Jewish Annotated New Testament [Hardcover]

The editors of this volume, both distinguished New Testament scholars, had two key reasons for creating this "Jewish Annotated New Testament." First they wanted Christian readers to learn more about the Judaic origins of Christianity and the context surrounding the life of Jesus. Second, they wanted to introduce Jewish readers to what is unquestionably one of the canonical texts in Western Civilization, whether they believe in it or not. On the whole, this volume does a fairly good job of serving these purposes.

It includes a preface by the two authors and a highly annotated version of The New Testament. Many of the glosses found in the text are geared at linking the ideas and events of the gospels to their background in the history of Judaism. Each of the books of The New Testament is accompanied by a brief introductory essay. There are also a number of shorter essays positioned within each book to help to explain specific passages at greater length. Finally the end of the book contains a number of essays by leading experts on the bible and Jewish history on a broad range of relevant topics including Jesus in modern Jewish thought and Jewish family life during the time of Jesus.

The volume is very informative and does offer explanations for some passages in the New Testament that will be useful for Jews and Christians alike. Although the book is informative, however, it is not as interesting as it should be in some places. In choosing the essays to be included at the end of the volume, the editors seem to have sacrificed depth for breadth. These very short essays read more or less like encyclopedia articles and are not especially thought provoking. They introduce their topics briefly and blandly and rarely take any risks or yield any interesting insights or details. In general, they do not try to tackle the difficult questions in a way that can stimulate greater mutual understanding between these two great faiths.

Despite my disappointment with most of the brief essays, the author's objectives in creating this volume are highly commendable. It can, in some ways, help to serve as a starting point for interfaith dialogue clearing away Jewish misconceptions of Christianity and heightening Christian appreciation for Judaism. At the same time, however, this book is only a starting point. It needs to be accompanied by a willingness on the part of both Jews and Christians to deal with the uncomfortable questions and issues surrounding the historical and theological relationships between their religions.

This review addresses the text, but it will make a point of describing how well the volume succeeds as a Kindle book. It gets five stars, in spite of blemishes, because the scholarship is first-rate and the perks one gets from the Kindle platform add enough value that you really get your money's worth. In a way, the only sign that the point of view is "Jewish" is that there is no bias to any Christian theology, such as Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, or Pentecostal.

The intention for publishing The Jewish Annotated New Testament, according to its editors, Amy-Jill Levine and Mark Zvi Brettler is to recognize the growing understanding between Jewish and Christian traditions, and to help further that understanding. It may be worth noting that both editors are at the top of their fields. Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish New Testament scholar, is literally a household name among the faculty and students at my seminary. Mark Zvi Brettler is an Old Testament specialist.
The Translation is the NRSV, the most popular Protestant "Scholarly" translation. Therefore, the best yardstick for evaluating it would be the Harper/Collins Annotated (NRSV) Bible. There is only one other major contemporary study Bible on Kindle, and the problems it has are a lesson that the Bible is a difficult book for a generic e-reader to handle. However, I have found reasons to prefer this over dedicated biblical software such as Bibleworks.

The "active" Table of Contents is good by Kindle standards, easy to reach, and gives you access to each book, essay, and appendix. This is much better than the ESV, but it stops too soon, in that once you come to the beginning of the book, it is tedious to scroll down to reach, for example Romans 8:8. With the ESV, you could enter a book and verse number, and go to that verse. I tried a few tricks in the search line, but none worked.

The maps are especially good, in that there is one customized to each Gospel, giving the location of only the names which appeared in that Gospel. But you will not find the brilliantly colored maps which are a fixture at the back of paper Oxford University Press Bibles. But, several of the potentially very useful charts, such as a "Timeline" and a "Table of Rulers" was in the text as a picture, and the text in the picture was so small, I simply could not read them. No amount of jiggery-pokery with font size would enlarge them. This is unfortunate, since some of these tables are the most useful to have in a study Bible. Oddly, other tables were done in "native" Kindle text, and these were fine.

The glossary was very nice, and for those items I checked, were as accurate as a one sentence definition can be. The search function is the primary reason I buy Kindle editions. Here, it works as well as in most books, but a second weakness is that if you query, for example, "son of man" and go to one of the results, if that phrase is in a longer book, you have no clue about which book you found. All you see is a mass of numbered verses which, if you are not familiar with the Bible, can leave you cold. The footnotes, on the other hand, were nicely done. If a verse had a footnote, its verse number was in a highlighted color. Clicking on them brought up the notes, but only the notes on that page.

The sidebar essays are nicely done, especially for the fact that they are all listed in the active "Table of Contents". So, if I want to read about "diatribe", I click on that and it takes me to Romans Chapter 2, which is exactly where I expected to go. This little essay describes "diatribe" better than anything else I have read on the subject, by being brief as well as accurate. The sidebar on "the virgin birth" was similarly concise, yet deep enough to get all the main issues included.
The introductions to the books, especially the Gospels, are marvelous distillations of scholarship we are familiar with in a seminary. One may think this is where these essays would look different from those written by a Christian. In fact, they are virtually identical to what I would expect from a Christian scholar. The only error I found was in a characterization of Shylock in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice", but then, that isn't in the Bible.

The list of sources at the beginning of the book, and the bibliography at the end were, like everything else, concise and helpful. They have the concomitant benefit of being searchable, if you happen to want a list of all of Cicero's major works. So, if you happen to want to compare what the gospels and Cicero said about tax collectors, you could look up Cicero, find him in the notes, then go the text to which the note points. Then, the problem of where are you (see above) kicks in.

It is just a bit annoying that Kindle does not yet support Hebrew, Greek, or Arabic alphabets. The transliterations are ok, especially if you don't know Hebrew, but if you do know Greek, it is nice to see the Greek to be sure the transliteration is reasonable.

In spite of its weaknesses, there are several good reasons for getting this edition on the Kindle. My main ones deal with things you cannot do with dedicated Bible software such as Bibleworks. With this, I can highlight and add notes to my heart's content, feeling no regret that I am marking up a "Bible". I can comment on NT lectionary passages on which I write, and find those comments three years from now, when the same passage comes around again. It's almost a shame that you can't have two copies, so you can mark them up in two different ways. This way, you can find all those passages which you consider especially important to something you wrote, or just generally unusual or inspiring, the way I came across the passage in Hebrews 1:6 - 7, which is remarkable suggestive of ayah's in the Qur'an:

6 And again, when he brings the firstborn into the world, he says, "Let all God's angels worship him." 7 Of the angels he says, "He makes his angels winds, and his servants flames of fire."

This is better as a Bible Commentary than it is as a good electronic Bible text, but it is good enough, and the "perks" which come with the Kindle should sell you on the idea. And, I like the idea of keeping the Old and New in separate volumes for the Kindle, since the combined Bible is too unwieldy for the Kindle paradigm yet.

Those of us who are involved in interfaith dialogue will recognize that this book will be a classic reference work for anyone seriously interested in Judaism in the first century. The editors have done an extraordinary service to both New Testament scholarship, and to correcting the misunderstood relationship Jesus had with his own Judaism. To say "Jesus was Jewish" is one thing, but this important book squarely places him at the epicenter of his people, in one of the most tumultuous periods in Jewish history - only a few decades before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. As a congregational rabbi myself who does a lot of interfaith work this book stands out as a reference work I will be proud to recommend to my rabbinic colleagues, to pastors, and to congregants in both churches and synagogues who want a fresh perspective on the Christian Scriptures through the annotations of Jewish scholars. Readers might also be interested in Dr. Levine's other important study of Jesus: The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus