The Bible and Beyond Podcast Episode

Was Jesus a Better Jew than the Jews?

An Interview with Dr. Amy Jill Levine

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine

Amy-Jill Levine, a distinguished New Testament scholar, provides examples of Christian commentators making Jewish practices and beliefs look bad in order to make Jesus look good. A more realistic understanding of these Jewish practices helps us understand Jesus better and understand Judaism more respectfully. Examples of these Jewish beliefs and practices include feminist perspectives, being identified as the Chosen Ones, and stereotypical attitudes about wealth and purity laws.

Professor Amy-Jill Levine is the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler, Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace and University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies America at Vanderbilt. And before that, the Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot Associate Professor of Religion at Swarthmore College. Having grown up in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood and being raised in a Jewish home lays the foundation for her life-long interest in Jewish-Christian relations.

Dr. Levine has been awarded grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In Spring 2019 she was the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute; in 2021, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She may be best known for her book, the Misunderstood Jew and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus and her co-edited volume, The Jewish Annotated New Testament. Her newest book, Jesus for Everyone, Not Just Christians, sheds more light on a better way for all of us to understand Jesus better, particularly Jews and Christians. To learn more about Dr. Levine, click here.

Audio

Video

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Interview Transcript

Shirley Paulson

It is quite a treat to have Amy Jill Levine with us on the Bible and Beyond podcast today. If you haven’t met her yet, through her numerous books, articles, public speaking engagements, classroom settings, or even Wikipedia, I’m delighted to introduce her to you. Dr. Levine is the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler, Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace and University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies America at Vanderbilt. And before that, the Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot Associate Professor of Religion at Swarthmore College. What is especially pertinent for our topic today is the fact that she grew up in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood and was raised in a Jewish home. She may be best known for her book, the Misunderstood Jew and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus and her co-edited volume, The Jewish Annotated New Testament. Her newest book, Jesus For Everyone, not just Christians, is what we’re discussing today. I’m so pleased to have you with us to shed more light on perhaps a better way for all of us to understand Jesus better, particularly Jews and Christians.

Amy-Jill Levine

I’m delighted to be able to join you. I’d like to think that the reason I’m credible is not just because I happen to be a Jew, but I actually happen to be a pretty good scholar.

Shirley Paulson

Yes, you are! And I think your writing and your experience and speaking just attest to that all over the place. So I’m really pleased to have your scholarship and your life experience with us. In the book that I just mentioned, Jesus For Everyone, you make a really strong case for exposing one of the, I think, unnecessary points of division between Jews and Christians. You provide examples of Christians making Jewish practices and beliefs that look bad for the purpose of making Jesus look good. But you argue that getting a more realistic understanding of these Jewish practices helps us understand Jesus more accurately and allows us to understand Judaism more respectfully at the same time. We won’t have time in our short conversation to cover all of your examples, but I’d like to highlight some of the ones that I think are really pertinent, important. They’re all pertinent. So one of your claims is that Christian women, looking for a Jesus proactive on feminism, really could not locate a feminist Jesus in the gospels. Therefore, in order to claim Jesus for feminism, they invented a kind of toxic first-century Judaism over and against which they positioned Jesus. Maybe we could start there. What would you tell us about that?

Amy-Jill Levine

Well, first I want to thank you for a fabulous summary of part of what I tried to do in this book. Thank you.

Shirley Paulson

Okay,

Amy-Jill Levine

Appreciate close reading. So in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Christian feminists, Catholic, Protestant, even some Orthodox, were wondering about what sometimes called the “stained glass ceiling” why they’re not the senior pastor. Why in some churches they could not even be ordained, why they were being silenced. And the idea was to find Jesus’s leverage. So if Jesus is proactive on women, then they could go to their church leaders and say, Hey, look, we’re supposed to be followers of Jesus. Let’s get with the program.

