As part of his new radio series "Encounters," ICJS Executive Director Chris Leighton interviewed Dr. Amy-Jill Levine. Dr. Levine is a distinguished Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. She has recently published an enormously important book entitled The Misunder-stood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (available at amazon.com). In this book, Dr. Levine situates Jesus within his Jewish context and examines the serious distortions that arise when Christians forget, or in some cases actively erase, the Jewishness of Jesus.

Chris: Tell us how a Jewish girl grew up and became en-tangled in the study of Christian origins. Didn't your interests in Christianity raise eyebrows on the part of your parents, your rabbi, and your Jewish community?

Amy-Jill: Well, it was certainly the case when I was writing my dissertation on the Gospel of Matthew. One of my relatives said, "Why would you want to work on that anti-Semitic text?" And I said, "Have you ever read it?" And she said, "No! Why would I ever read this anti-Semitic text?" [Laughs.] And that simply proved to me the importance of Jewish people becoming familiar with the New Testament. Not just to learn about what our Christian neighbors are thinking, but also to know that the text need not be read as anti-Jewish.

Chris: How did you become interested in Christianity in the first place?

Amy-Jill: I became interested in New Testament studies when I was a child because I grew up in a neighborhood that was predominantly Roman Catholic. My friends would tell me what they were learning in Catechism, and it all sounded quite fascinating. My parents told me that Christians were much like Jews. We had shared sacred Scripture. We worshipped the same God. Christians appreciated the Ten Commandments. And Christians thought a Jewish person named Jesus was ex-tremely important. So I grew up with a sense of the benevolence of Christianity -- Christianity as a first cousin to Judaism.

Then one day when I was seven years old, a little girl said to me on the school bus, "You killed our Lord." Because she had been taught that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus, and I being the only one she knew, it must have been me. And I couldn't put together how this beautiful religion that was a cousin to Judaism would have such hateful teaching. I started asking questions then -- that was a number of years ago -- and I'm still asking.

Chris: The title of your book, The Misunderstood Jew, is deli-ciously ambiguous. Who is misunderstanding whom, and what is the clarity that needs to be achieved?

Amy-Jill: I think when Christians are unfamiliar with first-century Judaism, they necessarily misunderstand Jesus. He makes far greater sense when he is seen within his first-century Jewish context. What were the circumstances that would lead people to be willing to give up their homes, their families, and even their lives for him? Or, and on the other hand, why would people want to kill him? So if we don't under-stand him as a first-century Jew, we'll miss part of the message. But he's also misunderstood by the Jewish commu-nity as someone who might have come to destroy Judaism, or someone who was unfaithful to Jewish practice, when that's by no means the case. So to a great extent, many people today -- Jewish or Christian, let alone Unitarian, atheist or whatnot -- simply misunderstand him because they don't understand the context in which he arose, and they don't understand the context in which the Gospels were written.

Chris: One of the key theses of your book is that Christianity goes awry -- indeed, the gospel of love gets twisted into an ideology of hate -- whenever it severs the organic connection that exists between Jesus and his Jewish context. Can you give us an example of how things can go in dangerous directions?

Amy-Jill: I'll give you my favorite one, and this is my favorite in part because I'm also interested in women's history. Whenever we have stories about Jesus healing women -- for example, the woman with the hemorrhage, or the raising of the synagogue ruler's daughter (Matthew 9, Mark 5, Luke 8), it's very common to hear in Christian preaching the idea that women in first-century Judaism were oppressed and repressed and suppressed and depressed and stuck in the women's quar-ters of their homes and not allowed any freedoms whatsoever until Jesus comes along and liberates them from this repressive Jewish system that actually makes the Taliban look fairly pro-gressive in comparison. And what preaching like that does is suggest that first-century Judaism, if not Judaism today, was a simply horrible system.

It turns out that when we actually look at the Gospels, women have enormous numbers of rights, such as freedom of travel, the ability to own property, the use of their own funds, the ability even to leave their husbands if they so choose. Once we separate Jesus from Judaism, we wind up making Judaism look ugly or retrograde or obscene, and Jesus is the only Jew in his time period who winds up having any sort of ethical value whatsoever. If we locate Jesus as a first-century Jew, as someone who knows the stories from what Christians would call the Old Testament -- the prophets' ethical message, the stories of those wonderful women like Miriam or Huldah or Deborah, then we see him more as part of his context, and his message does not become an anti-Jewish one. His message becomes one in continuity with Judaism.

