The Misunderstood Jew: She Taught at the Vatican and Changed How We See Jesus w/ Dr. Amy-Jill Levine

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today our very special guest is Dr. Amy-Jill Levine. Thank you so much for taking your time to join us today.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Happy to talk with you.

Johnny Ova: Let's jump right into our conversation. You grew up as a Jewish girl in a Catholic neighborhood in Massachusetts, and you've said that experience changed the way you see Jesus forever. If you could take us back to that childhood, when was the first time Jesus caught your attention?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Well, I'm not sure it changed the way I see him. It formed the way I see him. I didn't have an earlier view that got changed. When I was a child, my parents would explain to me what my neighbors were doing religiously, because we did different things, particularly on the weekend. They went to Mass. I went to Shabbos services and Sunday school. My parents explained to me that my Catholic friends thought a Jewish man named Jesus and a Jewish woman named Mary were super important. And then I saw a bunch of statues. So my initial sense of Jesus was that he was a Jew who was persecuted by the Roman government. Nothing new there.

Johnny Ova: So was that what piqued your curiosity? Was it more, hey, how come they're doing different things than I'm doing?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: That was part of it. Part of it was that when I was seven, all of my girlfriends were preparing to make their first communion, and they all got dresses. So I'm in it for the accessories. And the thing that really struck me was when I was seven, a little girl said to me on the school bus, you killed our Lord. And I said, I didn't kill anybody, because if I did, I would know. And she insisted that I did because her priest said so.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: And I thought the reason priests had to wear special collars was because the collar would choke the priest were the priest to tell a lie. So I couldn't figure out, as a child, how this tradition, which my parents explained was very much like Judaism, and which had the great accessories for first communion and the bunny and Santa, how was this tradition saying horrible things about me? So I started asking questions then. I was seven then. I'm turning 70 this year. So I've been doing this a long time.

Johnny Ova: Wow, amazing, really amazing. I know you're a committed Jewish woman who belongs to an Orthodox synagogue, and yet you've spent your entire career studying the New Testament. I think most people would find that surprising. What is it about Jesus, or that study, that keeps pulling you back toward the New Testament?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: There are a couple of things that are formative here. The first is it's all Jewish history. If I want to understand part of my own tradition, the New Testament is a source that fills in a number of gaps, particularly in the first century, where we don't have any Jewish sources that are authoritative for us. So along with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings of the historian Josephus, the Jewish philosopher Philo and all the other things historians read, the New Testament is a very good source for understanding first-century Judaism. The other reason I do it is that the more we can understand the New Testament within its historical context, the less likely we are, people in general, to produce anti-Jewish or antisemitic readings. I knew from that time when I was a kid that there are ways of reading the New Testament that will create antisemites, and I don't think that's necessary.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: There are ways of understanding Jesus where people kind of yank him out of his Jewish context, as opposed to seeing him in continuity with the Scriptures of Israel and with Jewish teaching. So it's to recover Jewish history and it's to stop antisemitism. Plus it's fascinating literature.

Johnny Ova: It really is. And you hit on something super important: history, context, culture. At our church, that's where we're big. It's one of the reasons we started this podcast, to get experts like yourself on to get a better understanding of context, history and culture. There are words, sentences, even activities that we read in our 2026 context and gloss right over, or think it's one thing without truly understanding the roots behind it.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Absolutely.

Johnny Ova: Here's a fact. You were the first Jewish person in history to teach New Testament at the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, and you have sat down with Pope Francis three times, and I have to ask.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Well, I didn't actually sit down with him. It's not like he had me on speed dial. I did get to meet him three times, and after the third time I didn't bother to collect the picture the Vatican photographers take. So three separate meetings, but nothing private. I'm hoping at some point I'll get to sit down with, say, Pope Leo, have a cappuccino and have a really good discussion about revising the lectionary and retraining priests. But that will have to wait, unless you have influence.

