A Jewish Take on Reading the New Testament

Amy-Jill Levine is Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. She is Jewish. In a 2012 interview with U.S. Catholic, she said:

The New Testament preserves for the Jewish community part of our own history that we don’t have. Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ mother, James, Paul—they’re all Jews.

The only Pharisee from whom we have written records is Paul of Tarsus. The first person in history ever called rabbi in a literary text is Jesus of Nazareth. [It might have been John the Baptist--see John 3:26.] If I want to understand Galilean life in the first century, other than archaeology, I have no better source than the gospels.

So by reading the New Testament, we Jews recover our common roots. To be sure, the New Testament is tendentious literature. All literature has an agenda. But Jesus is an interesting bridge between what we have in the shared scriptures—the Old Testament of the church and the Tanakh of the synagogue—and what we find in later Jewish literature, particularly in terms of storytelling and in his way of understanding Jewish law, the heart of Judaism, which has been debated since Moses came down the mountain. The Jewish system still does that, and Jesus takes his place within that tradition.

In What Jews Can Learn from the New Testament, Rabbi Martin I. Lockshin says:

Anyone who lives in a country with a Christian majority (such as the United States or Canada) should acquire basic knowledge of the foundational literature of the dominant faith. Students of the arts need to know stories like the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32), the raising of Lazarus (John 11:1-44), and the “passion” of Jesus (i.e. his trial, suffering, and death) or they will be at a disadvantage when studying many works of literature, art, and music. But there are also reasons why Jews, specifically, would gain from study of the New Testament. It is a rich source for a better understanding of Jewish history, Jewish thought, Jewish law, and the history of anti-Semitism.

Almost all of the books of the NT were written by Jews, many of them during one of the most eventful periods of Jewish history: just before and just after the destruction of the Second Temple (in 70 C.E.). Very few Jewish writings from that century survive, and none by the rabbis, the representatives of what soon became normative Judaism, since the rabbis of that period felt that their teachings had to remain oral (a position they eventually abandoned). So really the only surviving religious books written by Jews in the first and second centuries are a few of the later Dead Sea Scrolls and the NT.