In this coming week's edition of the Catholic paper Our Sunday Visitor there is an interesting article, by Carl Olson, dealing with the recently published The Jewish Annotated New Testament from Oxford University Press. The article includes an interview with one of the volume's editors, Amy-Jill Levine. I own Oxford's Jewish Study Bible, which has provided some wonderful insights for my class on Thursday nights. Perhaps this new volume might need to be included in my library as well. The translation used for The Jewish Annotated New Testament is the NRSV.
Below is a snippet from the article that I found interesting:
“The Jewish Annotated New Testament” reflects the co-editors’ desire, first, to encourage Jews to open the New Testament and read it without fear or prejudice, especially when it comes to passages that might seem anti-Jewish.
“We felt that Jewish readers might be more comfortable reading the New Testament if it dealt explicitly with such issues,” the co-editors told OSV, “and if the annotations and essays were written entirely by Jews, so it was clear that the volume was not intending to proselytize.”
A second audience is Christian readers who wish to learn more about the first-century Jewish context in which Jesus lived and the Gospels and other New Testament books that were written. Some specific examples: “how Jesus’ Jewish audience would have understood the parables; how Jesus’ interpretation of Torah and his ethical teachings fit within first-century Judaism; how proclamations of Jesus’ divinity could be accepted by early Jews, and how understandings of the ‘messiah’ change over time.” To this end, the volume often highlights the common roots shared by Jews and Christians, but without glossing over or ignoring the significant differences between Jewish and Christian beliefs.
The third group consists of secular readers who “want to understand the New Testament in its historical context.”
You can read the whole article here.