The problem was they couldn’t find him being proactive. I mean, h summoned no women directly, like the guys from the fishing boats, or the guy from the toll booth. He tells no woman that she will sit on a throne and judge the 12 tribes of Israel. So how do you get him to be proactive? So the easiest way to do it is to lower the bar on Judaism. So if you make Judaism look toxic for women, then anytime Jesus talks with the women, you’ve raised the bar and therefore you’ve got leverage. But there’s no good evidence for this highly misogynistic system in the gospels. So what did they do? They went to Jewish women who were wondering how come we couldn’t be ordained in some movements, some Judaism? Or, how come we had faced that stained glass ceiling? And we pulled out from leder material, some difficult stuff, say for example from the Talmud. But we also pulled out all the good stuff and the Christian women ignored all the good stuff, took the bad stuff, retrojected it back into the first century and created a negative Judaism over against which to situate Jesus. It’s bad history and it’s bad theology.

Shirley Paulson

And of course it makes us have disagreements with each other that aren’t necessary, which is I think our main theme right now: this is not necessary. But this same attitude, which is helpful but also difficult, I think it comes up in Jesus’s treatment of wealth and poverty. I found that in your book too, where I think Jesus speaks with such hyperbole when he says that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God. How then do Christian interpreters wrongly soften this image of Jesus in their efforts to make him like less provocative? Or maybe it could even push that a little further. How do Christian interpreters sometimes understand the relationship between Jews and money and how does this understanding both mischaracterize Judaism and Jesus?

Amy-Jill Levine

Yeah, so it’s the same model. In order to make Jesus be palatable, make Judaism look so awful that anything Jesus says looks good in comparison. So some Christian commentators will go to passages in Deuteronomy, speaking not to individuals, but to the entire community saying, “If you do well, then you will do well, right? If you behave properly, then God will reward you.” So they get this idea that Jews think that God rewards everybody who’s healthy and wealthy. And if you’re sick and poor, you therefore must be sinful, and therefore must be cursed by God. And Jesus flips the script. But again, it’s a totally false reading. If you run through Deuteronomy where Jews are, in fact, commanded to take care of the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the not-us, like the not-Jew, the not-Israelite. The prophets spend most of their time railing against the rich.

The rabbis are very, very clear that wealth gives responsibility. It doesn’t suggest reward, and if you’re poor, it’s not because it’s your fault. It’s because systems are difficult and therefore the community must take care of you. So some of this anti Judaism stuff is used. . .  I don’t think people are being deliberately antisemitic. I think they’re trying to get a Jesus that they can relate to who is usable, who suggests social justice, but they don’t know enough about Judaism to see Jesus as coming out of his Jewish system, reflecting his Jewish system. And therefore they want to see him as over against it. It’s sloppy and it’s not needed.

Shirley Paulson

That’s really helpful for us to think about. In other words, we’re not necessarily trying to say there’s something against Jews. It’s just like how do we find the answers we want to find in Jesus, if they’re not really where we are looking for them—which is a tough question. So where do you think this idea came from then that wealth means that you’re not a sinner? Where does that come from?

Amy-Jill Levine

The question of Jews and money has been fraught over the past, oh, two millennia or so,

—especially since under Christian domination, the Christian empire, Jews were not allowed to own land. Jews were not allowed to own property. Jews were frequently kicked out of one country or one region or another. But the Roman Catholic Church also considered that taking interest was unnatural. Money cannot beget money. But on the other hand, in order to float loans, which is what you need for business, somebody had to be able to provide the money. So Jews got forced into the role of money lenders or users, probably most popular being Shakespeare’s Shylock from the Merchant of Venice. According to the Book of Deuteronomy, Jews cannot charge interest to fellow Jews. We still cannot do this, to this day. But you can charge interest to an outsider. For people who think that’s unfair, what about tariffs, right? If you have something that’s made in the United States, you might not want to charge the same amount as if you imported it.

You might have a tariff on the import. That’s how that system works. So Jews get associated with money and because Jews couldn’t own land, this forced us into merchant working where you could go from town to town. You could be a peddler, you didn’t have to have a home base, and eventually finally into banking. So we have a combination of Catholic views on money lending, with Marxist views on Jews and Judaism, with the idea that some of my students have that somehow all Jews are rich [We should be so lucky!], and that we’re controlling all the banks. We should be so lucky. So 19th century Marxist stereotypes, 20^th– and 21^st-century ideas of Jews as having some sort of international monetary hold on the world, coupled with this idea of, well, Jesus has a concern about rich people. Well, that must mean all those Jews who just love the wealthy and despise the poor, rather than Jews who are commanded. And in fact we do, in terms of Jewish law, do our best to take care of people who need additional services.

