Welcome back to season five of Enter the Bible, a podcast in which we share "Everything You Wanted to Know about the Bible...but were afraid to ask."

In episode 11 of season 5, our hosts are joined by Amy-Jill Levine (“AJ”) who is the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace; and University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies, and Professor of New Testament Studies, Emerita, at Vanderbilt.

Today our theologians will be answering the listener-submitted question, "Who Are 'the Jews' in John's Passion Narrative?"

Do you have Bible questions you would like answered? Go to our website at https://enterthebible.org/about to get started.

This episode of the Enter the Bible podcast was recorded at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN on July 12, 2023.

Watch the video version on Youtube at https://youtu.be/GcS6KItWRZY

Mentioned in this episode:

Join the May 2025 cohort of Faith+Lead's School for Lay Ministry

Learn more and register today at faithlead.org/schoolforlay.

2025 May School for Lay Ministry Cohort

Katie Langston: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Enter the Bible podcast where you can get answers or at least reflections on everything you wanted to know about the Bible. But were afraid to ask. I'm Katie Langston.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: And I'm Kathryn Schifferdecker. And we are just privileged to welcome a very special guest today on the podcast. Professor Amy Jill Levine is the Rabbi, Stanley Kessler distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, and was previously at Vanderbilt University. She's the university professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies emerita, the Mary Jane Worthen, professor of Jewish Studies emerita and the professor of New Testament Studies emerita at Vanderbilt University. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us.

Amy-Jill Levine: I'm delighted you invited me. It floored me that people would be afraid to ask a question about the Bible. How bizarre.

Katie Langston: That is. That's totally it is. It's totally weird. But I think in some, you know, Christian traditions or cultures, there's sort of like this idea that you you shouldn't be allowed to ask questions or somehow that that makes you unfaithful.

Amy-Jill Levine: That's a great way to depopulate the church.

Katie Langston: Thank you. Yes, correct. 1,000,000%. Yes.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: There are many I've heard many stories from students and others who were who asked questions in Sunday school, and were told that they shouldn't. So a very non-Jewish approach.

Katie Langston: I think that's correct.

Amy-Jill Levine: Right.

Katie Langston: Yeah, exactly.

Amy-Jill Levine: Yeah.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: So we we have a listener question today that came in via our website. Enter the Bible. Org And as usual listeners, we encourage you to ask your questions there. So here's the question that came in via that website. Who are "the Jews" in John's passion narrative? So those for those unfamiliar in the Gospel of John, we have a number of references to the Jews, particularly in the passion narrative, and they seem to be the antagonists of Jesus calling for his crucifixion. So, Professor Levine, how would you begin to address that question? I know it's a big topic.

Amy-Jill Levine: Yeah, well, I would rephrase the question. They don't seem to be the antagonist. They are the antagonists, right? Yes. So John uses the term Judaios, Greek for Jew can also be translated Judean. But it's basically the same thing, 69 or 70 times, depending upon the manuscript that you look at. And I don't think that as John is being read out loud to people, since most people back then were illiterate, you're going to hear the text performed or read out loud. I don't think that Marcus is going to turn to Livy and say, Do you think he's talking about all Jews now? We're just some Jews? Yeah, that's that's not the way people listen to things. Every once in a while, John drops in a reference to Pharisees. They eventually morph into the Ioudaioi anyway. So I think just for John's rhetoric, there are people who are following Jesus and then there are these Judaioi and they represent the folks who don't. And John's very dualistic. You're either in the system or you're out of the system, right? So "the Jews" in John, although many pastors or Bible study these ones, oh, it's just the Jewish authorities or it's just the Jewish leaders. I don't think that's what John means. I don't think that works in terms of how the literature functions. And even if you say Jewish leaders or Jewish authorities, it doesn't help much because then you have to ask, well, in what sense are they authoritative? If we're talking about the chief priests, for example, the only thing they have authority over is over the temple. They don't tell people how to practice. They don't tell people what to believe. They are appointed by Rome. The only reason Caiaphas who's the high priest has his office is because Pontius Pilate lets him, so to say, Jewish authorities or Jewish leaders or just some Jews, it tries to get around what appears to be just anti-Jewish preaching, but it doesn't work. So I think it means the Jews. Now, who were the Jews for, John? They epitomized the nonbelievers. Now we got a problem because we have a really problematic text in what's supposed to be a gospel of love. Now what? And that's where people like you all who teach and preach have to be very careful in terms of how do you proclaim this? What do you say to your congregation? What guidance do you provide in the order of worship or on your website or even in terms of how you do the liturgical reading? Because in that reading, because reading is still a performance, you can read it with a lump in your throat as if saying Jewish is hard to get out under the circumstances or express your own discomfort with it. Because I think there are certain texts that people need to wrestle with in the same way that I, as a Jew, have texts in my own tradition that I'm not really fond of. Right? And then I take that idea of being Israel means to wrestle with God at least traditionally. And so I'm going to wrestle with this text because I think this text runs counter to my idea of a merciful and gracious God into my idea of all people in the image and likeness of God. And to my idea that you don't condemn a bunch of people for believing something that they find to be true to their heart.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Exactly. And the danger, of course, is now the Romans are no more, right? We don't have Romans running around today, but we do have Jews. We have Jewish folks.