Johnny Ova: I might have to pull on a couple of strings to see if we can make that happen. But what was that experience like, meeting the Pope? Did you talk about anything, or was it more of a meeting?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: It's more of a meet and greet, which is typical for this sort of thing. The work at the Pontifical Biblical Institute was the most important to me, even more than meeting the Pope, because I got to work with the crème de la crème of people coming into the Catholic priesthood. Some of these young priests will go on to teach in seminaries and graduate programs, and they will be the leaders of the next generation. I taught a course on parables, to understand parables in their own context, but also to work with them on this: we can't just do history if we're doing Bible. If we simply look at the Bible as a historical document, then how does it speak to us today? So along with the history there also has to be, what does this text mean to me? What does it mean to this congregation at this particular moment? What's the good news for today? So we worked on both the history and the pastoral aspects of the text.

Johnny Ova: Very cool, the application aspect, not just the historical aspect. You have a book called The Misunderstood Jew, and the subtitle is The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus. The word scandal is obviously intentional. What is the scandal?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: The Greek term that typically gets translated scandal really means a stumbling block. It's stuff you trip over, and it's not good for you or for anybody watching. The scandal, which is sometimes called the scandal of particularity, is to look at Jesus not simply as some sort of universal figure. In Christian theology he is that. But he's also a historical figure embedded in a particular time and place. The problem is people don't want to acknowledge it. They don't want to do the work, because that requires some history. And in a number of cases they don't want to acknowledge that their understandings of Jesus might be wrong. I've had a number of students over the years say to me, Jesus invented love of God and love of neighbor, how fabulous is that? Well, no. Love of God is Deuteronomy 6. Love of neighbor is Leviticus 19. And other Jews put those two verses together also. Jesus doesn't have to be unique in all cases in order to be profound.

Johnny Ova: Do you find that a stumbling block for people when you're teaching?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: People say Jesus wasn't Jewish, he was the first Christian, when he didn't know the word. Or comments like, okay, I finally acknowledge that Jesus was a Jew, but surely not the Blessed Mother. Or various comments where Jesus somehow has to be totally distinct: yes, he was a Jew, but he was the only Jew who cared about women's rights or health care or ecological concerns. So there's always this sense of, I need to yank him out of his context. That's bad Christian theology, because in Christian theology he's also fully human. It's bad history. And it's going to be bad for Jewish-Christian relations also.

Johnny Ova: It's the stumbling block of molding Jesus or the Bible into our own particular cultures, instead of allowing the culture he was raised in to speak for itself.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Right, or put those two things into conversation, because we don't stop asking our own questions. We just have to realize that, given his historical context, he might not be interested in answering those questions as opposed to others. So then how do we do the interpretation?

Johnny Ova: You've said that many Christian sermons and Bible studies accidentally make Judaism look bad in order to make Jesus look good. Can you give our listeners an example of how that plays out on a Sunday morning or in teachings you've heard?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: How long do we have? In standard sermons, when Jesus talks with a woman, the idea is that first-century Jewish women were oppressed and repressed and depressed, and Jesus comes along and invents feminism in a pantsuit. As opposed to seeing women, and you can do women's history through the New Testament, out in public, and nobody goes, my God, it's a woman in public. They're involved in the marketplace, in textile work. They're homeowners, they're patrons, they have access to their own funds, they have freedom of travel. So instead of seeing Jesus as inventing feminism, see Jesus as affirming women as his Jewish society would have. Or sermons where the person giving the sermon or homily does a tiny bit of research, and they say things like, well, the Jews said, and then there's a quote from the Talmud from 400 years later saying women are a problem, and then Jesus affirms women. That is false history: comparing problematic passages from one tradition to very good passages in another, or presuming that one comment from 400 years later is normative for first-century Judaism.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Or comments like, Jews looked at sick people as marginal and unclean, and by healing people Jesus invents benevolent health care. As if Jews weren't in the health care business. When we look at the Gospel stories or the book of Acts, we find most people who are disabled or diseased embedded in household or family contexts. When Jesus heals Peter's mother-in-law, that happens in Peter's house. It's not like he finds her off on the street with a fever. And when Jesus engages with people in states of ritual impurity, such as a person with a skin disease or a woman with some sort of uterine hemorrhage, he's not doing away with purity laws, and there's no law against him touching any of these people. What he's actually doing is restoring them to states of ritual purity.