Shirley Paulson

Really, I appreciate your addressing these stereotypes because I don’t know where they come from, but this is helpful to get a little bit of historical context to see why and where they would’ve come from and what are we leaning on. This was very, very helpful. I appreciate that. So then related to the money question then, on the side of poverty, what about the woman who gave all her money in the Temple, which was very, very little that she gave? I’m wondering about how you interpret that. Was Jesus condemning the value system of the Temple that would’ve motivated this kind of poverty? Or do you think he was against the whole temple system?

Amy-Jill Levine

Yeah, so the story shows up twice in the gospels. As a widow, she has two coins, and she gives both, which shows generosity. I mean, she could have held one back. The temple also functions to some extent as a redistribution center, much as churches or synagogues would do. So if you’re hungry, you could get food. This thing about Anna, the widow who lives in the Temple, it’s not like she’s got an income. If Jesus thought she was wasting her money, he could have called out, Hey lady, save your money because he’s not above disrupting things. Is the system impoverishing everybody? No, she’s a one-off. Nobody else is doing that. And to say that she was somehow manipulated into doing this by Temple authorities robs her of all the agencies that she’s got and turns her into a complete victim. I don’t want to turn women into complete victims, any more than I would say that if you come into a church on a Sunday morning and you’re unlimited income, but you believe it is the right thing to do to put a $10 bill on the collection plate, I think it would be horrible if the person presiding over the service just went up to you individually and said, lady, I’m sorry.

You don’t have enough money. You don’t get to contribute. And that also ignores the dignity of the individual and the reciprocal system of how charity works. Could women be manipulated out of their houses? Sure. Because right before that, Jesus talks about these scribes who walk around and devour women’s houses, but he doesn’t locate them in the Temple. He locates them in the marketplace.

I don’t think Jesus was against the Temple, and I don’t think the Temple was exploiting people. If it were, it makes absolutely no sense to me that Paul in Romans talks about worship (by which, he means Temple worship) is one of the irrevocable gifts that God gave to the Jews. And especially more, why Jesus followers, as we see in the book of Acts, continue to worship in the Temple? In fact, Paul even makes sacrifice in the Temple according to the Book of Acts. So did they like the leadership? No! Why would they? The leadership was appointed by Pontius Pilate, not by the Jewish community, but did they like the institution? This is the institution Jesus calls his Father’s house. So let’s be a little bit more careful about how we understand how institutions function. Could Jews be critical of the Temple? Absolutely. Does that mean that they all hated it? No!

Shirley Paulson

So I don’t think I’d ever realized that it was Pontius Pilate’s decision as to who’s leading at the temple. That’s news to me. And that does change how Jesus would’ve thought about what was going on there and still respecting the fact that it was God’s gift to the Jews.

Amy-Jill Levine

Yeah, the Roman governors—following Herod, the Great who disrupted Temple issues and appointed his own priests, people he thought he could control—when the Roman governors took over in the year 6 of the common era, they took care of who was going to be in charge of the Temple. They also held onto the high priestly vestments. And back then you can’t do the job unless you’ve got the outfit. So Caiaphas is dependent upon Pilate in order to do his job. And Pilate is, to some extent, dependent upon Caiaphas, who’s the now official [thank you, Rome] representative of the Jewish people in Judea to the Roman government. So Caiaphas’s job, in part, to try to keep the peace.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, that’s very helpful. Alright, so then another topic that kind of digs deep into the modern American psyche is the issue of slavery. Of course it existed in a very different context than now, but still slavery is slavery anywhere at any time. And you bring out the point that Jesus didn’t really take a strong stand against slavery, which is kind of hard to think about. So how have Christians come to terms with this that end up making Jewish practices look bad while elevating Jesus?

