Amy-Jill Levine
Amy-Jill Levine is a Jewish New Testament scholar who teaches at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
“If to get a good message you need to make Judaism look bad, then you don’t have a good message.”
The Prodigal Son is often read to mean that God loves sinners, whereas the Jews thought God only loved the righteous. This makes no sense.
Old habits die hard. Despite numerous attempts by mainline Protestant denominations to promote historically informed studies of Judaism, repudiate supersessionist theologies and engage in conversations wth Jews, the old habit of bearing false witness against Jewish neighbors lives on. In recent years this practice has thrived especially in mainline Protestant statements on the Middle East.