The Weight
The Weight
"Wrestling With Scripture" with Amy-Jill Levine
Show Notes:
Today’s guest, Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, has a challenge for all of us: to engage the Bible more deeply, and to do that in a way that faithful to the historical context in which the scriptures were written. Jews during the Second Temple period were aware of the societal context in which they lived, just as we are aware of ours today. But because we don’t experience that ancient context in today’s world, we lose the nuance of Jesus’ teachings. Putting Jesus back in his historical time and place gives Christians a deeper understanding of the scriptures and allows for us to wrestle with the text, to push back and ask questions.
AJ is Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. She is a graduate of Smith College and earned her doctorate at Duke University. AJ is the author of several books, including Short Stories by Jesus, Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians, and The Bible with and without Jesus.
Resources:
Follow AJ on Facebook
Buy AJ’s books on Amazon or Cokesbury
I'm Eddie Rester.
Chris McAlilly:I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight. Today we are talking to Amy-Jill Levine. She's a New Testament scholar who holds a position of Rabbi Stanley M Kessler, Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. Previously, she was the university professor of New Testament Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, and we're talking today about how to read the Bible.
Eddie Rester:One of the things I've always loved about reading her work, and it shows in the conversation today, she is so engaged with scripture and the New Testament that she makes it come alive for people. When you read one of her books where she just takes a deep dive, she's going to push you, she's going to challenge you, but you come away with such an energized, deeper appreciation for the scripture that she's been looking at.
Chris McAlilly:The first book of hers I came across many years ago, 20 years ago, was called"Jesus, the Misunderstood Jew," and it helped to treat... It helped me, as a child of the American South who grew up in Christian context, to think of Jesus as an ethnic Jew. And then there's another book that I came across of hers more recently. Eddie and I did a sermon series on it called "The Short Stories by Jesus," which delves into the parables of Jesus and offers fresh interpretations of all of these stories that I'd always heard, but in ways that revealed their original Jewish context and then brought alive the contemporary relevance that book. If you're, like, if you read this, and you're like, "I need to read something of hers," start with that book. It's so, so fresh and good. But the most recent book that she's written, which is the one that I that had the most questions about today, was a book that she wrote,"Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians." All great, and it all comes through in the conversation. What's the key takeaway for you? Eddie?
Eddie Rester:Well, you know, even in the conversation today, as we talked about the Jewish process of questioning and pushing the rabbi and the way that AJ was raised with her parents to question, it helped me reframe Peter and his who he was in the New Testament. In the conversation with her today, I'm sitting here rethinking, okay, Peter's not this knucklehead. Peter's the most honest, engaged of the disciples. And not just because he was ridiculously slow, it was because he was doing what he should have done and what the other disciples maybe were afraid to do. And so for me, just again, I love talking with people who can awaken me to fresh understandings of scripture. I want to echo what you just said, though about "The Short Stories by Jesus." It's a book that whenever I'm traipsing through a parable, I pick it up to see if that parable is one that she talked about, because it always helps me to go back to unravel what I think I know and what I'm bringing to a parable that's just not right. And she's so right.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah. The line from this one that I'm gonna remember is when I said, so, you know, how do you read the Bible? Well, I said, you know, do you submit yourself to the text? No, she is. And she lays that out as a way of She's like, "No! You don't submit yourself to the text. You submit yourself to God, and you wrestle with the text." It's like, Yes, ma'am, yes. That sounds fantastic. really faithful, engaged, responsible reading of the text. And hopefully you're encouraged, and you grow in some confidence in your own engagement with the Bible. And she kind of shows you some... We talked about some key ways that people read the Bible poorly, and how to read the Bible well. Great episode. Thanks for being with us. We're always grateful to have you with us on The Weight.
Eddie Rester:Like it. Share it. Let us know what you think.
Chris McAlilly:Like it. Share it and like it and share it and like it and share it again.
Eddie Rester:... And again.
Chris McAlilly:[INTRO] Leadership today demands more than technical expertise. It requires deep wisdom to navigate the complexity of a turbulent world, courage to reimagine broken systems, and unwarranted hope to inspire durable change.
Eddie Rester:As Christ-centered leaders in churches, nonprofits, the academy, and the marketplace, we all carry the weight of cultivating communities that reflect God's kingdom in a fragmented world.
Chris McAlilly:But this weight wasn't meant to be carried alone. The Christian tradition offers us centuries of wisdom if we have the humility to listen and learn from diverse voices.
Eddie Rester:That's why The Weight exists: to create space for the conversations that challenge our assumptions, deepen our thinking, and renew our spiritual imagination.
Chris McAlilly:Faithful leadership in our time requires both conviction and curiosity, rootedness in tradition, and responsiveness to a changing world.
Eddie Rester:So whether you're leading a congregation, raising a family, teaching students, running a non profit, or bringing faith into your business, join us as we explore the depth and richness of Christ-centered leadership today. Welcome to The Weight.[END INTRO] We're here today with Dr Amy-Jill Levine. Thank you for being with us today.
AJ Levine:My pleasure, and please call me AJ.
