CWR Interview w/ Editors of Jewish Annotated NT

Catholic World Report has just posted an interview by Carl Olson with two of the editors of Oxford's Jewish Annotated New Testament. You can read the entire interview here.

Two questions (and responses) are of particular interest to me:

CWR: How might Catholic readers, in particular, benefit and learn from it?

Dr. Levine: On the general topic of Jewish-Christian relations, the Catholic Church has been in the forefront of providing guidelines on how to teach and preach about Jews and Judaism. This volume compliments these efforts. We are also attentive to matters that Jews and Catholics hold in common: the ongoing interpretation of the shared Scripture (Old Testament/Tanakh); the concern for ritual; the role of Law; the relation of the New and Old Testaments.

CWR: What are some of the main concerns or challenges that Jewish readers face in approaching the New Testament?

Dr. Levine and Dr. Brettler: Some will be unfamiliar with basic Christian concepts (therefore, we provide annotations on baptism, Eucharist, resurrection, etc.); some might be concerned with passages that have led to anti-Jewish views (therefore, we provide historical and theological commentary); some might be unfamiliar with the stories and theologies that stand behind the New Testament as well as the stories and theologies that have developed from it (therefore, we show how the text is related to the Tanakh, to Jewish history, and to Jewish theology). Ideally, the Jewish reader will come away with a sense of what the great Lutheran theologian and biblical scholar, Krister Stendahl, called, “holy envy,” the ability to find meaning in a text or a tradition not one’s own.

Judaism cannot be fully understood without an understanding of the New Testament and its interpretation, since at so many points and times in history, Judaism developed within a Christian milieu. Therefore, Jewish readers can see in this text both a recovery of early Jewish history and the points at which Church and Synagogue parted.