Amy-Jill Levine: I mean, we do have Romans. Most of them most of them are Catholic.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: That's that's a good point. Right, Right, right. But not the Roman Empire, right?

Amy-Jill Levine: I've lived in Rome. I take that seriously. Yeah. We tend not to think of, say, Roman pagans. But if you're coming out of a Lutheran environment, why don't you start talking about the Romans? That just opens up a whole other problem.

Katie Langston: We have some specifics, which we can leave to one side here. Well, what what? You know what? What advice would you have for us? What would you, you know, as a as a Jewish person, what would you want from your Christian neighbors to say or, you know, to teach about the kind of blatant anti Judaism in, say, the gospel of John.

Amy-Jill Levine: Well, part of it is how, how do you distribute this Johannine material, this John material to your congregations? I would dearly love to see a massive revision of the various lectionaries that are out there, because I don't see any reason why John has to be read, you know, during Holy Week. Why not do the seven last words of Jesus, which is traditional in Black churches? I think that's a great idea. Plus, you get a little bit of every gospel and lectionaries don't read every word anyway. Then think one can be a whole lot more selective about what's read and what's not read. And there's stuff that's better done proclaimed from the pulpit and there's stuff that's better done in the classroom. I'm not interested, although this is debatable, I'm really less interested in people who want to say Judean rather than Jew. I think that's that's a distinction without a difference. And once you eliminate actual Jews from the New Testament, to use the German technical term, you have a New Testament, you have a New Testament. There's been purified of Jews, like like, let's get rid of all the Jews. I'm not I'm not happy with that either, for a variety of reasons. I'd rather people actually wrestle with the text and wrestle with what I think John is conveying, which is all these Judaio are the same and then it's not good. And then figure out how better to get at this. In the Jewish tradition, we have something called midrash, which is its non legally binding storytelling interpretation. And there are a number of midrashim. -Im being the Hebrew masculine plural. There are a number of midrashim that take texts which are really, really problematic and spin them in such a way that and little children learn this so they know, Oh, we don't go in this direction, we go in that direction. Since we Jews read the entire Torah in the Orthodox Synagogue every year from Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy in Hebrew, we're going to be reading a number of passages which are highly problematic. So Moses Song of the Sea, you know, the children of Israel are going through the Red Sea and Pharaoh's army, the chariot wheels get stuck in the mud and the soldiers drown and the angels are singing praises. And the midrash says when the the Israelites are escaping from slavery and Pharaoh's soldiers are drowning, that the angels start singing praises to God and they go to find God, right? And they can't find God, which is really awkward. And eventually they find him sitting in a corner, wrapped in a prayer shawl, anachronistic, and God is weeping uncontrollably. And the angels say, "But but the Israelites are escaping." And God responds, "My children are drowning. And you're singing praises." And that's about the Egyptians. So since little kids learn this right from the get go, we're made aware like you don't rejoice when even when your enemy dies, right? There are passages in the prophets that might take you there. But the midrash says don't do that, that everybody is in the image and likeness of God. So don't think that you're better than them and don't rejoice when they die. This is stuff you need to work on. So I think just starting from children's education in churches, recognizing how this language has been extremely harmful, recognizing that Jesus is a Jew and all the Marys are Jews and Peter and Paul, they're all Jews, not Pontius Pilate, but you know, the rest of them. They're Jews. And to give a sense that if you start talking about Jews as bad, then you're saying, well, Jesus is bad and Paul is bad and Peter's bad and all the Marys are bad and you really don't want to go there.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah.

