Understanding Jesus and Paul means Understanding Jewish Practice and Belief

The Forum at St. Bart's
Amy-Jill Levine (www.hartfordinternational.edu..., prolific author and the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, places Jesus and Paul within their Jewish context and reflects on how the Jewishness of early Christians is so often overlooked.
Please post your questions for our speaker in the comments section on Facebook or KZbin, or email the Reverend Peter D. Thompson, Vicar, at [e-mail].

[@Charity-vm4bt]

Thank you. This was excellent. I am a Catholic religion educator originally from Massachsetts. Very interested in her work and in Jewish history and biblical studies and post-Catican II Catholic Feminist authors. Her combination of scholarship, Jewish comfortableness with the Bible and her human warmth and humor makes for a refreshing approach.

[@arthurmartinson4370]

I (partially) opened up to Prof. Levine about my frustration of living among religious bigots. She responded to the e-mail with her usual humor and intelligence. Her "Great Courses" DVDs and videos here sustain me.....a heterodox, cultural catholic.

[@mongoharry]

Who's the famous scientist who said, "If you can't explain it to kids, you don't get it"? Well, this theology scholar definitely "gets it".

[@kashf69]

Amazing lecture AJ rocks as usual

[@dafnecastillo1294]

So beautifully shared ❤

[@Charity-vm4bt]

6:27

[@katkatsanis]

Hello, St. Bart's Friends~ This was a wonderful & inspiring interview! Thanks so much for this soul food, Meredith & Peter. : ) Lots of Love, Kat (& Goldalee)

[@Historian212]

Unfortunately, Nostra Aetate didn’t change how most priests taught about Jews in the gospels. Not for at least a generation. Even in the 1990s, 30 years later, I overheard an astonishing conversation between a young Roman Catholic dad and his primary-school aged children. It was early one lovely Sunday morning, and I’d gone out to buy muffins. I was walking on an almost-deserted, Brooklyn, NY side street. No one else was around, so the approaching family’s voices echoed off the stone buildings and concrete sidewalks. It happened to have been Palm Sunday - I could tell, because they were carrying their palms home from a nearby church. Dad, mom, son, and daughter. As I neared them, the father was quizzing the kids: “…and who killed Jesus?” (Naturally, my ears pricked up, and I steeled myself against what I thought the kids would say.) The son answered, tentatively, “The soldiers?” (I, relieved, began to relax.) The father immediately corrected him: “The Jews. The Jews killed Jesus.” That father was too young to have been educated prior to Vatican II. I wanted to stop, and get into it with him, or at least admonish him to ask the person who’d tried to teach his kids right. But of course I couldn’t - not in front of his family, it wouldn’t have worked, and would have just antagonized him. I’m so glad scholars like Levine are out there trying to fix this. I believe she’s making a difference. I only hope it’s enough to make real change. Anti-Jewish prejudice is ancient, and is deeply imbedded in Christian traditions. Reaching people in local churches is made more difficult due to the pervasive anti-Jewish culture that’s been handed down among Christians, both by clergy and from parents to children. As a 12-year-old in the late 1960s, I had rocks and horrible insults thrown at me by neighborhood bullies for being Jewish; in the mid-1980s, a Catholic guy I was getting to know sheepishly told me he couldn’t ask me out because - and this is a verbatim quote - “If I brought a Jewish girl home it’d kill my mother.” (We were both in our twenties, he meant home for a visit.) I doubt that these attitudes are promoted by the church, or that any priest directed those little boys to hurt and humiliate a young girl. So where did they get that from? It’s one thing to correct corrosive church theology and teaching; it’s quite another to undo centuries of embedded, often unconscious cultural bigotry.

[@hyacinthlynch843]

My mother was Jewish and she had great response to this accusation. She said, "The Jews didn't kill Jesus...we just sold the lumber."

[@CleanlinessisGodliness]

Thank you 😊

[@judygaleinchapelhill]

💗

[@susanstein6604]

Isaiah was referring to the birth of Cyrus.

[@williamtotherow3367]

About King Hezekiah

[@abrahamphilip6439]

When you say Jesus , it is specifically to know his inner circle , Peter, John & James , Paul was not one of them, no doubt important, The Jews missed out the Messiah cause they had not the revelations of the Prophecies even though they had the prophecies, Nevertheless know some truth; "-- with his stripes you are healed" (Isaiah) The stripes that man gave him out of sin become his own (he who had no sin became sin for us) by which he redeems man unto the words "I Hurt & I Heal " (Job) & "My Yoke is easy & Burden Light " (Mathew) So, the stripes that man gave him, he uses to redeem is why "It pleased God to Bruise (stripe) him" (Isaiah) Not for the Bruises itself but for its fruit, Not really a "Substitution ( magic) act" but a "Conversion act" is it not ?

[@stanstarygin6622]

Yet it IS stupid to see Jesus on the pages of the Old Testament.

[@MsCazanova55]

I cannot understand antisemitism. Jesus was meant to die as the sacrificial lamb of God His death was the fulfillment of the prophesy of Isiaih. He died for our sins and Jesus knew he was going to die. It was meant to be. His death and resurrection is the foundation of Christianity, without his death there is no Christianity soo..thank you AJ..

[@johnmann8659]

Caro Martini-Deacon It defies logic. - 1 Peter 2:9-12 - Romans 9:4 - John 4:22