Chris: It is certainly the case that Christianity has a long and woeful history of advancing its own truth claims at the ex-pense of Judaism. What gives you hope that these patterns of hostility and misunderstanding can change?

Amy-Jill: Oh, Professor Leighton! My goodness! The very fact that I'm talking to you on the radio about this gives me hope that these patterns can change. People today are willing to raise the question about the incorrect stereotypes Christians have held of Jews, as well as what incorrect stereotypes Jews have held of Christians. We're at the point now where mem-bers of churches and synagogues can go back and look at their own history, realize that we all have some terrible bag-gage, begin to learn a little bit more about what our neighbors think, and engage in interfaith dialogue. As long as these pockets of ignorance can be broken down, it seems to me, there's good reason to be hopeful for the future. If we simply took a retrospective look and said, "How were Christian-Jewish relations fifty or sixty years ago?" and "How are they now?" ... My goodness, we've had a sea change in those relationships! So I can already see the progress in my own lifetime. And I'm sufficiently optimistic to think that that progress will continue as we go forward.

Chris: I certainly share your upbeat read on what is possible. What do you think are the greatest challenges that face both of our communities as we move forward and get deeper into the twenty-first century?

Amy-Jill: In terms of Jewish-Christian relations, there are a number of challenges which are impacting us even now. What do we do regarding the State of Israel? And here stereotypes abound. It is by no means the case that the Jewish community is of a single voice when it comes to Israeli policy any more than the Christian community is of a single voice. But how do we talk about the role of Israel? How do we talk about whether the New Testament is anti-Jewish or not? The New Testament need not be read as anti-Jewish, but it certainly has been read that way in the past. How, then, do we over-come those anti-Jewish readings? How do we overcome the ignorance we have of each other so that Jews will become more familiar with Christianity, both in terms of its Scripture and in terms of the enormous diversity that's represented within Christian communities? And how do Christians learn about their Jewish neighbors and recognize that there is a similar diversity in Judaism as we move from Reform through Reconstructionist and Conservative up to various branches of Orthodox Judaism? So there's a lot that we need to do. On the other hand, to a great extent, at least these conversations have begun in small pockets throughout the country, on uni-versity campuses, in some churches and some synagogues.

Chris: In your book you raise a number of concerns that are apt to make Christians feel defensive. What have been some of the more noteworthy reactions to your book, both the positive and the negative responses?

Amy-Jill: Particularly helpful to me have been comments from Christian clergy who have said the book has been extremely useful because now they have to reconsider what they have been saying in sermons. The book ends with an alphabet: twenty-six separate letters of how to avoid misunderstanding between Jews and Christians, how to avoid anti-Jewish preaching, how to broach difficult topics, such as the question of: How is one saved? Does one need to believe in Jesus to be saved? How do we talk about the land of Israel?

In terms of some of the critiques that I've gotten, the dom-inant critique that I've heard or that I've actually seen on blogs and various Web sites as well is a critique that came from an article that was published in the journal Christian Century. In this article, as well as in my book, I have noted some disturbing anti-Jewish tendencies within liberation theol-ogy and particularly Palestinian liberation theology. I am a firm believer myself -- and I say this as a member of an Orthodox Jewish community -- in the Palestinians having a state of their own, and I believe that Palestinian life under Israeli rule has been unnecessarily harsh and often abusive. But I don't think that the concern for Palestinian rights should translate into anti-Jewish -- not just anti-Israeli but anti-Jewish -- rhetoric, and that's what I hear coming from some Christian Palestinians.

These comments are a portion of an interview from a February 2007 broadcast of "Encounters," a new weekly radio program on WYPR 88.1 FM (http://www.wypr.org) hosted by Dr. Chris-topher Leighton. "Encounters" explores the role of religion in the world today through interviews, storytelling, and mono-logues. "Encounters" is made possible by a grant from the Osprey Foundation in Baltimore and the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies.

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