Eddie Rester:AJ, okay, well, great. Yeah, we've been big fans of several of your books and your writings through the years. A lot of our friends have known you through the years, and you do an amazing job, I think, of helping people explore and dig through the scriptures. So I'm grateful to get to have a conversation with you today.
AJ Levine:Oh, I appreciate the kind words, but all this"through the years" makes me sound like, like I'm 120. I'm still pretty functional.
Eddie Rester:Yeah, that's right, yeah. Well, one of the things we did years ago was we looked at your book "Short Stories by Jesus," looking at the parables. And I think one of the things I'd love to just maybe talk about a little bit, where did your deep love of scripture come from? How did that develop in you? Because it's clear as you write that you want to understand, but you also want the people reading, whether it's articles or books, to understand scripture well. So where does that come from for you?
AJ Levine:them to understand scripture in its historical context, and I don't want them to be bored, and too much biblical literature is just plain dull. I've always loved stories. When I was a kid I had the D'Aulaires Greek mythology book. I had the golden book, or the golden Old Testament book. I had books on Japanese mythology and Norse mythology. I think this is all great. So going to Hebrew school, where you learn stories, our teachers would ask us to ask questions. You know, if you were Abraham, what would you do, you know? Or if you were Moses, what did you want to say to God? Or if you were King David, would you be scared when you saw Goliath? Or would you be brave? And those, as we got older, developed into more sophisticated questions. You know, what do you do in impossible situations? David and Bathsheba, that's an impossible situation. The Babylonian exile was an impossible situation. So when I was learning stories, particularly in the synagogue, as well as with my parents, because my parents, because my mother was a fabulous storyteller, there was always a give and take. There was always a question, so what are you going to get out of the story? Or how do you find yourself in it? I zeroed in on classics, so Greek mythology, Roman mythology, and then Biblical stuff, because I really liked that ancient stuff, and I had a better sense of, Well, the Jewish stuff is part of my history, but Jews are living within a broader Roman Empire. And then eventually the Bible became increasingly interesting and increasingly interesting. So I can't remember a time that I wasn't interested in it, and I'm now pushing 70, I'm still interested in it. So it's pretty cool text. It is inexhaustible in terms of
Chris McAlilly:Why the...
Eddie Rester:I think it's a good... No, go ahead, Chris.
Chris McAlilly:I was just going to say a lot of your work has centered on the person of Jesus. And, you know, I think kind of offering folks a way to read the New Testament in a way that perhaps is unique and distinctive. What are some of the main problems that you see in the way in which people, in general, but particularly, either Christians or biblical commentaries, typically make when they're reading the New Testament and the life of Jesus, right?
AJ Levine:So I became increasingly interested in stories told by Jesus, to wit things like parables, and stories told about Jesus, to wit the Gospels, as well as references in Acts or Paul or so on. And what I found consistently was that my Christian friends, and then when I went to college and graduate school, that my Christian teachers and the people who were writing books about this stuff very frequently had absolutely no clue about life in Second Temple Judaism. So there was a negative Jewish foil over against which Jesus looked all bright and shiny. And I'm enough of an historian to know even back then, when I was just starting, well, that doesn't work. People don't make sense initially, outside of their own historical context. Yes, you can read Shakespeare without knowing anything about Elizabethan England, but it helps if you do. The Bible is not Shakespeare. The Bible is authoritative. It is scripture. And if we yank it out of its own historical context, basically what we're doing is we're colonizing it. We're strip mining it of anything that we think we find to be useful. We're saying its own culture, its own history, is irrelevant. And I think that's a bad reading of Scripture. And if we yank Jesus out of his historical context, we're going to get him wrong, and we're also going to wind up being in place, I might say. So for very good reason, maybe we should look at Jesus as an historical figure. It makes theological sense for Christians, and it makes historical sense for everybody.
Eddie Rester:When you think about Jesus as a historical figure from his moment, his time, his context, what are some of the things that we should know about that ? I mean, Chris and I went to seminary, but some of our listeners don't, didn't have that opportunity. What are the some of the things that are critical to know about Jesus's context and his place in his time? I knows there are a thousand of those things. So, yeah.
AJ Levine:Right. So I don't take for granted that people who went to seminary know anything about Second Temple Judaism.
Chris McAlilly:[LAUGHTER]
AJ Levine:Because the association of theological schools does not require you to know anything, and if you're not required to do it, your teachers may well give you your Bible completely from a post-colonial perspective or a feminist perspective, or read a response perspective, all of which are lovely and terrific. But what I found in a number of seminary contexts is you get an introductory lecture about Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and Zealots, and then it's Jews all the way down, without any sense of the diversity of what's going on, how the temple functioned, how following Torah functioned, how Jews wound up arguing with each other, which is what you do if you're an ethnic group, and so on. So what do we need to know? We need to know that being Jewish is not just a matter of belief in one God. It's being Jewish means you're part of an ethnic group. So in part, it's like saying, well, what does it mean if you're German or if you're Kenyan or if you're Peruvian? What sets you apart from other cultures with which you may come in contact? And the same point, by the way, holds for Paul. What does your tradition look like in terms of practice? Like, what do you wear and what do you eat, and what's the rhythm of your year, sacred space and sacred time? How do you define yourself over against your neighbors who are not Jewish, or who might be Jewish, but members of a different way of practicing Judaism, in the same way one can distinguish within the Christian community? I mean, Lutherans aren't Methodists who aren't Episcopalians. You know, from the outside, it looks pretty much the same, but inside, boy, you go to war over this stuff.
