A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine returns familiar parables to the social, economic, and religious world of their first Jewish hearers. She questions readings that reduce the stories to simple morals or make Jesus appear gracious by casting Judaism as legalistic, exclusionary, or spiritually inferior.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
Travelers can meet Jesus through the stories he told before deciding every historical or doctrinal question about him. Levine makes those stories strange and provocative again while teaching an essential interpretive discipline: Christianity should not elevate Jesus by diminishing the Jewish tradition in which he lived.
Good starting place if…
You know some of Jesus’ parables and want to hear their challenge more freshly, especially within their first-century Jewish setting.
Know before you begin…
This is focused interpretation of selected parables, not a complete introduction to Jesus or a devotional commentary. Levine’s reconstructions and readings are argued scholarly judgments rather than recovered transcripts of what every original listener thought. Her corrective is intentionally direct because anti-Jewish habits can hide inside familiar Christian interpretations.