Amy-Jill Levine

That’s right. Slavery is one of the few cases where Jews don’t take the blame for most things. But what happens instead, is Christians tend to ignore the problem, or say, “Well, Jesus really isn’t talking about slaves, he’s talking about voluntary servants.” The Greek term is “slave,” and there is a different word for servant—or, that he could not have said anything against slavery given the conditions of the time. But we know that there are other Jewish groups, like the Essenes or the Therapeutae (this group in Egypt), who did think that slavery was not a good idea, because everybody’s in the image and likeness of God. So we’re all related and therefore one person cannot own another. So what I want to do is talk about first, why don’t Christians talk about the problem in the first place? And second, can we even use this language of slavery today? Or, is it so blighted, particularly given the American context, the American legacy of slavery, let alone ongoing slavery in some countries in the world and human trafficking? What can we learn by bringing up parables regarding enslaved individuals or the enslaved individual in Luke, chapter seven, whom Jesus heals, or the fellow who gets his ear chopped off in Gethsemane? So they’re there all over the place, so why don’t we recognize them? And once we see them, now how do we wrestle with these stories? And I think Jesus’ stories and stories about Jesus help us wrestle with these issues? And in order to wrestle with them, we’ve got to notice them in the first place.

Shirley Paulson

So why do you think it would be that we tend to, I mean you’re right. We tend to think of Jesus talking to servants who almost voluntarily want to serve, but they’re actually slaves. Why do you think that has happened? Why do we talk that way?

Amy-Jill Levine

Because we don’t like to deal with things that make us uncomfortable. And the thing about Jesus is, I think he likes to make people uncomfortable! He disrupts things, just when you think. . . He does it to this day, to me, when I pay attention to him! Just when I think everything is fine, it’s like I have this little Jesus bug in my ear going, AJ, what about this? What about that? What should you have done that you didn’t do? And what did you do that you should not have done? And it’s that type of personal disruption that makes him for me, in part, so extraordinarily profound. On the other hand, if we think about slave language today, the only people in antiquity who call themselves slaves of God, enslaved of God are people who were free.  Like Moses or Paul or Jesus himself who takes the role of a slave—and enslaved person—and the washes the disciples’ feet. What does that mean? Does it mean that because God is my only master [still a pretty awful metaphor], but if God is the only one who’s in charge of me, or the boss of me, then I’m free in the world.

Because nobody else directs what I’m doing, and it decenters me. I’m not the most important person in the world, which if I’m a CEO, is probably a good idea. I’m an academic, but it helps get rid of some of that ego stuff that modern Americans may be burdened with. So I think the metaphor may still have some cachet in some settings as long as we’re very, very careful to recognize that this is a trigger for many people who are descendants of slaves who were dealing with the legacy of slavery. But I don’t want to let it go. It’s sitting there in the New Testament, it’s sitting there in the gospels saying, let’s talk about this.

Shirley Paulson

And I’m glad you are. I really appreciate the way you bring up things that are just beneath the surface that we tend to read over and comfort ourselves thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what Jesus meant. But I really appreciate you bringing things up that don’t often get talked about. This is very helpful. So then I was also taken by your question, one of the questions that you raised when you got into the subject of ethnicity. You asked, how do we define ourselves without projecting negative images onto people outside our families or tribes or nations? When I read that question, I thought that is a great question and in addition to asking this question for myself, I was interested in your discussion of the way Jesus thought of the Samaritans. I was certainly taught that Samaritans were the enemies who did everything wrong according to Jewish traditions. But you’re saying it’s not quite that way. So how does this reflect on Jesus? Help us with that one.

Amy-Jill Levine

It guess it’s the problem of things being so much more complicated.

So one of the reasons we get this idea is because of books like Ezra and Nehemiah and I and II Chronicles, where there is some enmity between Judeans just returning from Babylon and people in Samaria. If you actually look at later Jewish sources like rabbinic literature, sometimes Samaritans—the rabbis confuse them with Sadducees, with other groups of Jews, but with different ways of understanding theology, a different configuration of the biblical canon. But they’re lost, but they’re not us. Sometimes they’re looked at as “they’re us because they’re descendants of those 10 lost tribes back from the 8th century BCE. And sometimes they’re friends and sometimes they’re enemies. So it depends upon the source that you read. It’s Luke that basically sets them up as enemies. In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 9, Jesus and the entourage stop by a Samaritan village and they’re looking for a motel, and the Samaritans don’t want to receive them because Jesus is a Jew and he’s heading to Jerusalem.