Eddie Rester:That's right, yeah.
AJ Levine:So, so what does it mean to be a practicing Jew in the late second temple period, and how would Jesus have been understood in terms of his parables or his glossing of Torah or his controversies with Pharisees? How might people at the time have understood that? And if we get the context wrong, we're not going to understand this stuff very well.
Eddie Rester:Yeah, yeah, when I think about, you know, the way we typically read is we read past a lot of that real fast to get just to Jesus. So we ignore the conflict with the Pharisees, or sometimes conflict between the Pharisees and the scribes, and we just move very quickly to what's comfortable? What's the danger?
Chris McAlilly:I think, sorry, I don't mean to jump in and answer the question for you, AJ, but it just seems like we totally miss a lot of the subtext, a lot of the implied meaning, some of the emotional undercurrents, some of the yourself to the text, to not simply use the text as a unspoken assumptions that are embedded in the text, and we just use the text as a pretext for whatever it is, whatever the pretext. And I think that's the thing that I find most heck we want to say. I mean, it seems like that's the problem, that our use of Scripture is just a cloak for some motive, some, you know, some dynamic that we're trying. We're pushing some kind of an agenda. And I mean, anyone who's spoken in a context, a religious context, has done this. I'm sure that I've done this. difficult, especially in the midst... You know, a lot of the folks that are listening are actively trying to lead religious organizations, rather than develop the deep habits of scholarship and biblical study, and I think that that's the thing that I find myself wanting to do more and more of. How have you... For your students along the way, I mean, what are some of the habits that you've offered to help folks get beyond their own the way in which they use the text as a pretext for whatever they want to justify?
AJ Levine:Yeah, well, I mean, sometimes using a text as a pretext is not a bad thing if you've got something that you believe this is consistent with the gospel. I'm speaking in Christian terms. Of course, use the text for that. Why not? Because the meaning of the text should not be restricted to the first century, or otherwise, you were playing first century Bibleland, and that would be silly. But to go with your earlier metaphor again. I mean, I was an English major, I worry about metaphors. So I worry about terms like seminary. I mean, really, you talk about submitting to the text. I don't Submitting to a text, really, uh-uh. Because the text want to submit to the text. I want to wrestle with the text.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, yeah. is not the master and the text is not the ruler. So I think of myself as part of Israel. I mean, I can do this as a Jew, and y'all can grandfather yourself in. So that's fine, yeah. And to be Jewish means to wrestle with God. Well, how do you do that? So you wrestled with the text, and you say, well, does this meaning work? So the two questions I would ask my students, which drove them nuts on occasion, was, the first is, how do you know that? And that's a nice way of unlearning a bunch of stuff that we were exposed to when we might have been kids, Christians going to things like Vacation Bible School, or Sunday school teachers can really get you screwed up, because they're usually volunteers, and they don't have pharmacological education, and they tell you what their teacher told them, who told them, what their teacher told them, you know, back to Martin Luther, back to John Wesley. How do you know that? And if it's, "Somebody told me," that's not good enough. Right? You know. So your mailman told you, that's terrific. How does your mailman know? Well, because he reads Greek and he's got this book on, you know, Plutarch. Okay, now we're getting somewhere. And the second question is, why do I care? So once you find a reading in the text, it could be absolutely fascinating, but you need to explain why I should be fascinated with it, too, particularly if you are a pastor. So you found something you think is terrific, then show the congregation why this is, why this is important, or why they should pay attention to it. Otherwise, it's just idiosyncratic.
Eddie Rester:So as we think about some of what Jesus had to say. And again, you've written a book about the parables so well, a lot of what you push back on is the antisemitism that seems to just get brought forward, as you're saying, from one generation to the next generation, without questioning of that. How do we begin to unravel that well as we come to the scriptures?
