Short Stories by Jesus

Starred review from August 11, 2014
Those who view parables as easy nuggets of feel-good sentiment need to think again. Levine (The Misunderstood Jew), professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University and an affiliated professor of Jewish Studies at Cambridge University, shows how despite their brevity, Jesus’s tales have disturbed from the very beginning. Readers hoping that Levine’s expertise will lead to singular and definitive meanings for the oft-perplexing parables that she discusses will be disappointed. On the contrary, she shows how the biblical stories’ defiance of narrow understandings and application is reason for celebration. But not every interpretation is equally credible, however. “Context matters,” Levine notes. Lucky for readers, she provides such information in an easy manner, covering topics from ancient Jewish-Samaritan relations to the Hebrew/Jewish background of New Testament literature. Levine also provides correctives to popular, anti-Semitic interpretations. As the text enlightens, it also emboldens critical application of Jesus’s ancient stories to modern hearts and minds.

December 1, 2014

Levine (New Testament and Jewish studies, Vanderbilt Divinity Sch.; The Misunderstood Jew; The Jewish Annotated New Testament) has written a thorough and welcome treatment of one of Christian scriptures' characteristic, distinctive, and puzzling literary forms: the parable, one of the principal teaching tools of Jesus. The author shrewdly sets the parables in their original contexts, meditating on what these parafictions might have meant to their first audiences in the ancient Near East, and then moving forward to consider the possible purposes and ramifications for the stories in a wider context of interpretation, and in our own world. For Levine, parables do not so much "mean" as "solicit meaning making," which is perhaps all Jesus could have asked. VERDICT Well crafted and ably supported, Levine's touching and scholarly readings of the possibilities should be fodder for rich discussion in church groups and also deserve a place on library shelves.

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