Johnny Ova: So where do you think this oppressive mindset comes from?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Laziness, where people don't want to do the historical work. Tradition, because this is how texts have been interpreted over the centuries, so it's what people grew up with and they don't bother to question it. A sense, for some people, that there must have been something wrong with the system for Jesus to come and fix it, which is not necessarily the case. Paul talks about Jesus coming in the fullness of time. That means according to God's timetable. It doesn't mean everything was so awful that now, finally. That's bad theology. And I think sometimes there's a sense that the worse you can make first-century Judaism look, the better Jesus looks in comparison. That strikes me as a form of weak theology. I think he looks fabulous. Look, I don't worship him as Lord and Savior, but boy, he was smart. So if I think he looks fabulous and compassionate and interesting and profound, and I don't need to make his context look bad, I don't think Christians need to do that either. But that's simply the way the system has carried through over the centuries.

Johnny Ova: It's interesting, because evangelical Christians specifically have this almost extreme favoritism toward the Jewish people. But at the same time, you're right, there's this negative view that Jesus had to come and wipe the slate clean and rebuild everything from scratch because you got everything wrong. Lazy theology, lazy study habits, and it creates a big monster in the church. In my opinion, some of the ways we represent God and Christ make God look terrible.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Right, terrible or dramatically inconsistent. When churches produce the model of the Old Testament God of wrath versus the New Testament God of love, that's actually a Christian heresy. It's the same God, the one who created heaven and earth. When Jesus teaches his disciples, when you pray, pray Our Father, he's not inventing a new and better God. It's the same God. And when I get this nonsense from some of my students about the Old Testament God of wrath versus the New Testament God of love, I just quote the text to them. "The Lord is my shepherd, who leads me beside still waters and restores my soul." That's Psalm 23. "But you are condemned to the outer darkness, where there's wailing and gnashing of teeth." That's Jesus. So in the Old Testament, to use Christian terminology, I've got a good shepherd, and in the New Testament you've got a sadistic dentist. That's bad comparison. It's bad history, bad literature and bad theology.

Johnny Ova: Let's talk about the Pharisees a little. Most Christians hear the word and immediately think hypocrite, legalist. I know you co-edited an entire book on the Pharisees that even includes an essay by Pope Francis. Set the record straight for us. Who were the Pharisees?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: We start by noting that the only Pharisee from whom we have actual written records happens to be Saint Paul of Tarsus, and I don't think Paul had a morbid conception of his God. To figure out who the Pharisees are, we have to look at all the sources we have from the period. That means not only the Gospel texts. We also have to look at the book of Acts, where a Pharisee named Gamaliel speaks up on behalf of Peter and John. We have to look at the Gospel of John, where a Pharisee named Nicodemus also looks pretty good. I would date him. He seems an interesting guy. We look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, where the word Pharisee isn't used, but it's clear they're talking about Pharisees when they mention a group called the Seekers After Smooth Things. In other words, for the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Pharisees make things too easy. The Pharisees are like, we know what you're supposed to do, but you're going to trip up because you're a human being, so when you trip up, here's how you fix it. So they tend to be lenient.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: In the early rabbinic documents, the rabbis don't call themselves Pharisees, but it's clear they're more or less consistent with that tradition. Again, what they're trying to do is take the Torah and update it to fit the needs of particular communities, because all laws have to be updated and interpreted. Or we can look at the Jewish historian Josephus, who is no fan of the Pharisees, by the way. He's a priest, he thinks people ought to be listening to the priests, and he's incensed that people are listening to these Pharisees, this lay-led group who have gotten above their station. He says they like the simple life, they're out among the people, they walk the walk as well as talk the talk. It's completely the opposite of what we get in, say, Matthew 23.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: When we put all this together, what we find is that the Pharisees at the time were the liberalizers. They're the ones interpreting the law for new situations. They're no longer living under their own government. They're living under Roman occupation. Technology has changed, education has changed, cultural concerns have changed. And the Pharisees are updating the text to say, here's how you live your life in conformity to Torah, and if you can't do everything perfectly, which nobody was expected to do anyway, here's what you can do. Finally, and I think this is really important, the Pharisees were interested in an egalitarian move. The book of Exodus says all Israel should be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. How do you do that when you have an inherited priesthood, an elite group? This is why, for example, the Pharisees are interested in washing their hands before they eat, which after COVID turned out to be a good idea.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Why? When the priests touched the sacrificial elements in the temple, they washed their hands first. Even pagans did this. So you could be like the priest at your own meal. Just as the priest washed his hands, you can wash your hands, and that's something everybody can do. So they're interested in extending priestly privilege. That's an egalitarian move, not a legalistic one. They're interested in how you profess who you are on a daily basis, so religion is not one hour on the weekend. How do you live a life of sanctity?