AJ Levine:Yeah, well, because it takes work, which means that part of what clergy do falls under the category of elitism, right? Because you're supposed to have more knowledge than people in your congregations, or at least they think you do, and you have formal training on this. So use the training. How do you know something? Because you might look something up on the internet, right? I mean, there are plenty of resources out there, some of which are terrible and some of which are actually pretty fine. And they say, "The Jews thought." Well, no, already stop right there. Because there's no head Jew to tell us what to think. And if they tell you, "the Jews thought," then how did they know that? Right? If you get a rabbinic citation, you go look up the citation. Because what the rabbis typically do is they engage in conversation. So you know, Rabbi This says this. Rabbi That says exactly the opposite. The sages say something else, and you go two pages later, and it's an argument over the same idea taking very different shapes. So, you know, you can say, "One rabbi thought," but that doesn't help you very much. Look this stuff up. Do not presume that Jesus has to be original on everything. He's not. Presume that when he's speaking to people, they've got some grasp of what he's saying, because if they had no grasp whatsoever, that would make him either a very bad teacher, or worse, a sadistic one, and I don't think he was either. The Gospel of Mark tells us, I'm in Mark four here, the disciples who are not the brightest students in the seminar. You know, like they don't get the parables either. And Jesus keeps saying, like, "Are you also without understanding?" To which the answer is, well, duh. Mark says he explained everything in private to his disciples. But when it comes to parable, interpretation, most parables come without interpretation. So if I've got a parable, and this is particularly the case with Luke, Luke's going to tell me what the parable means. That's Luke being a good pastor. So you can go with what Luke says. That's fine. It's in the text. But that should not obviate any other possible meanings that you might get.
Eddie Rester:Right.
Chris McAlilly:Yes.
AJ Levine:Luke says this, But what about, you know, some woman who might be hearing this, or some enslaved person, or some rich person, what are they thinking?
Chris McAlilly:One of the things you say in the introduction to the book that you put out in 2024, "Jesus for Everyone," is that you quote...
AJ Levine: "Jesus for Everyone:Not Just Christians."
Chris McAlilly:"Not just Christians." Yes, indeed, yes, yes. Thank you for offering that subtitle. You mentioned a classic book, "When Religion Becomes Evil," by Charles Kimball. And you quote Charles Kimball as saying, "Authentic religion encourages questions and reflection at all levels. When authority figures discourage or disallow honest questions, something is clearly wrong." And then you go on to talk about the way in which that shows up in religious leadership and among spiritual communities, where authority sometimes gets mishandled. Unpack that a little bit, because I do think this pushing us to take responsibility for engaging the text and seeking to understand where our positions come from as a way of engaging in what he would call authentic religion.
AJ Levine:Yeah, because I thought it was a great Would you maybe unpack that quotation and why you used it? quotation. I wish I had said it. The pastor takes the place of God in the church, and that's not the role of the pastor, but that's what usually happens, and it happens across the board, whether we're talking about conservative, more liberal or so on and across the Christian spectrum. The rabbi, on the other hand, does not do that. When I was a kid in Fair Israel Synagogue in New Bedford, Massachusetts, my first rabbi was Rabbi Ziskin, who was very tall and had a white beard. And I asked him if he was God, and he said, no, he just worked for God. And I thought, you know, that was great. But then I realized as I got older that you can argue with rabbis. I mean, that's what you do. If I don't, these days, if I don't disagree with my rabbi at least once a month, one of us is not doing our job. So what I think would be helpful if people in the pews were more encouraged to be disciples and less encouraged to be sheep.
Chris McAlilly:So I love the way in which you push this point, by saying, "I disagree with Jesus, too, on a number of economic matters," as economics, slavery, gender roles, et cetera. That pushing that point, I think, is to disagree with one's rabbi is not a matter of unfaithfulness, but actually the height of engagement as a disciple. I think that seems to be kind of what I hear you pushing us towards.
AJ Levine:Yeah, but it's already in the New Testament. So if you look at the SyroPhoenician in Mark seven, or the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15, she clearly disagrees with Jesus. She pushes. He says this. She says that, you know, you want to call me a dog. Fine, I'm a dog, but I'm still entitled. And it's a great argument. It's actually a kind of model of the Sermon on the Mount, like, you know, turn the other cheek, absorb the insult, don't respond with violence, but don't lose your dignity at the same time. So can you argue with Jesus? Sure. Can Jesus argue with God? Absolutely. I" don't want to die. Let this cup pass from me. Okay, you're God. Your will is going to be done. I get that, but I'm not thrilled with this." That's what lament psalms are. Lament psalms are arguments with God. "God, things really suck. Let me tell you how bad they are. I was conceived in iniquity. My enemies are surrounding me. Things really suck. You were great in the past. You can come through now, and if you come through now, I will sing your praises." That is a standard lament psalm.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, just to press this point. I have a... What I'm thinking about is the fact that I'm raising an adolescent at the moment. I have a 13-year-old, and...
AJ Levine:They grow up eventually. It's fine.
Chris McAlilly:I know, I know they do.
Eddie Rester:You can get past that age, but right now, yeah.
Chris McAlilly:100%. And so what I'm realizing is that the parent-to-child relationship is changing, and I have to incorporate into the relationship a fair amount of disagreement. And that isn't a sign of disobedience, right. things that Abraham debates with God. You know, you see this It's a sign of maturity. And in some ways, what I've always appreciated about your work, AJ, but what I'm being reminded of in this moment, is the agency that is placed in the relationship in the person who maybe has less power in the relationship that you continually offer. And for a relationship to be a real relationship, each party has to have the agency. Otherwise, it's an evil relationship. So it's a To allow agency in the lesser party, to engage the text, to relationship of dominance, and maybe, you know, potentially injustice. development of the Jewish tradition as a religious tradition, as one of debate and engagement. I appreciate the ways in which you've talked about how that's a part of your own formation within the Jewish tradition, but maybe speak a little bit more to that about how your formation maybe shaped the way in which you became a scholar.
