Book Review: Short Stories by Jesus

Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi by Amy-Jill Levine
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Parables told by Jesus are meant to provoke. In this volume by Amy-Jill Levine, she seeks to reopen the readers' eyes to the provocation they contain.

Christian tradition has too often resorted to allegory (or worse) to read and interpret the parables. In that process the parables have been used to disparage and attack Judaism and Jews. They have been used to claim for Christianity purity and holiness that Judaism supposedly had lost and corrupted. They have been used to drive a wedge between Judaism and Christianity, to paint an us-vs-them picture of what following the God of the Bible means. Levine, writing as a Jew, brings a broad Jewish perspective and corrective to traditional Christian interpretations and suppositions.

On the other hand, perhaps modern Christians shouldn't be judged too harshly for perpetuating traditions. Levine writes that as early as the gospel writers recording the parables, and likely even earlier, the parables had already begun their "domestication" to try to tame their provocative natures and to support an exclusive Christian theology. What cannot be forgiven is that with the amount of scholarship and knowledge available to Christians today, that they continue to perpetuate traditions and interpretations that are questionable and may not have any basis in the original telling.

Levine goes through a selection of parables, one per chapter, first offering a translation of the text that adheres very literally to the Greek. She then addresses the traditional Christian interpretations, and offers critiques and counterpoints. She ends each chapter with a different, and based on her scholarship, what she would say is a more accurate reading and understanding of the parables.

The re-imagining and re-reading of the parables will definitely provoke thought, especially among those of us who grew up understanding the parables in another way, where parables were supposed to provide some kind of model answer to a problem or a picture of the kingdom of God. In Levine's interpretations, the parables are open-ended; they ask troubling questions, and the reader must come up with how to respond to them.

The final chapter is both a summary and an invitation for the reader to continue exploring the parables. She gives brief overviews of another handful of parables and suggests some directions that the reader might take in following the pattern she has provided in her book.

Don't read this book if you don't want your comfortable Christian hermeneutics disturbed. Read it if you are genuinely interested in discovering what the original hearers of the parables likely heard from Jesus.

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