At which point James and John, two of the apostles in their apostolic best say, “Lord, shall we call down fire from heaven and destroy this village?” It’s a Sodom and Gomorrah image, which according to Ezekiel, was destroyed because of lack of hospitality. And Jesus says, “No, you don’t drop a bomb because of lack of hospitality.” The parable that we call the Good Samaritan is in the very next chapter. So it’s Luke who’s actually set up the Samaritans as the ones who don’t like Jews. And now we have to deal with the Samaritan who deals with the guy in the ditch. So Jews and Samaritans, they’re enemies except when they’re not. The mother of Herod Antipas, the fellow who kills John the Baptist, she was a Samaritan married to King Herod the great. So they’re enemies except when they’re not. So how do we deal with the us and the not-us, or the us who used to be Jews, to Samaritans? It’s not a great analogy, but it’s kind of like Protestants to Catholics.

They were one; now they’re not one. Can they talk with each other? Do they hate each other? Do you have a Hundred Years’ War? Do you have something else? And then we have Jesus and Gentiles. Gentiles back then means not-Jews and not-Samaritans, because Samaritans aren’t Gentiles. They worship the same God that the Jews do. Jesus does not give up on his own identity. He doesn’t invent universalism. He says to the Samaritan lady at the, well, by the way, “You all—you Samaritans—you don’t know what you’re doing. We Jews, we worship what we know. You worship with what you don’t know, because salvation comes from the Jews.” In other words, the Jewish biblical tradition, rather than the Samaritan one, is the correct one. That doesn’t prevent him from having a lovely conversation with the Samaritan lady or spending a couple of days in her village. You can have strong theological disagreements. You don’t have to locate down to some sort of lowest common denominator theology and you can still have lunch. I think this is helpful.

Shirley Paulson

That is very helpful. And I think actually you’re right, it’s not a perfect analogy, but with the Christians and Jews today, we can understand that we can talk to each other, but we don’t have to be enemies even if we disagree. So that is a very helpful way to think about this, even though I know it’s got limitations. So then actually speaking of ethnicity, there’s another really important topic that I think you can help us with. And I’m sure you hear this all the time too, as I hear it. What does it mean to be the Chosen People?

Amy-Jill Levine

So the question is, chosen for what? If you come into a synagogue service, a tourist service on Saturday morning, one of the prayers that we say, when we read the Torah, before the Torah reading, is: . . . . “who has chosen us from among all the nations?” But then the next line is what’s important: . . . . “and has given us his Torah.” So what are Jews chosen to do? We are chosen to follow the Torah. It doesn’t make us better than anyone else. I mean, Deuteronomy is very clear about this. You’re not the greatest nation in the world. You screw up a lot. Golden calf, not one of our better moments. But God remains faithful to the Jewish people, and our job is to remain faithful to that covenant. So we are chosen to follow God’s covenant. Does it make us special or unique? No more, no less than any other group ethnicity today, what we would call race. Religion is unique and special and has its own gifts and its own concerns. Christians glommed onto this definition as well. I Peter, the First Epistle of Peter, talks about being a holy nation in a chosen people. It’s the same language. And then I can say to my Christian students, so if you are a “chosen people” as Christians, what are you chosen to do?

Shirley Paulson

To do? Yeah,

Amy-Jill Levine

To do.

Shirley Paulson

That’s really helpful for us because when you just use “chosen,” you think you’re chosen to be special rather than chosen to do something. I really appreciate that.

Amy-Jill Levine

Right? And both can be true. In the same way that if you have children, your own children are special to you. You adopted a child, this is a chosen child. Back then, adoption was really the way to go. Like Julius Caesar adopted Augustus. So you’re actually wanted, as opposed to the genetic lottery, and therefore you’re special. And, particularly, if you’re minoritized or you’re oppressed, some sense that there’s something special about you can actually get you through the day. But it doesn’t mean that other people are not special in their own contexts.