Johnny Ova: I guess the answer is going to be lazy theology again. Where do these characters come from? The way we paint Caiaphas, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, they're always the bad guys, and Jesus and his apostles are the good guys. What do we have from Caiaphas or from the Pharisees that would even show that?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Caiaphas isn't a Pharisee. He is the high priest. We know the most about him, aside from the New Testament, from the Jewish historian Josephus, who says not much happened under Caiaphas. There you go. So we get it from select readings of the New Testament. But even when we look at the Gospels, we have to recognize they are themselves selective. Any time we report what happens, we're going to spin it, because no historian is completely objective. You have to figure out what to say and what words to use to say it. That's why after a political speech, depending on the commentator, it's the best speech ever or the worst speech ever, everything was true or everything was false. It helps to read a variety of sources to figure out what happened. And back then, we don't have any of it on tape.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Most historians date the Gospels toward the end of the first century, if not the beginning of the second, so we're at least a generation after Jesus. Jesus and his initial followers spoke Aramaic. The Gospels are written in Greek. So how do these stories go from oral tradition, which we don't have access to because it's oral, into writing, and what texts were the Gospel writers using? They're going to adapt their story. And part of the way they adapt it is to say, gee, we've got these non-messianic Jews down the street, and they seem to be doing okay. They represent a challenge to us. They're reading the same books we're reading. They're reading Isaiah and the Psalms and coming up with different interpretations. Well, they can't possibly be right if we're right, in a binary world. One way of affirming your own identity is to say who you're not, and they become the negative foils.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: That's the way historical study works. Instead of treating the texts as objective, which they're not, they're theological documents, we say, here's how Matthew defines Matthew's group over against the Pharisees, who were the potential rivals. We see the same thing in the Dead Sea Scrolls. When they talk about the Pharisees as Seekers After Smooth Things, they're not being complimentary. The problem is that the Dead Sea Scrolls did not become the sacred Scripture of a largely non-Jewish audience, but the New Testament did.

Johnny Ova: Very interesting points. When you strip away 2,000 years of church tradition and place Jesus Christ fully back inside Second Temple Judaism, what changes? What does Jesus actually look like?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: He looks like a first-century Jew, a really interesting first-century Jew. What changes is not only how we understand him as continuous with his culture. He has to make sense to the people at the time, or they would have looked at him and said, this makes no sense whatsoever. But our knowledge of Second Temple Judaism also changes. Not only can we use Jewish history, practice and belief to understand Jesus better, we can also use Jesus and the New Testament to understand Second Temple Judaism better. We recognize that in Second Temple Judaism there are various ways of understanding God and various possibilities of superhuman individuals. The philosopher Philo talks about Moses as if he's God, actually. The incarnation makes more sense. What makes sense in a Jewish context in the year 30 or the year 70 does not make sense in a Jewish context in the year 500.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: In the same way, the early church had to figure out what exactly it thought about Jesus. Is he God? Is he subordinate to God? Is he a human who somehow got divinized? Is he divine from the beginning? We can see those debates already in the New Testament, and they come up through church history. So by understanding Jesus as a Jew, we understand him differently within his cultural context, and we also understand a little more of the parameters of belief in Second Temple Judaism.

