Review

Title: The Jewish Annotated New Testament, Second Edition, New Revised Standard Version
Editors: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Biblical Studies
Year Published: 2016
Number of Pages: 824 + xxix
Binding: Hardcover
Price: $39.95

Reviewed by Jenny Webb for the Association for Mormon Letters

The premise behind this outstanding volume is, simply, that reading the New Testament from the perspective of its original cultural, political, and religious context (i.e., Second Temple Judaism, 515 BCE – 70 CE) will cast the text in a new light and bring fresh insight and interpretation to the reader. It accomplishes this goal quite thoroughly. Any reader who wishes to study the text of the New Testament from a scholarly perspective will find plenty of engaging, illuminating readings guaranteed to make it worth their while.
Levine and Brettler have coordinated an impressive array of Jewish scholars in order to provide various forms of useful textual apparatuses throughout the entire New Testament. Each book has a concise introductory essay that orients the reader to the main issues surrounding issues such as the dating, composition, authorship, purpose, structure, and literary features of the text. Levine and Brettler also provide introductory essays to the two main sections of the New Testament, the Gospel and Acts, and then the Epistles and Revelation. These introductions remind lay readers of information they may likely be familiar with (e.g., “An epistle is a public letter, designed to be read to a community” [281]) and also introduce helpful historical information that may be more unfamiliar (e.g., “Although Rome had developed a functional postal service, the Epistles … were likely delivered by a personal messenger” [281]).

The New Testament text itself is fully annotated, and a number of brief essays on specific topics such as Genealogy, Gamaliel, Head Covering, and Antichrist appear throughout the text in appropriately useful locations in callouts delineated by light grey boxes. These annotations and in-text essays, in addition to a series of maps, form a highly functional study Bible for a reader from any religious (or non-religious) perspective.

In addition to this apparatus, Levine and Brettler have assembled a series of excellent essays following the text of the New Testament. Thirty of the essays were available in the first edition of this book; this second edition has nearly doubled this number with an additional twenty-four. As a reader, I found this content to be fascinating and incredibly useful; as an editor, I found this content to be exceptionally well conceived and balanced. I was particularly impressed by the high level of scholarship apparent throughout—so often projects of this nature present uneven results, but it was clear here that the scholars involved were not only experts in their field, but also committed to the larger vision of accurate but accessible scholarship with the intent to promote cross-cultural understanding that guides the entire volume. Just to whet your appetite, let me give you the sections in which the essays are grouped: History, Society, Movements, Jews and Gentiles, Religious Practice, Religious Belief, Literature, and Responses to the New Testament. Personally, I found the essays in the Jews and Gentiles section particularly illuminating as they raised issues and perspectives I was unfamiliar with.[1]

The volume is rounded out by a series of tables (e.g., a timeline, a calendar, weights and measures, etc.), a thorough glossary, and an index. Again, these items are well conceived and useful.

As a believing Mormon, I wondered at the outset what I would find in such a project as this one. While I expected to find a scholarly Jewish perspective on the New Testament interesting and engaging, I wasn’t sure what else to expect. However, as I continued to encounter information that helped me to reconsider biases and assumptions I didn’t even know I held, I was reminded of the value we as a people find in the call to “seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118). The value of this call is, in my view, in part due to its continual relevance. We are not asked to seek learning up to a certain point, or for a certain number of hours. Rather, we are called to orient our lives, our very selves, so that we continually “seek learning.” To continually “seek” implies an ongoing openness grounded in humility—we are called to be continually open to re-learn, re-consider, and thus recognize truth. Without this intellectual and spiritual charity we, as a people, are unfit to receive one of the greatest gifts of the restored gospel: continuing revelation.

Additionally, I believe that a Mormon audience can fruitfully engage with this project due to the way it presents the New Testament texts—and particularly Jesus Christ—from a respectful but thoroughly non-believing perspective. If the gospel is truly global and the good news is available to all, it is important to understand the various ways in which Christ as a figure can be approached and understood, including by those who do not view Him as the Messiah. As a people, we have historically developed many ways to talk about the gospel with people who already believe in Christ, but I found it helpful to repeatedly consider the Christ narrative from a non-believing perspective and reflect on how my own conversations with those who do not subscribe to any Christian denomination or belief in Christ could be more nuanced, thoughtful, respectful, and welcoming.

As with any project on this scale, I did of course encounter several infelicitous errors, but they were almost always on the level of the copy editing rather than content. For example, the typo “gene$alogy” in the in-text essay on genealogy (11) simply needed to be caught in proofreading, while the difference in the spelling of Matthew’s Greek at the beginning of his gospel (“geneseos” in the in-text essay, and “geneseōs” in the note to the gospel text—macrons are always tricky it seems! [11]) can be understood as evidence of the different scholars involved in writing the in-text essays and the notes. Still, for those of us for whom Greek remains mostly mysterious, even such slight differences can prove unsettling. However, I want to make clear that these relatively minor errors in a project of this size and complexity, while unfortunate in an OUP book,[2] should not dissuade any interested reader from acquiring this valuable volume.

In the preface to the first edition, Levine and Brettler explain their approach: “our intention is not to convert, whether to convert Jews to Christianity, or to convert Christians away from their own churches. Rather, this book is designed to allow all readers to understand what the texts of the New Testament meant within their own social, historical, and religious context” (xiv). In my estimation, they have succeeded admirably on all counts, and I am grateful for their efforts. Highly recommended.

NOTES

1. This section contains the following essays: “Jewish Views of Gentiles” by Meir Ben Shahar, “The Concept of Neighbor in Jewish and Christian Ethics” by Michael Fagenblat, “Food and Table Fellowship” by David M. Freidenreich, and “Birkat ha-Minim: A Jewish Curse of Christians?” by Ruth Langer.

2. If Oxford University Press cannot provide sufficient copy editors and proofreaders for a project like this, what hope is there for the rest of us?!