Amy-Jill Levine: So it's not a single fit that's going to fix everything, but it's a long term process of revising what gets read in churches, revising how stuff gets presented. Determining what, if you're reading the lectionary, what Old Testament to use the Christian term Old Testament text should be put up next to this. What should be read to the congregation and what need not be read to the congregation. That's a lot of work, but it's work that I think in 2023 people ought to be doing.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah, agree with you. Because of the yeah, the long, sad history, shameful history of Christian treatment of Jews through the through the millennia.

Amy-Jill Levine: And what's happening now in so many educational settings and sermonic settings is the idea that, well, antisemitism has gone away.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: I don't think so.

Amy-Jill Levine: Or that all Jews are white and privileged, which is not the case on on either score or that because there were other things that are more important, we can ignore antisemitism. I don't think so. And this is stuff that churches can actually do because you're going to be reading the New Testament. So it requires better New Testament knowledge, better historical knowledge and and ears that are more attuned to say, how do I deal with this rather than just say, Oh, you're overreacting, or it doesn't mean all Jews, right, or it's not a problem anymore. These various excuses, it just means Jewish leaders or I'm sure some of them were nice. Thank you.

Katie Langston: Right.

Amy-Jill Levine: Stop. Stop coming up with these excuses, which is just the Christian version of fragility. And to say, yeah, this actually doesn't sound very good. What I advise my students is, when my children were little, I used to bring my kids to class because they always had Passover off and they went to the Jewish Day school here in Nashville. And I would say to my students, you know, picture this kid in the front pew and don't say anything that would harm this kid or cause any member of your congregation to harm this kid, which is theatrical and manipulative, but it's really effective. And if you picture me back pew, because if I hear a bigoted message coming out from the... you bet I'm going to stand up in the back of the church and the last thing you want is an angry, middle aged woman, Jewish woman standing in the back of your church making faces at you.

Katie Langston: You don't want that. So you don't want that. Yeah.

Amy-Jill Levine: Let's be careful.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: So you mentioned emphasizing that Jesus is a Jew. The Marys are Jews. Peter's a Jew. Paul's a Jew. Do you see? Like, let's say you're reading the John, the text from John. Maybe in Holy Week, maybe not. Is, is that, do you think, an effective strategy like do you do that from the pulpit or is that best left to a classroom? Do you like is is it possible to preach John's passion narrative, do you think, or is it best left to teaching.

Amy-Jill Levine: Oh anything is possible, whether it's wise or not is another question. Some of this will depend upon how well educated or how well prepared your congregation is. What works in Church A does not necessarily work in Church B, so that's going to make a difference. How many Jews you have in your church will make a difference because there are a number of churches where you might have intermarried couples or Jewish converts. And in cases like that, the congregation and and the clergy tend to be much more sensitive to these particular concerns. If there's been an anti-Semitic incident in your town, you tend to be more concerned about that. So what works in one church doesn't necessarily work in another. Can this stuff be preached? Yeah, but you have to be really, really careful.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah.

Amy-Jill Levine: Should it be? That depends upon what you think your congregation needs to hear or would do well to hear or can bear to hear. No. No church one size fits all. No congregation is one size fits all.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: No, no, that's true. You had mentioned earlier in the conversation, you said at first that the, and I'm not sure I heard you right. So that's why I'm asking, that the Pharisees in John's gospel kind of morph into this category of the Jews is that is that what you said?

Amy-Jill Levine: That's what I said.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Okay, So why is it with that? What? What's that change about? Do you have any theories?