Johnny Ova: Contrary to popular belief, even the miracles Jesus did would not make him unique, at least the way it's reported, because there are other people reportedly doing miracles as well. What would you say about that as a differentiator for Christ? Did his miracles make him divine, or what they viewed as divine? Was that a mindset?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: I did a whole book called Signs and Wonders addressing precisely that topic. Yes, there are other miracle workers at the time. There are other exorcists. Some of them are successful, and some are looked at as special people. We already have healers and miracle workers in, to use Christian terminology, the Old Testament. Jesus walks on water, the prophet Elisha makes an axe head float. Jesus feeds multitudes with limited resources, so does Elisha. Jesus raises children from the dead, so does Elijah, so does Elisha. In early rabbinic commentaries we have rabbis who are miracle workers. So miracle working doesn't make you divine. Could people have presumed that the divine was working through you? Absolutely. We also have pagan or Gentile miracle workers. So they're out there.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: What miracles certainly do is gain attention. If you just got up on a stone one day and said something wise, nobody cares. But if you exorcise a demon and then say it, this guy's got credibility, let's pay attention. It's a great way of gathering crowds. It's probably a way Jesus would solidify his own knowledge of who he was and what he was doing. It's a sign of the in-breaking of the messianic age, a time when there's no longer war and poverty and death, and also no disease and no pain. So part of bringing about the kingdom of God is restoring people to full-bodied wholeness or their full mental state, exorcising demons. Does it make you God? No. But if you already believe Jesus is God, is it one of the contributing factors? Absolutely. So it becomes a retrospective reading. I do think Jesus did miracles. I just don't think he's the only one.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: One other thing, just to note. You can also work miracles through Satan, so we have to be careful. A miracle tells you that somebody who could not walk can now walk. Who's responsible? Is it God? Is it Satan? Is it psychosomatic? The thing itself doesn't necessarily tell you the cause. That's a matter of interpretation.

Johnny Ova: Speaking from my understanding of a Christian perspective, a lot of Christians get duped by that: this speaker is very engaging, miracles, signs and wonders happen. People are always drawn to those things. In the text, Moses goes miracle for miracle with the magicians of the time, the snake devouring the snake. Even in the New Testament, his name is slipping away from me, someone performing miracles and wowing the crowds. And even Jesus said a wicked and perverse generation seeks signs, while he's doing signs and wonders. I think it's a cautionary tale. Don't be fooled by the signs and wonders you see, sticking divinity on everything that happens to be unexplainable.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Simon Magus. And you raise a really good point about how we function. We want the signs and wonders, but after we get them, then what? It's the politician who promises everything, or the great victory parade. What happens the next day? Or, isn't he fabulous, he does signs and wonders. Well, then how come we don't pay attention to him when he says love your enemies? There's a fair amount of disjunction going on there.

