Short Stories By Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

I appreciate Amy-Jill arranging for a copy from HarperCollins of her new book.

The renowned biblical scholar, author of The Misunderstood Jew, and general editor for The Jewish Annotated New Testament interweaves history and spiritual analysis to explore Jesus’ most popular teaching parables, exposing their misinterpretations and making them lively and relevant for modern readers.

Jesus was a skilled storyteller and perceptive teacher who used parables from everyday life to effectively convey his message and meaning. Life in first-century Palestine was very different from our world today, and many traditional interpretations of Jesus’ stories ignore this disparity and have often allowed anti-Semitism and misogyny to color their perspectives.

In this wise, entertaining, and educational book, Amy-Jill Levine offers a fresh, timely reinterpretation of Jesus’ narratives. In Short Stories by Jesus, she analyzes these “problems with parables,” taking readers back in time to understand how their original Jewish audience understood them. Levine reveals the parables’ connections to first-century economic and agricultural life, social customs and morality, Jewish scriptures and Roman culture. With this revitalized understanding, she interprets these moving stories for the contemporary reader, showing how the parables are not just about Jesus, but are also about us—and when read rightly, still challenge and provoke us two thousand years later.

No one reading this volume will be able to read the parables of Jesus the way they did before doing so.  Levine’s volume doesn’t simply challenge standard readings, it demolishes them.  It wittily and carefully and thoroughly and relentlessly rips the parables from our ‘all knowing’ hands and un-domesticates them and gives them back to us in a form which Jesus himself doubtlessly intended.  Not since Jeremias has a book on the parables changed the landscape quite the way Levine’s does.

The parables Levine examines and interprets are the parable of the lost sheep and coin, the good samaritan, the parable of the yeast, the pearl of great price, the mustard seed, the pharisee and the tax collector, the laborers in the vineyard, the terrible judge, and the rich man and Lazarus.

In her introduction Levine shows how readers of the parables ‘domesticate’ them and in the conclusion she shows how the parables were – and are – intended to disturb.

Unfortunately the volume is too short.  282 pages is just not enough and all of the parables need to be treated to the same extraordinary, excruciating examination as those discussed herein.  Indeed, its only fault is that it is too brief.  Readers will, I am confident, put the book down (after being unable to put it down) upon completion and ask themselves, ‘when will A-J do to all the parables what she has done to these.  I want to know.  I have to know.’

This is a stunning accomplishment, long overdue, and critically important for interpreters of the New Testament Gospels.  Levine’s writing style is so fantastically engaging and anyone who has ever had the privilege of hearing her present a paper at SBL or some such affair will hear her voice virtually reading the volume to them.

It’s probably apparent to anyone paying attention that I really admire this volume and the scholar who produced it.  You should read it too.  You will gain a new appreciation for scholarship and how it really should always be done.