Shirley Paulson

Oh, so helpful. Yeah. Alright. This is a game changer I think, in a lot of ways. And another really tough subject I want to get into here too is the subject of divorce. Jesus makes it pretty clear that divorce is just plain wrong and yet just about everybody, including Christians dance around that one is if he couldn’t possibly mean that. So how do you think that both Jews and Christians can come to terms with that difficult thing?

Amy-Jill Levine

Yeah, well, some Christians don’t dance around it at all. So it really depends upon the denomination or the branch of Christianity that’s under discussion. Jews don’t have to worry about what Jesus says. I mean I think we should pay attention to him, but at least in terms of divorce, we’ve got our own stuff we’ve got to worry about. So we have to go to the Talmud post biblical Jewish material. One way to contextualize Jesus’s statements is to look at what Paul says. In I Corinthians, Paul says, “I have it as a word of the Lord.” I mean he got this from the Jesus tradition, you ought not to divorce. Paul says, you can separate for a period as long as by mutual agreement. Why? Because Jesus is coming back soon! The distress is about to show up. Paul even says, “Don’t bother to get married. You got enough to worry about if you get married, you have to worry about God knows how much else.”

So if you think the second coming is happening a week from Tuesday, you do not need to get divorced. You’ve got other things you’ve got to worry about, and you’re not doing long-term planning. The problem is Jesus doesn’t come back and then we have to figure out, okay, well that’s a dis-confirmation of our beliefs. We thought he was coming soon. He’s not. How now do we adapt? And the church, because it’s smart, generally figured out ways of adapting. And if we simply restrict what the church is to the words of the New Testament (which I think is unfortunate), in Christian theology, that puts the Holy Spirit out of business because the Spirit’s got nothing more to contribute. It forces all Christians to live into some sort of first century Bible land, which is unfortunate. Why use modern medicine for example, or use science or electricity? The church needs to develop. And here—as we see in the Jewish tradition with the Talmud, with the medieval response, with ongoing Jewish law, which is still being debated to this day because we have new things and we need to worry about can we do this? Should we do this, should we not?—the church can do the same thing. That’s the role of the Spirit.

Shirley Paulson

Okay. That’s very helpful to think about too. So we have to keep thinking, I can’t just assign it to somebody who already has the answers for us. Okay, so now there’s another really important common point of distinction I hear: the Christians’ claim for Jesus that relates to health issues. The legalism for Jews who oppose healing on the Sabbath or the purity laws that Jesus broke in order to heal people. Would you see that these are valid descriptions of Jewish customs or a misread of them?

Amy-Jill Levine

It much depends upon the Jew that you ask! Remember, we don’t have a head Jew to tell us what to do. We are basically an ethnic group, like ‘Americans’. So you can have Democrats and Republicans, and they can violently disagree. But the one thing we agree on is “we’re all American.” The Pharisees and Sadducees, Essenes, and people in the Galilee and people in the diaspora. I mean Jews don’t agree on much. In terms of purity laws, purity laws are designed to help us sanctify the body. Jesus does not break any purity laws. There’s no law against touching a person who has a skin disease, what we would call leprosy. There’s no law against a person who’s got some sort of vaginal or uterine bleeding touching anybody. It’s like the system doesn’t shut down. Of course you can touch a corpse. That’s how you get them into the ground!

That’s how you take care of them. That’s how you bury them. So Jesus doesn’t violate any purity laws whatsoever. What he does do, which most of my Christian friends don’t notice, is he restores people to states of ritual purity. So he has somebody who is impure because of a skin disease. He restores the person and then says, “Oh! go show yourself to the priest because the priest has to pronounce you pure.”  Whenever I hear the term ‘legalism,’ by the way, it’s going to go bad for Jews. Are we legalistic? I could no more and no less than other people. But we’re not so obsessed by the law that we’re worried that if we violate one of the commandments, God’s going to zap us.