AJ Levine:I had the best parents ever. That is just fact. How do I know that? Because it's fact. I had fabulous parents. My mother was 44 when I was born. They were married close to 20 years. Lots of miscarriages. I was just this delightful surprise, when they thought they would never be able to have a kid, and they had already retired at that point. They used to close up the house after Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the fall and decamp to Miami Beach and then come back the following year atPassover. So I was raised among adults. I didn't have little kid playmates. I had Jewish senior citizen playmates. They always treated me as a person whose opinion was worth hearing. Even from the time I was a little kid, when I would come home from school, my mother would say to me, "did you ask any good questions today? What interested you? What did you think was weird? Did anything strike you as wrong?" And then we would have these conversations about that, and that would continue all the way through. My dad died when I was relatively young. My mother's mother lived with us. That's, like three Jewish women in the family, how we didn't kill each other is a minor miracle right there. But both my mother and her mother, my grandmother, were very conscious of me being an individual with my own concerns, not trying to make me in their model. Mother was... My mother graduated from college in 1933 at the height of the Depression, wanted to go on and do graduate level work in some sort of theoretical mathematics. She's super smart, and her parents said to her, you know, we've lost everything we've got. You've got two brothers, and we need to get them through medical 1930s, my mother, the middle child, did exactly that. She school so you come home and work. went home and worked. She put her mathematical thing aside. She became a bookkeeper and then a substitute teacher. And she thought if she ever had a child, particularly if she ever had a daughter, she knew what it was like to have doors closed in front of her, and she was going to make sure that any door that was worthwhile, she was going to open it for me. In that sense, I had fabulous parents. So if I were to say something like, I would like a pony, that wasn't going to happen. That door would not open. No. The barn door was closed. That was not going to happen. But, "can I get this book about something?" Or, "here's a person..." I was interested in law. So, "here's a person who is a lawyer. Can I speak to Mr. So and So to find out what that's about?" "Can we go to this museum?" Absolutely. So it was that sense of always encouraging me and making sure that I was not submissive, that word again. I was not going to submit to certain cultural codes that said, because I'm a woman or because I'm a girl, I can't do certain things, or because I'm Jewish, I can't do certain things, right. You want to study New Testament? Well, let's go see how that's going to work, right? And she gets me into catechism class in the local Roman Catholic Church. So I had parents who... My mother said to me, "as long as you remember who you are, go, you might learn something. And then go explore other people's religions, because it's good to know about what other people think and what other people do." Just terrific.
Chris McAlilly:That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that. That's helpful.
Eddie Rester:Yeah, as I think about this questioning, the intensity of questioning, the importance of questioning, and the relationship even of the disciples with Jesus and questioning, I've just been sitting here rethinking my estimation of Peter, because we make fun of Peter for the ridiculous questions that he asks, because it's easy to do, but now I'm sitting here thinking, now I know why he was the one that Jesus said, "I'm gonna build the Church on you," because he was willing to say the things that no one else would say, to ask the questions that needed to be asked, to push Jesus on things. This week, I'm studying Matthew 18, where Peter comes up with this question, "hey, how many times should we forgive people? Seven times?" And then Jesus kind of slaps him down a little bit and said"no, no, seven times seven." But I'm sitting here thinking that that's the most honest, maybe one of the most honest relationships we get to experience in the New Testament. You can probably say no, these other ones, but I'm just sitting here rethinking Peter in this conversation right now. I'm going to see Peter in a very different light going forward.
AJ Levine:Oh, I like Peter a lot. He starts out as kind of a lummox, but he does come into his own in a quite nice way.
Eddie Rester:Yeah.
AJ Levine:And he owns up to when he makes a mistake, he owns up to it. And that's so hard to do. You know, good for Peter. The scene about Peter denying Jesus when Jesus is being tried. This is a synoptic version, when Jesus is being tried by the Sanhedrin, and Peter is denying and denying and denying. And I have the sense that he knows what he's doing, and it's self preservation versus what do you do and where do you go? And I think most people would do exactly what Peter did. They went to self preservation.
Eddie Rester:Yeah, yep. But then Jesus in John, jumping out of the synoptics, brings him back.
AJ Levine:Yes, you get the three times "do you love me?"
Eddie Rester:Yeah. And then even, you even see we were talking with another guest recently about Acts 15, this moment where Paul comes to Peter and the council in Jerusalem about this major conversation about the Gentiles, and you continue to see this push back and forth, this respectful dissonance and disconnect that allows a decision to be made.
AJ Levine:Yeah, on the other hand, sometimes Peter actually gets it wrong. So he needs to be called out.
Eddie Rester:Yeah. Yeah.
AJ Levine:So that business in Acts 10 with the "Oh, yeah, it was unlawful for us to go into a Gentile." Oh, come on, it's not unlawful.
