A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
Edited by Jewish scholars Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, this study edition presents the New Testament with essays, annotations, maps, and historical context focused on its Jewish worlds and its reception. Contributors explain Jewish practices, texts, movements, and interpretive debates while identifying passages and later readings that have fostered anti-Judaism. The second edition expands engagement with Jewish–Christian relations and diverse Jewish contexts.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
This edition helps Christian and post-Christian travelers stop treating Judaism as a failed background that exists merely to make Christianity intelligible. Jewish scholarship clarifies the New Testament’s internal Jewish arguments and the later consequences of supersessionist interpretation. The Library includes it as an essential corrective and reference work, while recognizing that no edited volume represents all Jewish scholarship and that annotation informs interpretation without settling every historical or theological dispute.
Good starting place if…
You want to read the New Testament with Jewish historical and interpretive guidance and to recognize where familiar Christian readings distort Judaism or feed anti-Judaism.
Know before you begin…
The New Testament contains diverse voices produced in complex first-century settings, and later Christian use has often intensified polemic into enduring harm. Notes can identify context and reception but cannot make every passage ethically harmless or collapse differences among ancient and modern Jewish communities. This is a Jewish-annotated scholarly edition of Christian texts, not a Jewish endorsement of New Testament theology. Use it to revise habits, not to claim mastery of Judaism or recruit Jewish scholarship to validate Christianity.