A Jewish scholar addresses differences in belief
If religion were based on logic, it would be Sudoku.
“In Sudoku, everybody can get the same answer if you’re patient enough, if you’re smart enough and if you have an eraser,” said Amy-Jill Levine, a celebrated Jewish scholar who studies Christianity.
Levine, who spoke in Springfield last week, says religion is actually based on love, and love isn’t logical. Her lecture at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Springfield addressed why Jews and Christians read the Bible differently, and what everyone – regardless of belief or skepticism – can learn from religion.
Levine teaches on the New Testament and early Christianity as a professor at the nondenominational Vanderbilt Divinity School, part of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. She has written several books on ancient Israel, Judaism, Jesus, feminism in Christianity and other topics. Her curriculum vitae is 58 pages and contains numerous degrees, publications and awards. Levine’s lecture in Springfield resulted from collaboration between Springfield’s Jewish Community Relations Council and the Great Rivers Presbytery.
Levine gets comfortable by taking off her high heels before launching into her humorpacked talk, calling herself “a Jew who trains Christians how to be ministers.”
Despite her quip about religion and logic, there’s a heavy dose of reason in Levine’s research. She studies biblical Hebrew and Koine Greek, the primary languages of the Old and New Testaments, respectively. She also studies the cultural and historical contexts of ancient Israel, helping her address misconceptions and differences of biblical interpretation between Jews and Christians.
Levine says the interpretation of the Bible is open, even in texts shared between Jews and Christians. Differences of interpretation come from many sources, she said, including different approaches to punctuation, organization and translation.
“Every time you translate something, something gets added in there that doesn’t belong, and something gets dropped out that does,” she said. “Romeo and Juliet in French is exquisite. Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish? Not so much.”
Levine says early Christians essentially invented the idea of religion and proselytizing. For most of history, a person’s religion was based on where they lived and their ethnicity, she says. Christians changed that by seeking to convert people regardless of geography or heritage. That also accounts for why Judaism tends to more readily welcome disagreement regarding doctrine, she says, adding that Christians also invented the idea of heresy.
“If you’re a Jew by birth, it makes it easier to argue,” she said, “because at the end of the day, you’re all still Jews. But if you get into the system by belief, you get out by belief.”
Jews and Christians also differ on the central themes of the Bible. For Jews, Levine says, the common thread throughout is the idea of going home. By contrast, Christians view the Old Testament as a promise and the New Testament as its fulfillment. Levine uses a sports analogy in which the two faiths are playing different games. The Christian church is playing football; the Garden of Eden is the kickoff, Jesus is the midfield and Revelation is the end zone.
Her explanation concerning Judaism is much simpler.
“The synagogue is baseball,” she said.
“We go home.”
Levine says she often has people from many different belief systems in her classes at Vanderbilt, including Buddhists, Muslims, atheists, Wiccans and more. Her message to those students is that even if they don’t believe in a particular religion, there is “universal value” to its study – value like morality, ethics and history.
“If we recognize that together we’re greater than the sum of our parts,” she said, “… that we might learn something from our neighbors, then it’s all for good.”
Contact Patrick Yeagle at [email protected].