Johnny Ova: I joke about it, but there's truth to it: we become spiritual addicts to the church. People come on Sundays, they get their hit or a prophetic word, and then on Monday they're not cultivated or taught to live a life. Our church is very focused on the works: loving your neighbors, being kind and generous to people, helping the widows and the orphans. Those things bring functional living to society, and we can pull them from what Jesus taught. But we're always about the hype and the next big thing, and that goes down a slippery slope. Back to something you mentioned before. A lot of Christians are taught that Jesus came to abolish the law, that he replaced a system of rules with a message of grace. But that's not what you see when you read the Gospels through Jewish eyes. You brought up the Pharisees making it easier for people. Can you expand on that?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: You don't have to read the Gospels through Jewish eyes to get there. You just have to read the Gospels. Start with Matthew: "Don't think that I've come to abolish the law and the prophets. I've not come to abolish but to fulfill." Fulfill does not mean I'm going to do it and check it off the list so you don't have to. Fulfill means I'm going to show you how to do this in its fullness. And then Jesus proceeds to interpret the Torah. Law is not a great translation of Torah. It really means instruction. He says, you have heard it said to people of old, don't murder. Most English translations then read, "but I say to you," but it really should be "I say to you," because he's not making a contrast. It's not an antithesis. An antithesis would be, you have heard it said don't murder, but I say to you, go ahead and murder. What he says is, I say to you, don't be angry with a brother or sister. The law says don't commit adultery. He says any man who looks at a woman with lust is already guilty. That's not abolishing the law. That's making it stricter.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Here's where Jewish history helps. The Mishnah, an early compendium of Jewish law, talks about building a fence around the Torah. What they mean is that you have a law, and you make another law to make sure you don't violate the first one. It's not a matter of legalism. It's a matter of consistency and being intentional. If you're not angry, you're less likely to murder. If you don't think about committing adultery, because it takes some planning, you have to rent a room or whatever, then you're less likely to do it. So Jesus is by no means doing away with the law, nor were the Pharisees all legalistic. Every time you hear the word legalistic, it really means Jewish. It very often becomes a Protestant term: look at the Catholics, look at what they're doing. That's how that word comes into English vocabulary.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: When we see Paul in the book of Acts, Paul never gives up following Torah. He's an entirely faithful Jew. He goes into the temple and offers a sacrifice for men who have taken a Nazirite vow. He wants to go to Jerusalem for the pilgrimage festivals. He honors the Sabbath and keeps it holy by going into synagogues and teaching. So Paul doesn't think that once he becomes a follower of Jesus he suddenly dumps his Jewish identity. He's still a Pharisee. He identifies himself as a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees. He just thinks he's a better Pharisee because he's now got Jesus. So first, the law is not a problem. The law is a blessing. Second, Jesus does not do away with the law. He actually intensifies it.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: The third thing, and here we get to Paul, is the reason most Christians today don't follow Torah. Paul says that if you follow Torah with all its particular commandments, including circumcision, you'd be converting to Judaism. But Paul, as a first-century Jew, thinks the messianic age has begun with Jesus, and one of the signs of the messianic age is that all people, every nation and tongue, will turn to worship the God of Israel. We have an image of that in the book of Revelation, by the way: every tongue and nation all worshipping at the throne of God. If all these Gentiles convert to Judaism, the only nation worshipping the God of Israel will be the Jews. So Paul says, you don't convert. That's the Jews' thing. That's not you. You remain Gentiles, you don't circumcise, which is the big sign for men, but you're Gentiles in Christ, Gentiles in the Lord, adopted into this family. Then, as time went on, people lost the fact that Paul is the apostle to the Gentiles writing to Gentiles. They thought his negative comments about the law applied to all people, and then any sort of following the law becomes a problem.

Johnny Ova: Here's something that will surprise a lot of listeners. You have said that almost nothing Jesus taught was unique to him, that most of his teachings have parallels in Jewish tradition. Does that diminish Jesus in your eyes, or does it make him more powerful?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: It's neither one nor the other. It's just a historical fact. What it does do is help us understand where he is entirely distinct. I don't know of anybody else who said you have to love your enemies. That's a lot. Josephus, our first-century historian, says we are commanded to treat our enemies with moderation. If they're hungry, we have to give them food. This goes back to the book of Proverbs: if your enemy is hungry, you feed him, if your enemy is thirsty, you provide drink, if your enemy is lost, you show him the road. But nothing says you have to love them. And Jesus says, let's one-up that. That's also building the fence around the Torah, and I think that's wonderful. But love your neighbor as yourself, we already had that. What Jesus also does is help us reframe what we already know and figure out what the priorities are.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: In the very famous parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, the run-up is that Jesus is having a chat with a lawyer, and they get around to talking about neighbors. They get to love God and love neighbor, and they're fine on that. Then the lawyer, trying to make himself look good, asks Jesus, and who is my neighbor? In the first century, and in fact today, that's a really good question. Neighbors are people with the same rights and responsibilities you have. Leviticus 19, which says love your neighbor as yourself, goes on to say in the very same chapter that you also have to love the ger, the non-native born, sometimes translated stranger, sojourner, resident alien, immigrant. You have to love the immigrant because you were immigrants in the land of Egypt. In other words, you love the neighbor because the neighbor is like you, part of your group, and you love the non-neighbor because you know what it's like to be socially vulnerable.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Determining who's a neighbor and who's a stranger is really important. Take Canadians. I'm a US citizen, so Canadians are strangers. They don't get to vote in our elections. They have to go through certain loopholes to get into the country. You still have to love them. So are Canadians neighbors or strangers? In the first century, Samaritans were the test case, because Samaritans have the same Torah the Jews have, with a couple of small differences, but not in terms of daily practice. Are they in or are they out? Can you share table fellowship with them? Can you intermarry? That's a really good question. But at the end of the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus changes the question. It's not who is the neighbor, which is still a good question. It's who acted as a neighbor to the fellow who fell among the robbers.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Maybe the issue is to reframe the question, or to figure out what's more important and what's less important. He says in Matthew 23, the invectives against the scribes and Pharisees, you tithe mint and dill and cumin, minor commandments, but you neglect the weightier matters of the law. You want to do it all, but promote justice and compassion over tithing. I think that's right.

