THE author is a well-known American Jewish writer, now retired after teaching, who has taught in several universities, including Christian institutions, and thoroughly conversant with Christianity. The purpose of the gospel message is to give invitations to discussion, to help us all towards human decency. Hence there are chapters on Health Care, Family Values, and Politics.

The author’s own position is somewhat paradoxical: she does not believe in a Creator-God, but derives peace and warmth from the scriptures, and lives as if there were such a God. The message of Jesus is for all, though the author has difficulty with the idea that Jesus was both fully human and a man without sin; the question is shelved, as “above my pay grade; I’m a historian, not a theologian”.

The author sets out to correct a number of misconceptions about the world of the Gospels. She has no truck with artificial distinctions. When Peter claims that as a Jew he would be defiled for entering a non-Jewish household, he was simply wrong; for Jews and non-Jews mingled together unhesitatingly. The same is the case with Jews (or at least “Judeans”) and Samaritans, despite the claim of John 4.9, “for Jews do not associate with Samaritans”; and despite the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Similarly, despite the teaching of the camel and the eye of a needle, wealth is no bar to entry into the Kingdom; it simply must be used correctly. The wealthy can remain comfortable, provided that they have a social conscience. Nor did Jesus challenge the institution of slavery, though the author herself is careful to avoid degrading any enslaved person by calling them a “slave”. Here, as elsewhere, the gospel is a challenge and an invitation to discussion.

The method and objectives of the book may best be gathered from the full exegeses of individual passages, based on the author’s own, often somewhat quirky, translations and her encyclopaedic grasp of Jewish traditions. Especially interesting are those of the Gerasene demoniac, the Syro-Phoenician woman, and Jesus’s dialogue with the Samaritan woman. The narratives are treated as coded instructions rather than history. Thus, since gerash means “to drive out”, Jesus’s visit to Gerash shows that Jesus breaks ethnic borders. The name, “Legion”, that the demons give themselves equates the Roman occupation with demon possession so that the demons’ possession of the demonised man is equated with rape of the weak by the powerful.

The discussion of the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman bypasses what seem to me the most striking elements (the dialogue between Jesus and the woman) to focus on the woman’s high social status, which seems to me doubtful and certainly not emphasised. But it is easy to slip into the error of supposing that there is a historical, indeed biographical, interest in the stories.

The analysis of the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well is more discursive. Coming at noon instead of midnight (no! Nicodemus comes merely “by night”), the Samaritan is the opposite of Nicodemus. Since, on occasion in the scripture, future spouses meet at a well, the dominant motif is considered to be a flirtation of Jesus and the Samaritan. John is of course re-writing Synoptic stories in his own way. Though it may have a historical core, it is basically “a brilliant theological midrash based on earlier scripture”.

Neither history nor biography is the purpose of the book, but this distinguished Jewish teacher holds firm in her conviction that listening to the Jesus tradition in the light of history should provide a prompt for a meaningful life.

Fr Henry Wansbrough OSB is a monk of Ampleforth, emeritus Master of St Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and a former member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

The author Amy-Jill Levine is a speaker at the Festival of Preaching, in Cambridge, 15 to 17 September. For details, visit: festivalofpreaching.hymnsam.co.uk

Jesus for Everyone: Not just Christians
Amy-Jill Levine
Harper One £29.99
(978-0-06-221672-4)
Church Times Bookshop £26.99