Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians
I cannot decide if Amy-Jill Levine’s recent book, Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians, is properly or poorly titled. To be sure, the reason for the wording is obvious. It is a book about Jesus written primarily for those who would not self-identify as Christians. Levine notes in her introduction that she writes “to atheists, but also to agnostics, to deists and theists, to the seekers who want a social justice Jesus, to the baptized who now reject Christian identification, and to Jews who might be curious about, or even prejudiced against, one particular first-century Galilean Jew,” to skeptics who doubt Jesus existed, and even to “Muslims, Hindus, Wiccans,” and more (9). Levine has the perfect profile to write such a book: she belongs to an Orthodox synagogue (though without identifying as Orthodox—or even, for that matter, as a “believer”) yet studies the Gospels as her profession (24–26). Her academic titles at Vanderbilt University (emerita) and Hartford International University for Religion and Peace both list “New Testament” and “Jewish Studies,” two fields which, alas, are not often united in a single job description. Nor is Jesus for Everyone a novel exercise for Levine. Her many previous books, both scholarly and lay, are generally about the Gospels, situating Jesus within the Jewish world of his time. In her own words, Levine is “a Jew who teaches the New Testament to anyone who is interested—undergraduates and divinity students, priests and pastors, rabbis and imams” (6). So, on these levels, Jesus for Everyone fits precisely.
Levine considers six topics in the book’s six chapters: economics, enslavement, ethnicity and race, health care, family values, and politics. It is here that I sometimes quibble with the aptness of the title, and this for two reasons. First, Levine frequently concludes that the episodes she ponders are not historical but rather the embellishment of the evangelists (for example, Mark 5:1–20, at 142–51). Such judgments are in keeping with many critical scholars, so it is not as though her scholarship is rogue, even if I happen to disagree with her conclusions. Rather, if the pericope in question is not something Jesus said or did, then the credit ought to go to Mark or John, not to Jesus. The title The Gospels for Everyone is, I suppose, less catchy. Perhaps I am picking nits, too, since Jesus as a gospel character remains the focus.
The second reason for my quibble is the deeper one. Levine does not always commend Jesus to her audience. In the introduction she writes that “Jesus the speaker of Jewish wisdom has taught me much, and continues to teach me, about priorities and principles, about how to live and how to love” (26, though nuanced at 4–7). In many cases, her appreciation for Jesus does come across in her writing, maybe most strongly in chapter 1, on wealth. Nevertheless, Levine is not shy about critiquing Jesus or the Bible in general. This is most evident in her discussion of slavery in chapter 2. Rather than celebrate the Bible as an emancipatory text, with the exodus narrative leading the way, Levine highlights the complicity of Jesus and scriptural authors in the web of human enslavement. She notes various examples, including some from the Hebrew Bible, such as the laws that regulate slavery in the Torah. Turning to Jesus, Levine notes that he never condemns the practice of slavery and that he includes enslaved persons in his parables, without (insofar as the Gospels tell us) any pang of conscience concerning their exploitation. Even if all her examples do concern slaves (a debatable point in some cases), I doubt the underlying assumption that because (1) Jesus mentions slaves and (2) Jesus does not actively condemn slavery, then (3) Jesus has no qualms with slavery. Jesus also tells a parable about a dishonest manager (Luke 16:1–8, which Levine interprets at 65–81), but he hardly affirms graft just because he does not name it as such. Jesus delights in surprise, in reversing expectations, as when a corrupt steward has something to teach us about money. Arguably, this is also how we should approach his parables about slavery. They do not necessarily reinforce an evil social system; they could instead find lessons for us in the least likely of places. Whatever Jesus’s understanding of slavery, however, the point is that, here and there, Levine utilizes Jesus as a negative example. In the end, then, Levine’s volume seems to be less about the ways Jesus himself can prove beneficial to a public wider than the faithful in the pews. Instead, it is more about the ways Levine can spin a Gospel text into a stimulating conversation piece.
I would also register a concern with “everyone.” Jesus for Everyone does not aim to be equally palatable to all perspectives. Nor should it. Much of what brings verve to Levine’s writing is her sharp, occasionally acerbic, assessments. Still, in many ways her original title, Jesus for Atheists (9), may have been closer to the mark. It is not that this book is only for atheists, but the aim does seem to be to reach those who expect to dislike Jesus because they know they dislike Christians. Had I been consulted, I might have suggested Jesus for Progressives, even if this would threaten to halve the sales of the book. I say this tongue in cheek, but only partially so, as Levine regularly tracks to the left of the cultural divide in America: among other things, advocating for greater food security rather than policing drag shows (chapter 1, at 46), teaching against America as a melting pot (chapter 3, at 176–77), and questioning gender norms (chapter 5).
Admittedly, I am not the target audience for this book. When Levine lists “readers who worship Jesus” among those who might be holding her book, she adds a knowing parenthetical comment, “if you are still with me” (9), as if she expects those readers to be the most likely to put it down. Indeed, there is some irony that I, a confessional Christian, am reviewing Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians—and that I am doing so for Christian Scholar’s Review, no less. Still, if my evaluation thus far has sounded more negative than positive, it is not because I did not appreciate her work. It is only because I was hoping to enjoy the book more. Levine’s writing is clear, concise, and clever—if occasionally overly clever.1 She knows how to keep the reader’s interest, and the book hums, even while traversing heavy and divisive topics. She has a rare gift to communicate high-level research in ways understandable to a broad audience.
The single most helpful aspect of Jesus for Everyone is when Levine clears away the sloppy, and often damaging, research that denigrates first-century Jews to make Jesus appear all the better. (This decluttering is, by sad necessity, frequent in Jesus for Everyone.) As is already evident, Levine is mixed in her appraisal of Jesus. But even for traditional Christians who affirm Jesus’s sinlessness, we can do better than casting aspersions on all other Jews of his day. When Jesus debates with the Sadducees, for example, he was not debating with all Jews. It was with but a small subset of them. More than that, if we locate Jesus within first-century Judaism, then all the debates recorded in the Gospels become internecine. Indeed, to confess that Jesus lived a perfect life is to say that the only human being who has ever gotten everything right all the time was a Jew.
In the end, there remains much to commend Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians, even if I am unsure how well the title communicates the content. It is a surprisingly brisk read, and a welcome one. As a Christian I benefited much from her study. I hope that those like me, and unlike me, also find value in it.
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Footnotes
- Her translations of the New Testament are also distracting. She defends her decision as an effort to “defamiliarize the stories for those who have heard them before” (27), but the result is that she stretches the tolerability of idiomatic English to reproduce the Greek word order. A representative example is, “Easier it is a camel through the eye of a needle to go, than a rich person the kingdom of God to enter” (51). Languages have their own rules of syntax, and what is normal in Greek is not normal in English. It is not more faithful to Spanish to render “pan fresco” as “bread fresh” just because Spanish places nouns before adjectives. The effect may be defamiliarizing, but it is also needlessly confusing.
