SHORT STORIES BY JESUS: THE ENIGMATIC PARABLES OF A CONTROVERSIAL RABBI
By Amy-Jill Levine; HarperOne; $39.99 (hardback)
Reviewed by Br Brian Grenier CFC
AMY-Jill Levine, Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and affiliated professor at the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations at Cambridge University, will be known to some readers as the co-editor of the best-seller, The Jewish Annotated New Testament.
Narrowing her focus, she explores in this new work a selection of Jesus’ parables, including the Good Samaritan, the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, the Labourers in the Vineyard, the Prodigal Son, the Tenacious Widow, and the Rich Man and Lazarus.
She believes that contemporary Christians (notably homilists) tend to domesticate these stories, thereby diminishing their power to challenge, surprise, confront, provoke and even disturb us. In the process, they fail to appreciate the genius of Jesus’ teaching.
Prof Levine demonstrates convincingly that our understanding of Jesus’ parables will be impoverished if we take insufficient account of the historical, social and religious context in which they were delivered and of their many resonances in the Hebrew Scriptures.
To plumb their hidden depths (and before we apply them to our own circumstances), she would have us ask, “How do we hear the parables through an imagined set of first-century Jewish ears, and then how do we translate them so that they can be heard still speaking?”
It is in addressing these questions from her own perspective as a Jew that the writer enhances our understanding of the parables and exposes what she sees as common misinterpretations of them (notably those that reveal anti-Jewish sentiment).
Each of her studies – “works of history and imagination, of critical analysis and playful speculation”, she calls them – follows the same pattern.
A fairly literal translation of the text of the particular parable introduces the author’s attempt to situate the story in its historical and literary context.
Then, having suggested what the original listeners, given their mindset, might have made of it, she invites the reader to consider how it is not only relevant to our times but is “perhaps more pressing than ever”.
The book carries an adequate index and brief endnotes which, offering leads to pertinent further reading, serve as a bibliography.
Short Stories by Jesus is a scholarly and detailed work which would tax the general reader. However, those who bring to the task a good knowledge of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures will find it informative, refreshingly original and (as in the case of the reviewer) a corrective to some long-held assumptions concerning these “enigmatic parables of a controversial rabbi”.
In reading it we may come a little closer to learning what Jesus said later when he “explained everything [about them] in private to his disciples” (Mark 4:34).
