Levine, Amy-jill. The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus. HarperOne, 2006.

To me, the main value of this book is seeing the perspective of someone who is committed to Judaism but also  happens to be a New Testament scholar.  She begins by drawing an analogy—a tad strained, she admits—that, I believe, shapes the way she writes the book: “the Torah functions for the synagogue as Jesus does for the church: it is the ‘word’ of the divine present in the congregation” (Levine 2006: 17). Therefore, looking carefully at the worldview of each community is important if one is to understand the relationship between the two.  She has many things to say about the interaction between Jews and Christians throughout history and the different ways that each misunderstands the New Testament. Although some will quibble about Levine’s exegesis of some passages, she does challenge Christians to take a closer look at those passages more critically, and I personally found her discussion of the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax-collector to be illuminating. All in all, it is a fascinating read even when there are points of disagreement.

You may also want to watch a video of her lecture entitled Reassessing Jewish-Christian Relations, 2008.

“When Jesus is located within the world of Judaism, the ethical implications of his teachings take on renewed and heightened meaning; their power is restored and their challenge sharpened. Jews as well as Christians should be able to agree on a number of these teachings today, just as in the first century Jesus’s followers and even those Jews who chose not to follow him would have agreed with such basic assertions as that God is our father, that his name should hallowed, and that the divine kingdom is something ardently to be desired. Conversely, the failure to understand the Jewish Jesus within his Jewish context has resulted in the creation and perpetuation of millennia of distrust, and worse, between church and synagogue” (Levine 2006: 20).