BOOK REVIEW:
That most Jewish of books
How does the New Testament appear to Jewish eyes? A new scholarly volume provides both close-up and wide-angle views of the Christian Bible’s 27 books, and reveals the Jewish underpinnings of nearly every part of it
By Benjamin Balint (Haaretz)
Tags: Israel culture Diaspora Jewry
The Jewish Annotated New Testament
edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler
Oxford University Press, 700 pages, $35
The most detailed review of this book I have seen yet. Excerpt:
In “The Jewish Annotated New Testament,” Amy-Jill Levine, of Vanderbilt Divinity School and author of the 2006 book “The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus,” has teamed up with Marc Zvi Brettler, a professor of Bible at Brandeis University, to reclaim the New Testament as an integral part of Jewish literature. The result is a landmark volume that in its reading of the New Testament as a Jewish text reverses the usual direction of appropriation − with sometimes surprising effect.
The bulk of the book is a verse-by-verse annotation by 27 renowned Jewish scholars (oddly, not a single Israeli among them), one for each of the New Testament’s books, demonstrating the texts’ deep indebtedness to early Jewish theological motifs, stylistic conventions and exegetical impulses.
The second part of the volume consists of 30 essays on historical and religious topics − such as messianic movements, midrash and parables in the New Testament, Jesus in Jewish thought, the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls − designed to enlarge the scope of the commentaries.
These close-up and wide-angle views combine to offer a fascinating bifocal study in literary influence.
Earlier reviews etc.
here and links.