Amy-Jill Levine: Yeah, I think it's a process that begins with the other gospels, and John simply brings it home. Uh, Mark is pretty good about keeping groups separate. Matthew is the one who brings together Pharisees and Sadducees. And you can see that Pharisees and Sadducees both come to John the Baptist. That's not in Mark. So the idea that Pharisees and Sadducees would agree on anything is already a bit a bit weird. Uh, and Luke, Luke gives you a kind of nicer Pharisees, certainly in Acts. But by the time you get to John, John has no references to Sadducees. And even when you get stories that start talking about Pharisees, by the end of the story and John doesn't know when to end a text anyway, they just go on forever.

Katie Langston: That's that's true.

Amy-Jill Levine: It's not like the synoptics where you can be done.

Katie Langston: Exactly.

Amy-Jill Levine: So when you start when John starts with Pharisees, eventually they just become Jews. Okay. And I think that's deliberate. I think the same thing is happening in in Matthew where you get Pharisees and Sadducees. But at the end, I think Matthew strategically uses the term Ioudaioi with this totally nutty story about, you know, bribing the guards to say what happened to the body. "Oh, we fell asleep" like some Roman guard is going to say, "Oh yeah, we fell asleep," which is already just nuts. And then and then while we were asleep, the disciples came and stole the body. Well, how would they know that if they were asleep? The whole story is completely ridiculous. And Matthew says in this story is told among the Ioudaioi until this day. And I think that's Matthew's way of saying, you know, they're all kind of coming together. It's all the people, the Greek is , all the people say, you know, crucify him, crucify him, his blood, be on us and on our kids. So Matthew has begun that process of consolidating all the Jews who are not Jesus followers as quote unquote, the Jews. And John John picks that up and continues it.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Oh, that's really helpful. Historical context. So the Gospels are written obviously after the events that they record sometime in some cases many, many, many years after. And so the the early church, which starts, you know, all the early believers are Jews, early Christian believers are Jews. And then it starts to, of course, expand to the Gentiles with Paul's missions. So the gospel writers are writing in a context, am I right, that that the antagonists of the early church, at least some of the antagonists, are Jews? And is that influencing the I mean the people out of whom they came. Right? Is that influencing this depiction of the Jews in the Gospels?

Amy-Jill Levine: It has to be. Yeah. Because anytime you write a text, you're influenced by your external environment. So those of us who write books were influenced by what we read and whom we read and what we saw in the movies or heard on the radio. Now, whether John is reflecting what's actually going on on the ground or whether John is trying to manipulate what's going on around. And I think John is more in the manipulative phase because from what we know externally, Jews who are believers in Jesus and Jews who are not or on the whole getting along pretty well.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Okay.

Amy-Jill Levine: So how do you make people choose up sides rather than stay on the fence or say, I want to be here, I want to be here. So John is saying, listen, if you hang out with those Ioudaioi it would be bad for you because they're really children of the devil and they're really out to get you. And the whole group of them wanted to do away with Jesus. And you might be thinking not so much. So there are places in John where things kind of slip, where maybe things aren't so bad. My friend Adele Reinhardt, who's a really good Johannine scholar whose work I would commend everybody. Um, pointed this out to me because I hadn't noticed it in John chapter 11, which is the raising of Lazarus. There's this little note that says the Jews came to comfort Mary and Martha. Whoa. Yeah, yeah. You know, we're bringing over, like, you know, a chicken or something. So it was like this little slip saying, well, you know, maybe these fuses believers and the non Jesus believing Jews, maybe actually things on the ground don't look that bad.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Um.

Amy-Jill Levine: And what happens when you get church leaders is they're trying to do the separation where stuff on the ground looks, looks actually pretty good. The best example of that and you have to move up a couple of centuries is John Chrysostom writing in Antioch saying, Oh, the synagogue is a brothel and it's terrible. And why is he saying that? Because Gentiles in his congregation, these Gentile Christians, are saying, let's go to the synagogue, right? They feed you, they're not telling you you have to be celibate. They got the Hebrew. That is the real deal. And what the leaders are trying to do is engage in this separation even when people on the ground may not be.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: That's that's helpful. That's really helpful to get some of that historical context. So choose sides or yeah, yeah, that that makes sense.

Amy-Jill Levine: It's like parents saying to their kids, you can't play with so-and-so because and because so-and-so is a Jew or so-and-so was a Christian believer or whatever. Yeah, I want to play with them.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah.

