2024 Book of the Year

This year’s Book of the Year on this Tov Unleashed Substack is a book I have not discussed yet (but I will). When I saw the announcement of this book I immediately went to Amazon and ordered it. When it arrived I began reading it. I read it straight through, marking it all over the place, and now I announce it to you:

Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians by Amy-Jill Levine (New York: HarperOne, 2024).

Many readers of this Substack will know I have benefited much from Levine’s other books, including The Misunderstood Jew and Short Stories by Jesus. Her books are on a shelf within arm’s reach. Levine introduces herself in these words: “

I am a woman, a Jew, at one time the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Associate Professor of Religion at Swarthmore College, and now both University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies emerita at Vanderbilt University and the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. Otherwise put, I'm a Jew who teaches the New Testament to anyone who is interested.

She also says, “I am not a ‘believer,’ as that term is used in a Christian context or more broadly in the sense of ‘belief in divinity’.” Yet, you would not think that by reading her book because she reads the text as one who is getting inside that text. “I live as if there is a God, and I take seriously the idea that all humanity is created in that divine image and likeness.”

“And yet … 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.”

Her undergraduate degree in English gave her the gift of reading texts with deftness and questions. Her ability to ask questions of a text became for me a highlight of this book. I had seen this skill before, but in this book I see it even more. She’d like a bumper sticker that reads, “The Bible says it; let’s discuss it.” Hence, as she explores central topics of present-day concerns she asks Jesus and the Gospel texts questions, not to answer them but to discuss them. This may be the most important impact of Jesus for Everyone. What topics? Here are the chapters:

Economics
Enslavement
Ethnicity and Race
Health Care
Family Values
Politics

For each chapter she explores the Jewish context, explains the teachings of Jesus in that Jewish context, reads the texts with a view toward exploring those topics, and asks questions. You might not be surprised that she has no need to defend the Gospels, yet she reads them with respect.

One of Levine’s trademarks has been of much help for me: she points to the common tendency of posing Jesus against Judaism to make Jesus look better. Thus, Jewish males were hard on women; Jesus was kind; Jesus was a 1^st Century feminist; Jesus is better. The Gospels are not the Book of Hebrews. Jesus operates within Judaism, with conflict with some authorities, but always within. She’s corrected my own misreadings at times; at times I disagree with her. I always learn, and I always come away thankful.

Amy-Jill Levine can write. She expresses her mind. She’s got wit on top of wit. She sits at a distance from Jesus so she shows Christians who she thinks he was. She’s full of courage. Here’s one: “Other Christians find the Jesus of history too spooky, too kooky, or too Jewy and so strip him of his Jewish markers.”

The following marks the entire book.

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. If we cannot, we are lost. … we may never get to ‘love of enemy.’ I'm not there yet, and love of enemy is not on my bucket list. But human decency, that's attainable. The Bible helps us get there; the Jesus tradition helps us focus.

Join me over the next six weeks as we look into each of her chapters.