Book Review: Short Stories about Jesus

 Information about the book
Amy-Jill Levine.  Short Stories about Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi.  Harper One. New York. 2014.  (Cokesbury / Amazon).  For those interested in using this book as curriculum, there is a Leaders Guide and video on Cokesbury.

Summary

From the Amazon description: Jesus was a skilled storyteller and perceptive teacher who used parables from everyday life to effectively convey his message and meaning. Life in first-century Palestine was very different from our world today, and many traditional interpretations of Jesus' stories ignore this disparity and have often allowed anti-Semitism and misogyny to color their perspectives.

In this wise, entertaining, and educational book, Amy-Jill Levine offers a fresh, timely reinterpretation of Jesus' narratives. In Short Stories by Jesus, she analyzes these "problems with parables", taking us back in time to understand how their original Jewish audience understood them. Levine reveals the parables' connections to first-century economic and agricultural life, social customs and morality, Jewish scriptures, and Roman culture. With this revitalized understanding, she interprets these moving stories for a contemporary listener, showing how the parables are not just about Jesus, but are also about us - and when understood rightly, still challenge and provoke us 2,000 years later.

Impressions

I found this book to be excellent!  It was so full of ah hah moments that I can't begin to list them.  Each chapter is a different parable.  Levine begins with some traditional interpretation work, and then looks at the scripture in sections, sharing information about the audience to which the parable was told and how they would have heard and reacted to it.  At the end of each chapter, she offers interpretations that often mesh better with the original purpose and intention of the parable. 

In the last "epilogue-like" chapter, she offers advice that if a parable is interpreted as allegory, platitudes, based on a negative stereotype of Judaism, or does not raise questions, then our interpretation needs a second look.  Her insights are fresh and authentic; she is a professor of New Testament at Vanderbilt, and she is a Jew.  The combination of those two characteristics provide an outlook that is baked in knowledge. 

I highly recommend this book.

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Posts on my blog that reference this book will be tagged with Levine Short