Amy-Jill Levine
HarperOne, 320 pages
Published August 6, 2024
WWJD— what would Jesus do? This question – plastered across bumper stickers and plastic wristbands – is meant to encourage whoever reads it to imagine how Jesus would act in any situation and then to do likewise. Despite the ubiquitous phrase, however, it’s a hard question to answer. Many modern circumstances leave us at a crossroads, wondering what to do — crossroads that simply did not exist for Jesus. He never voted for a president, posted a photo on Facebook or ordered groceries online. So how do we determine what a Jewish man living in the first-century Roman Empire would do in our 21st-century context?
This is one of the questions animating Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians, the latest from New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine. Levine looks closely at what Jesus, as described in the Gospels, does and says about issues that we still wonder about today: economics, race and ethnicity, family values and health care, for example. In particular, she strips away anti-Jewish stereotypes and tropes about Jesus and first-century Judaism to help the reader meet the human Jesus in his own context. She then invites the reader to consider how Jesus’ actions could influence our own, even those who do not have theological convictions about Christ. (Levine identifies as a “non-believing Jew.”)
Levine’s reading of Jesus has the potential to unsettle and challenge people of different beliefs and convictions. She is not concerned with creating a simple portrait of Jesus that fits a single ideological agenda. She refuses to make Jesus look “good” (loving, religiously provocative and socially righteous) by making Judaism look “bad” (legalistic, restrictive and unjust). And she does not shy from the parts of Jesus that might feel out of step with our sensibilities, such as his decision not to denounce slavery and his views on divorce and remarriage.
Levine’s portrait of Jesus is complicated, particularly for anyone who might be discomforted by a human and potentially fallible Jesus. But even when Levine disagrees with Jesus – or perhaps more accurately, when she sees distance between the world Jesus lives in and the one she would like us to live in – she still finds value in his example and invites the reader to do the same. Gospel stories of Jesus should challenge the reader to wonder and question; they are, in Levine’s words, “invitations to discussion.”
Per Levine’s title, this book is intended for anyone and everyone to find value in Jesus, including those, like herself, who do not see Jesus as a theological figure. (In fact, a previous title of her book was Jesus for Atheists.) She writes: “The human Jesus – storyteller and healer, agitator and sage, dreamer and martyr, failure and yet success – has much to teach us, regardless of our theology or beliefs.”
For those of us who believe in Jesus as someone more than a human teacher and moral example, Levine challenges us to free Jesus from our assumptions so as to understand him on his own terms. Particularly this year – in an election cycle, when many will wonder how the teachings of Jesus can inform the world we want to live in – we may find it useful to know what Jesus did in his own time before we consider what we should do in ours.
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