And for most cases when it comes to diet and dress and whatnot, it’s not like it’s going to happen very often. It’s not like there’s a pork barbecue stand in lower Galilee where Jesus is likely to go eat pig, right? The closest he comes to pigs are those pigs that go over the cliff. So Jesus adhered to the various Jewish laws. Did he adhere the same way other people would do? Probably not. But the same thing would be said about Pharisees and Sadducees and so on. He doesn’t agree with washing your hands before you eat. Now after Covid, it turns out the Jews were right. So it turns out they were right. But the question is, “why do it?” Because when my Christian friends talk about it, it’s like, why are you supposed to wash your hands before you eat? Because the Pharisees thought [they’re kind of an egalitarian liberal group], and they said, “Well, priests in the Temple wash their hands before they touch the sacrificial elements.” So why should just priests be priests? ‘Priest’ in Judaism is an inherited role. If your dad’s a priest, you’re a priest. And the Pharisees said, “We’re all supposed to be a kingdom or priest in a holy nation.” Thank you, Exodus.

So we can do what the priests do. They wash their hands, we wash our hands. It’s an egalitarian movement. Jesus says, “well, it’s a law that’s not in the scripture.” It’s not. It’s a post biblical idea. You don’t need it. Perfectly legitimate debate between two different Jews. But when Jesus debates his fellow Jews, it doesn’t take him out of Judaism. It puts him smack in the heart in Judaism, because what’s more important than debating what you think God wants you to do?

Shirley Paulson

Well, that’s another interesting example of where it looks like we’re sort of elevating Jesus again, in order to say something about Jesus by putting Jewish customs down, which I can see how that doesn’t really make any sense there. I certainly have been taught that Jesus was breaking all these rules in order to heal, but those aren’t there. So that’s very. . .  And I love the report that he’s enabling people to become more Jewish, more pure, more what they were originally meant to be with his healing rather than less,

Amy-Jill Levine

Right! Nor is he providing any lesson for Christians, by the way. What he is telling us is that free healthcare on the Sabbath is a miracle, because he’s not advising all of his followers. Like go into the synagogue and go violate a bunch of laws. All of these miracles tend to be one-offs. And when Jesus does heal somebody in a synagogue like the bent over lady in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says she’s bent over by Satan. I think she’s bent over by osteoporosis; and he raises her up. And the synagogue ruler, the guy who’s running the services says, “You had six days on which you could have done this for a non-painful, chronic condition.” And Jesus says, “she’s a daughter of Abraham. What’s your problem? The congregation gives glory to God. So the congregation’s not sitting in there going, well, you could have waited another day. One person who’s going to complain! Nothing to do there. Go into any church service in the world at the end of Sunday morning, somebody is there going to complain about something.

Shirley Paulson

Oh gosh, true. Yeah. Well, okay, so many more questions. I would just like to recommend that people just read your book because there’s a lot more in there in terms of your depth of the ideas that you’re talking about and there are even more ideas. They’re just wonderful. So again, the book is Jesus for Everyone. So I think that’s a helpful thing to get your teeth into. But I’d like to ask you one last question if you don’t mind. What would you like for both Christians and Jews to think about or to do that would make positive changes at this point?

Amy-Jill Levine

If I ruled the world,

Shirley Paulson

Yes,

Amy-Jill Levine

It might be helpful to stop stereotyping, to think that all Jews think X, whether Jesus or current political situation in the Middle East or whatever, or for Jews to think all Christians think X regarding the same things. And just to meet with each other as individuals without having to bear the burden or know everything about their background and their tradition. So that we come to these conversations as individuals. And then to have the courage to ask, “Why do you believe this? Or why do you do this? Or help me understand this.” We cannot know our neighbors. We cannot love our neighbors, let alone love the stranger who dwells among us unless we know something about them. So rather than stereotype to make that effort actually to get to know somebody else, I think that would be a grand start.

Shirley Paulson

Well, hallelujah, you have just done that. You’ve helped us to get to know some Jewish people, and particularly one Jewish person a little bit better. So I want to thank you so much for being with us today and really helping us to dig in a little deeper and learn a lot more. Thank you so much.

Amy-Jill Levine

Many thanks. Many thanks.