Eddie Rester:Right.
AJ Levine:So, like, Peter, like, let's not exaggerate your concerns, either.
Eddie Rester:Right, right.
AJ Levine:So I have a little bit of an argument with him and like him at the same time.
Eddie Rester:Yeah. I think, yeah. I think so. I mean, yeah, it's all of us. We get it right, we get it wrong, and we need, sometimes we need to be encouraged along the right way and then pushed on when we're not where we need to be. Yeah.
Chris McAlilly:So one of the things that you say at the end of this, so coming back around to the "Jesus for Everyone" book, "Not Just Christians," one of the things that you say at the end of the book is that your editor kind of pushed you in the direction of writing this book. Is that correct? Is that the origin of the book, or does it come out of kind of the long... The book is organized in terms of particular topics, the economy, enslavement, various kind of politics, things that are very much a part of the everyday conversation for people who are in the world, that may or may not be religious. Just talk about the origin of that book, kind of the motivation, and kind of how you chose to structure it the way you did.
AJ Levine:Yeah. Well, when I finished the parables book, which is 2014 there were a lot more parables that I had notes on, but there's like a law of diminishing return, and there are only so many pages your publisher is going to give you. So I had all this other stuff. I didn't know what to do with it. And I was getting increasingly concerned with politicians citing Jesus or citing Paul on particular economic or political or national concerns, usually taking the text dramatically out of context. I thought, well, this is not helpful. And I also kept getting comments from more Christians on the more liberal end of the spectrum, saying, but, you know, but, AJ, can you say something about whatever sexuality and and so on? So the press is Harper, the former editor who's now no longer with Harper said, why don't you write a book called"Jesus for Atheists" and take out all the supernatural, the woo-woo stuff, like, you know, rising from the dead, or virginal conceptions, or walking on water. So take out the woo stuff, the Thomas Jefferson approach, and see what Jesus might have to say to anybody, regardless of theology. And it's pretty good. So I wrote a book, this was back in 2019, I wrote a book called "Jesus for Atheist," where the whole first chapter is about like the the professional atheist, the Dawkins and the Hitchens and all that, explaining why these arguments are no more or no less successful than the professional apologists who want to prove that God exists or prove that Jesus is the Christ, and we just want to lock them both in a closet because they're basically preaching to the choir, and otherwise they're, to me, annoying. I'm not a fan of apologetics on either side of the spectrum. But just what can we learn from these texts? And he got it back and said, well, this doesn't work. And I'm thinking, yeah, he's probably right. It didn't work because I'm still pushing this "for atheists" thing, and it was not, it was not quite a good fit. So I said, I think I need to reconfigure this, and I just want to talk about why I think--because I really do think this--that Jesus has something worthwhile to teach us, regardless of whether we're Christian or not. I would say the same thing about Confucius, or, you know, a number of great thinkers over the centuries. You don't have to be part of that group or believe in that theology to take some really good teachings from it and then learn something. Right, same thing, but things like the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita or the Book of Mormon or whatever. I just happen to be a New Testament expert, and I really like Jesus.
Eddie Rester:Yeah.
AJ Levine:So that's how this book came came to be, and the subjects that we look at in terms of politics, economics, this whole chapter on enslavement, because people are talking about issues of things like reparations, and how do we understand biblical slavery? And when Jesus says we should think of ourselves as enslaved, is that a helpful metaphor or a harmful metaphor? And why does it work for one group and not for the other? And actually bring that stuff up to the public? So people who are saying, "What would Jesus say?" Well, I don't think, side note, that we should say, you know, what would Jesus do? Like he doesn't live in a 21st Century participatory democracy. But I do think looking at these stories told by Jesus or about Jesus help us formulate the questions in a way that we can now have some sort of engaged, informed conversation. So what are the questions about enslavement or economics or politics or family values and so on that the text raises, and how might the text then help us sort through in terms of finding answers? The answers may be very different, depending upon the person who's providing them, but at least this way, we have a basis on which to have a discussion, and we can realize that questions can give rise to different answers, and all of those answers might be partially right. That's not a bad thing.
Eddie Rester:You said the New Testament stories of Jesus, they're just inexhaustible. That's why we all keep going back to them. And I think what you just said, I mean, I think that even the text can give us different questions and different responses in different moments along the journey. And I think that's what people... Would you say that's what people lose sometimes? We try to nail Jesus to this moment with this answer for this for all time.