Johnny Ova: You hit on the Good Samaritan, and I know you wrote an entire book, Short Stories by Jesus, where you argue that Christians have been misreading parables for centuries. I want to go to the Prodigal Son, because it's probably one of the most known parables in history. The standard interpretation is that the father represents God's grace and the older brother represents legalistic Judaism. You say that reading is deeply problematic. So what's actually happening in this story?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: I don't want to take away the idea that the father represents God's grace. As I put it in the book, I spent years, up until COVID and my retirement from Vanderbilt, teaching in a maximum security prison with men who had done some quite horrific things in their lives. A number of them look at the father in the parable as God and see themselves as the younger brother who is dramatically messed up. They need that image of grace, and I don't want to take that from them. I think it's a good reading. But when Christians say to me, this is the Old Testament God, the Jewish God who would be harsh and not receptive at all, so Jesus invents the loving father God, that's ahistorical, it's antisemitic, and it's just plain wrong. People want to see the older brother as legalistic Judaism when he says to Dad, I've never disobeyed you and you've never even given me a young goat. As if Jews are following the law to get some sort of eternal reward. That's a false reading of why Jews follow Torah. Jews don't follow Torah to earn divine grace. We've already got that, which is how we got the Torah in the first place. We follow Torah as a reciprocal concern. God shows us love by giving us the Torah. We show God love by following what God gave us, and it enhances the relationship.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: The parable is the third of three parables: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and then these two lost kids, and I'm not sure the father is entirely found either. You can take it as about God's grace, but you don't need a negative image to get to God's grace. I also think parables in general, in terms of genre, are frequently ethical prompts. They're not moralistic stories. They help us think about the world otherwise, or, as I mentioned, Jesus likes to reframe the question. Parables frequently tell us something we already know but have repressed deep down, and he brings it out with this beautiful kind of heart surgery.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: In the first parable there's a fellow, he's never called a shepherd, he's a guy who owns 100 sheep, and he loses one. At this point I don't think he's God, because God doesn't lose us. I think he's a guy who lost a sheep. He realizes he's lost the sheep and has to go find it. So the first question is, how do you know you've got 100 sheep? How do you know you've lost one? It's not like they line up in groups of 10 for roll call. The only way you know is if you count. Then there's a woman who's lost a coin. If you want to make the first parable and the third parable about God, then that woman has to be God too, and my Christian friends go, no, I can't go there. I think she's a lady who lost a coin. How do you know you've lost a coin? You have to count them. And then we begin a parable that says, there was a man who had two sons. As soon as we call it the parable of the prodigal son, we've already messed up the parable. It's about a guy with two sons. We call it the prodigal son because Christians have always identified with the younger brother who discovers God's grace. Well, what he discovers, in a historical sense, is that Daddy loves him. Daddy never stopped loving him.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Nor am I convinced this guy sinned. I think he was dumb. He blew all his money in dissolute living, but I'm not sure that's a sin. That's just bad behavior. He spent it on parties for all his friends. Then there's a famine, he's hungry, and he goes to work for a pig farmer, which is a comedown for a Jewish kid. But there's nothing illegal about feeding pigs. It's not like he's eating them. Moreover, the law says you live by the law, you don't die by it, so if you're going to starve to death, of course you would eat. He realizes his father has hired hands, in fact enslaved people working for him. So he figures he'll go back to Dad and say, I have sinned. Dad sees him in the distance, runs out, puts his arms around him and kisses him. Not to prevent the neighbors from stoning him. Dad loves his son, just as the sheep owner wanted his sheep and the woman wanted her coin.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: The problem in the parable is a line most people ignore. The older brother was in the field. He heard the sound of music and dancing, and he asked an enslaved person what was going on. The enslaved person says, your brother came back safe and sound, and Dad killed the fatted calf. And the older brother refused to come in. In other words, Dad had enough time to call the band and the caterer, and he didn't call the older brother. Which means there was a man who had two sons and he forgot to count. So the parable is not only about divine grace. It can certainly be about that. But it's also about remembering not just the people who have strayed and come back, but the people who have always been faithful. They're the ones usually ignored, discounted, not given any recognition. Not that they act for recognition. They act out of love. But we don't acknowledge them on a human level or pay attention to them too. So I think the parable interrogates all of us.

