, what I find reflected back to me is my own Jewish tradition that I can locate in what Christians would call the Old Testament, or in rabbinic sources.

It’s just lovely to hear it in Jesus’ words because he’s got a masterful way of phrasing what is of ultimate import.

Q: How can understanding Jesus “through first century eyes and ears” help Christians understand their faith?

A: It’s essential for Christians to understand Jesus as a first century Jew. He’s got to be profound and inspirational enough for people to leave their homes and follow him. He’s got to be provocative and dangerous enough for other people to want to kill him. Often in churches Jesus has become too familiar or too domesticated.

Today when people hear parables, they’re lacking the sense that parables should have. They should turn your world upside down. They should make you sufficiently uncomfortable to start working on them, rather than to sit back and say “Well, that was a nice little story. Let’s sing a hymn.“

Q: How does Jesus’ Jewish identity make the parables come to life?

A: Today, when we think of good Samaritans, we tend to think of people who stop on the highway and help you change your flat tire. The Jews and the Samaritans are traditional enemies. This parable translates into modern idiom perfectly.

You’re an Israeli Jew walking down the road and you’re waylaid by bandits. A member of the Israeli parliament passes by. A Christian Zionist passes by, and the person who stops to help you is a Palestinian militant who belongs to Hamas. If you can picture that, which is hard to picture, you can get a sense of the vision that Jesus is talking about.

Q: You wrote that some Christians get their dominant impressions of Jews and Judaism from church Scriptures, Israeli policies, “Fiddler on the Roof” and an occasional episode of “South Park.” What are the common misperceptions?

A: There are many. Not all Christians think this, but there is a strong sense that Jews think alike. As if we’re all in lockstep, for example, on what should happen in the state of Israel, when Jewish views are as diverse as Christian views.

(Other misperceptions are) that we’re very much interested in law, but don’t have a conception of grace, when in fact the entire covenantal tradition is predicated on grace. A number of Christians are somewhat surprised that not all Jews keep kosher. Not all Jews believe in God.

Q: You also say that Christians shouldn’t come to the table of interfaith dialogue with a sense of guilt. Why not?

A: Guilt doesn’t help. I say this as a Jewish person. I know from guilt. People come up to me and say, “Gosh, I’m really sorry about the Holocaust.” Except for the (president) of Iran, I think we’re all sorry about the Holocaust. But, those Christians weren’t there. I don’t believe in inherited guilt.

I don’t think it does the Jew any good to come to the table as the victim who needs to be appeased. It’s true that Christian-Jewish relations have not been terribly pleasant over the past 2,000 years, with most of it marked by the persecution of Jews by Christians. But the folks who are at the table now should be able to come as equals.

Q: You’re an Orthodox Jew with a Ph.D. in New Testament; does that let you see both sides of the bridge?

A: I’ve been blessed in that sense. The neighborhood I grew up in was predominantly Portuguese Roman Catholic, and I was welcomed by my friends and their parents … I grew up with this sense of this absolutely vibrant, ethnic Roman Catholicism.

My parents told me that Christianity was much like Judaism, believing in the same God, believing in loving your neighbor as yourself, and that Christians thought a Jewish man named Jesus was extremely important. So, I started out with the sense that Jews and Christians were cousins and we got along.

By the time I was 7 years old, when I was hit with really bad anti-Semitism, I already knew that did not have to be the baseline.

Q: What happened when you were 7?

A: A little girl said to me, “You killed our Lord” because that’s what she heard from her priest. I couldn’t put together how this wonderful Christian tradition that was like a cousin to Judaism would say such a horrible thing … I was traumatized, but even then, I knew somehow Christian tradition did not rest on the idea that the Jews are the bad guys of the world.

Q: You once wanted to be pope. How does your current career compare to being pope?

A: I still think I would make an absolutely splendid pope. I’m not Roman Catholic. I am married. I have children. I go to an Orthodox synagogue, and I’ve got a full-time job teaching in a predominantly Protestant divinity school in Tennessee. But if those are not problems, I am ready to take on the job.

KRE/RB END ROAN

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