AJ Levine:Yeah. So as I've said before, if you read a story when you're six and then you read the story the same way when you're 60, something's gone wrong, and it hasn't gone wrong with the story, right? So if, and therefore, what happens for people who begin with that perspective is the texts are designed for children. Well, they're not designed for children. Okay, I've written children's books. I get that, like kids can understand parables, but they're really designed for adults. So if we bring to them adult questions, they may help us reformulate those questions in a way that the way we've got it formulated may not work, but this alternative may be more helpful.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, and I think one of the key moves, I mean certainly different readers, based on their social location, what's going on in their vocational life and their family life, etc, are going to see different things in the text. And we'll find different potentially faithful texts that are reasonable or faithful to the text. But one of the key moves that that you make in each chapter, it seems to me, is really kind of divesting. I mean, you call it divesting ourselves of bad history. And I do think that that's a really important move, and I think it's one that you're constantly kind of pointing readers of the biblical text towards, is to say, you know, not every reading is valid. You know, there are some readings that are off the table based on, stereotypes or misconceptions. If someone is not, not trained in a professional sense, and they really want to kind of engage the text in a deeper way, maybe as someone who's a lay person, but takes the Bible seriously, what are some key moves that someone could make as they're engaging a topic like economics to make sure that they're kind of in the vein or in the lane of what you would describe as a reasonable or faithful reading?
AJ Levine:If we're talking about Jesus material or Pauline material, if you have to make Judaism look bad in order to make your text look good, then you've probably got a bad reading. And it's a kind of desperate reading as well. You know, the text can stand on its own pretty good. Jesus can stand on his own. He's pretty good. You don't have to set up a negative foil for that. If you get a reading, and you go through an entire Gospel, and all you get is comfort, and you get no challenge, you miss something, because the gospel message is a message of challenge. It's a message of risk, high risk. So if it's just all comfort, comfort, comfort, warm and squishy kind of church lady thing, it's just special. It's a misreading of the gospel. There has to be a challenge there Jesus, I think, and here, you know, I'm a historian, and I may be wrong. I'm old, I wasn't there. I think he's highly eschatologically oriented. He thinks the end of the world, kingdom of God, as he would call it, is about to break in. The Hebrew would be the Olam Haba, the world to come. And you live as if he's treating, teaching his disciples to live as if they've got one foot in there already. So what's the kingdom of God? It's when everybody in the community is treated like a mother, brother, or sister. And pair bonding like the Leave It to Beaver model of the household is no longer the most important, the household of this broader assembly. That's important, and we have to consider that, and that's very hard for individualized Westerners to do in terms of this eschatological moment. That's part of the eschatological moment, you know, where people are neither married nor given in marriage, like everybody's a mother, brother, or sister. There's an old rabbinic, well, there's an old rabbinic saying for everything. There's an old rabbinic saying that goes something like, repent one day before you die. I think that's kind of the Jesus move like, you know the end of the world is coming on Tuesday. Reorient yourself. Figure out what's important, figure out what's less important, and take care of the important things. And sometimes the important things are easily done, like telling people you love, "I love you," because you may not have the chance the next day. That's really important. You don't go to bed angry, right? And then figure out, where's your money being invested? How is your client being invested?
Chris McAlilly:I want to move over to another topic that I think is just very much a part of the conversation, the topic of ethnicity and race. It's really a topic where you were, you're looking at the text, thinking about these relationships between those who are on the inside and those who are on the outside, assimilation, how you deal with the enemies. All of these relationships are very much in the text. What are you trying to do in that chapter? What are some of the problems that problematize readings of the text that we sometimes extrapolate?
AJ Levine:Right. And here I'm substantially informed by people who were writing from African American perspectives, Asian perspectives, Hispanic perspectives, and so on, sometimes under the broader category of minorities or ethnic ethnic or racial minorities, who see things in the text that people who were part of the white Christian majority might not see. I think Jesus is interested in ethnicity. He remains a Jew in the body. He's an ethnic Jew. He is circumcised. Okay, granted, he didn't have much of a choice on the matter, but he keeps to the dietary regulations. He does not declare all foods clean, because if he did, Acts 15 need not have happened.
Eddie Rester:Right.
AJ Levine:Of course, anybody can eat anything. He wears, he wears tzitzit, he wears ritual fringes, which remind him of Torah. He goes to synagogues, right? And he has a different sense of a Gentile mission than a Jewish mission, because the Gentile mission really doesn't get going until following the death of Jesus. You can see that in Matthew, right. "Now all authority has been given to me." I'm in 28:16 or so. "Now go make disciples of all their Gentiles." Right? It's like change in job description means change in mission. See the same thing. So this means that if you're a member of a particular ethnic group or a particular group that falls into the category of race, and you have your own cultural concerns that you don't have to check those at the door when you walk into the church. The church is supposed to be comprised of multiple nations. That's the book of Revelation, the part that says catalogical vision. But you can instantiate it now, so that not everybody has to conform to a particular sort of Methodist British way of doing things. There are other ways of being culturally engaged within particular denominations. I want to look at Jesus as, in that sense, somewhat ethnocentric. And I think that's okay, because you start where you are, and if your ethnicity is already minoritized as Jews were within the broader Roman Empire, or if you're worried about matters of forced assimilation and forced acculturation where you have to give up who you are, the Gospels say absolutely not. And we can see that by Jesus hanging on to his own ethnic identity and at the same time being welcoming of Gentiles, non Jews, as the Jerusalem temple was and as
Eddie Rester:My Greek is rusty. But I think in that Matthew 28 passage where Jesus says, "Go into all the world," isn't the Greek for world there "ethnos?" Isn't that...