Johnny Ova: That's a great point.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: For me as a teacher, you know the weaker students, because they're the ones who come for extra help. And you know the weak students because they're the ones who make it so you don't have to grade on a curve. But what do you do with the shy person who's getting an 88 or 89, can't crack the A, and doesn't want to come to your office because they don't want to be a bother? How do you make sure that student feels as counted as the ones at the top or the ones at the bottom? How do we recognize the people who are part of our daily lives whom we simply ignore or take for granted? The parable interrogates us on that. So it's not only good news about God's grace. Parables are also interrogations of us. How do we become better human beings? I think that's part of Jesus' agenda. How do you be a better you?

Johnny Ova: I couldn't agree more. That's an amazing point. I never looked at it that way before, but it's so true. Just two more questions. The first one is on the parables. We were always taught that the parables are comforting, that they're meant to comfort, that Jesus is dumbing these things down for us to understand. But you're saying they were never meant to comfort. They're designed to provoke, to disturb and to make people uncomfortable. Speak on that a little, or give us another example.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Well, I also don't think Jesus dumbed things down. That's not helpful, and that's not what good teachers do. You don't have to use fancy technical terminology to explain something, but that's not dumbing it down. The problem in most Christian settings is that parables are taught to little children, because little children can get simplistic messages from them, like the prodigal son means God loves you even if you spill your milk. But they're not children's stories. They're the same genre as wisdom literature, like the book of Proverbs or Ecclesiastes or Job, or, from the pagan side, Aesop's fables. Aesop's fables typically tell us things we don't want to acknowledge, like slow and steady really does win the race, when we just want to speed through things. So I think the parables are generally designed to discomfort, to shake us up, even people who think they're doing pretty well, and most people probably think that, and tell them they could do better.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: There's an old line, I don't know who invented it, that religion in general was designed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. If you want something that comforts the afflicted, those are the Beatitudes. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the peacemakers. That's comforting folks who are having difficulties. I think parables are primarily designed to afflict the comfortable. And of course we don't want that, because who wants to be afflicted? The brilliant thing about Jesus here is that many of the parables, not all, are actually kind of funny. So while we're being afflicted, we're also smiling. It's like listening to a really good satirist talking about somebody you voted for, and you go, yeah, that's true too. As long as you're laughing along with it, you're also thinking, this is probably right, I need to work on this.

Johnny Ova: Who wants to suffer, right? Who wants to be pushed?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: So they're not dumbed down, but neither are they children's stories. They can be made into children's stories, but they're not. They're very difficult.

Johnny Ova: Love it. Last question, Dr. Levine. You're a Jewish woman who has spent your entire life helping not just Christians but all people understand the Scriptures more deeply. As you mentioned, you do not believe Jesus is the Messiah, yet you've dedicated everything to understanding the Bible with its true Jewish roots. After all these years, what is it about Jesus that you would want Christians to truly understand about him?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: I want them to read the Gospels rather than take other people's word for it. Take some personal responsibility here. And then go read scholars who are not interested in promoting antisemitism, who are interested in knowing the first-century context, who know the history and the literature and can read the primary sources. And don't yank Jesus out of his Jewish context. Recognize him as continuous with Jewish thought of the period, because I think that helps you understand Jesus better, and it also helps Jewish-Christian relations. If you love Jesus, which is what Christians claim to do, it seems to me you would want to know everything there is to know about him. Just as when you fall in love with somebody: where did you go to elementary school, what's your favorite color, what foods do you like? So learn something about that cultural context, and learn it from credible historians who are not set on yanking Jesus out of it. And if they won't trust me, there are a number of Christian writers who do that well also. I'm not the only one.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Levine, this has been an absolute pleasure. You are wonderful, and I really enjoyed the conversation thoroughly.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: It was fun to talk with you. Thank you for your good questions.