The New Testament: Jewish or Gentile?

The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Brettler, has recently been republished in a second edition. It performs the vital task of correcting Christian misunderstandings, distortions, stereotypes and calumnies to recover the various Jewish contexts of Jesus, Paul, and the early Christian movement. This is a welcome development in the painful history of Jewish–Christian relations. There is a danger, however, in the book’s Christian reception, of a kind of nostalgia for ‘Jewish roots’—an expectation that by returning to Jesus’ original message, and an ‘authentic’ Jewish form of Christianity, one can bypass centuries of mistrust and worse. Matters are not that simple. Christianity grew out of a complex dual heritage, already reflected in the New Testament. The Christian message quickly spread into the Greek-speaking world, and its adherents soon became majority Gentile. This paper explores the implications of that process, which was begun by Paul, who presented Jewish messianic ideas to a Gentile audience, assigning universal significance to the traditions of his own particular community. It examines how Jesus’ teachings acquired new meanings, often reflecting a Christian movement at odds with the majority of Jews. And it unearths the subtext beneath the New Testament’s defamatory polemic. Doing so involves negotiating the complex relationship between theology and sociology: between ideals (Jewish and/or Christian) and the lived experiences of Jewish and Gentile communities.