AJ Levine:Go into all the world. It's make them... My Greek is not rusty.
Eddie Rester:Okay, yes.
AJ Levine:It's make disciples of all, "panta ta ethne."
Eddie Rester:That's it.
AJ Levine:"Panta" is all, and"ta" is the, and "ethne," which is where we get ethnic, can be translated either Gentiles or nations. It is the Greek version of the Hebrew term "goy" or"goyim," which can mean Gentiles. In Yiddish, it just means Gentiles, like Fiddler on the Roof Yiddish, it means Gentile. But the "Lo yisa goy el goy cherev," "nation shall not lift up sword against nation," right? Not just Gentiles, and that's everybody. So is it go make disciples of all the nations, including Jews? Is it go make disciples of all the Gentiles? Like your focus has now changed. You did the Jew thing. Now you go out and you make disciples of all the Gentiles. I think that's what Matthew was saying. But back in the mission discourse in Matthew chapter 10, this is amazing that I can actually do this in my head now. And the reason I can do it is because I wrote my dissertation on these verses. So once you write it, you know stuff. My dissertation that I wanted to call "Matthew in the Missionary Position," but the good folks at Duke would not let me do that.
Chris McAlilly:That's very funny.
Eddie Rester:Rudy Smith...
Chris McAlilly:You're gonna make Eddie blush. Eddie is blushing. He is.
Eddie Rester:Yeah...
AJ Levine:You know, Jesus says don't go to the Gentiles, don't go to the Samaritans, just go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Well, the mission to the Jews has never stopped. Right. The great commission is not screw the Jews, just go to the Gentiles. What it is is it's an add on, right? You've got this thing here, and now what you're going to do is you're going to add on, and you're going to include the Gentiles in your missionary focus. So I really do think it means go make disciples of all the Gentiles, but it doesn't also mean screw the Jews.
Eddie Rester:Right, right,
Chris McAlilly:Which is your favorite of the Gospels? I know that's a hard question. What's that? Whichever one you're working on?
AJ Levine:It's like asking who's your favorite kid. I mean, you can't do that, and you shouldn't. You know, I wrote my dissertation on Matthew. I probably know Matthew better, but I did an Abingdon study guide on Mark. I did an Abingdon study guide on John, and I wrote a commentary for Cambridge University Press on the Gospel of Luke with Ben Witherington the Third, who's a Methodist evangelical. Like, Ben and I don't agree theologically on pretty much everything, but he's a really, really close friend. So we thought, wouldn't it be fun? This was Ben's idea. First, I thought it was just nuts, but the more I thought about it, that's pretty good idea, that we would each take a chapter. I got the odd chapters. He got the even ones. Then we would trade off and where we disagreed, it would be, "Ben says this." "AJ says this." "Ben says this." Agreeing to disagree, we move on. And what we thought the book would do would be encourage people who would normally read me and would stay way away from Ben to get some sense of more conservative, evangelical scholarship, and people who would never touch me with a 10 foot pole. "Oh, my God, she's a woman and she's a Jew!" You know, "Oh, how terrible!" They'd kind of be forced to read me. And we didn't want it to be like Team Ben and Team AJ. We want to say, here's how biblical scholars do what we do, and here's why we sometimes disagree.
Eddie Rester:Right.
Chris McAlilly:I love...
Eddie Rester:And can disagree. And anyway, yeah, that's fantastic,
Chris McAlilly:Yeah. And I think I can sum this up, just using your words here in the end of in the afterward, afterward, afterward, I think you call it. You're talking about the parable of the sheep and the goats, and these are the sentences that come to mind as you're talking,"If we do not see the face of the divine in the face of everyone else, even if we don't believe in a God who looks like us, we should nevertheless be able to see the human face, the face we share in everyone else. And if we cannot, we are lost." And I think that that is right. I mean, that feels like a very pertinent word for, where are we? This is May the 15th, 2025. And you know, I think one of the things about your scholarship that I just find so immensely helpful is how alive the Bible is to this current moment. I always come away from reading some of your stuff more energized for preaching and teaching and bringing the scriptures into the community that I'm serving. And so I'm always so grateful. And grateful for this conversation, for an opportunity to talk with you and to engage with you and to hear your passion for the Scripture. So thank you. Thank you for taking the time to do it.
AJ Levine:Okay, so when it's time to do my obituary, just, you know, put all that stuff down.
Eddie Rester:We'll just pull this back up.
Chris McAlilly:Yeah, we'll just... There you go.
Eddie Rester:This has been so delightful. Really. Thank you. It's pushed me in some good, good ways.
Chris McAlilly:We've been trying to push Eddie for years. So this is really grateful. Thank you. AJ.
Eddie Rester:Yeah, yeah. Thank you AJ.
AJ Levine:I'm a Jewish mother. I know how to do that, so if you need more pushing, just let me know. That's what I'm good at.
Eddie Rester:Thank you very much.
AJ Levine:Thanks very much for the conversation.
Eddie Rester:[OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe, or leave a review.
Chris McAlilly:If you would like to support this work financially, or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]