Katie Langston: Exactly. Yeah. And it feels important, you know? Um, I know some of our audience are church leaders and some of our audience are lay folks, but it feels important to to say, you know, let's not be like the leaders of the past in their failures in terms of requiring this sort of side taking or, you know, the the sort of lies and conspiracy theories and all the things that exist, you know, surrounding anti-Semitism. Let's not let's not do that. Let's you know, it's up to us to sort of break that cycle and and to and to say, no, that's not how we're going to be.

Amy-Jill Levine: Right. Exactly. And Christians have have a good track record on doing this on a number of other subjects, questions in your own community on say women's ordination or denial of of enslavement language. So if that stuff can be said, we're not going to do that anymore or we repent of this, then this is another place where resisting readers can come in and say, yeah, I don't think this text is actually conveying the spirit that I want to convey, either to myself or to my family or to my congregation. So go wrestle with it, because that's what Israel means. Go wrestle. Israel means wrestling.

Katie Langston: I mean, not to get off on a tangent or anything, but I preached on 2 Peter recently, which isn't the number one most exciting text to preach on, let's say. And I noted in my sermon how that it was problematic and that lots of commentators have talked about how problematic it was. And I referred back to that to that text of, you know, of Israel wrestling , you know, some texts you have to wrestle a blessing from some texts and some sometimes it takes all night long and you end up with a limp at the end. Right? It's not clear cut. There's no simple, you know, way to deal with it except to acknowledge that it is that it is difficult. And. And you and you have to. You go back to it and you you fight with it, you know, and that that's a faithful way of engaging scripture. That's a faithful way of of loving God and loving your neighbor.

Amy-Jill Levine: I think, in fact, it's what the biblical God expects from us. I mean, Job is the one who does all the wrestling and in the end Job: Okay, You're right.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: That's right.

Amy-Jill Levine: That's great.

Katie Langston: Yeah, right, Exactly right.

Amy-Jill Levine: Moses wrestles, Jeremiah wrestles. Abraham wrestles. Anybody who's who's doing anything is going to say, excuse me, this is not right.

Katie Langston: That's right.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah, yeah. And our Jewish brothers and sisters historically have done that a lot better than Christians have, I think. We we had another podcast where we were talking about humor in the Bible and how often Christians are overly pious and don't don't want to do anything that might feel disrespectful. But there is there is a kind of give and take that wrestling that is really important. And and it's, as you say, present, though, in the Bible itself and certainly present in the tradition of Jewish interpretation of Scripture. So we have much to learn.

Katie Langston: Yeah, we got a lot to learn.

Amy-Jill Levine: You can just take it from Jesus. Jesus doesn't go to the cross saying, "Oh, that sounds like fun."

Katie Langston: Right? That's.

Amy-Jill Levine: That's not the plan for me. I don't want to do this. This is not a good idea. Is there. Is there an out here?

Katie Langston: Right. Right. You stop. Right?

Kathryn Schifferdecker: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Yeah.

Amy-Jill Levine: Yeah. Which is a good lament song. Yeah, yeah.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah, Psalm 22. Well, to our listeners, I should have said this in the introduction, but if you want to learn more from Professor Levine, she has written many books, one in particular that, that I would highly recommend is the Jewish Annotated New Testament, which is published by Oxford University Press. It's going into its third edition. Professor Levine is one of the general editors and a contributor to that, along with Professor Mark Brettler. And it has just some really interesting insights, as you've heard already from this podcast, about how understanding Jewish theology a history tradition can help one read the New Testament with new eyes. So again, the Jewish Annotated New Testament and Professor Levine has many other books that that talk about the Jewishness of Jesus, of Paul, how to read the New Testament with with that context in mind. So just go go in search and you'll find much to treasure there . So. So thank you so much, Professor Levine, for being with us for this podcast. We really appreciate your insights.

Amy-Jill Levine: Thank you for raising important topics.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: All right. And to our listeners, there's much more to find on Enter the Bible. Org. We encourage you to go there and submit your own question. Those, those blog posts and more podcasts and lots of material at Enter the Bible dot org. We'll see you next time.