Biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine often labels herself as an "unorthodox member of an Orthodox synagogue." The self-described "Yankee Jewish feminist" has been a professor of religion and New Testament at Swarthmore, founded by Quakers; at Vanderbilt’s divinity school in the Bible Belt; and in a federal maximum-security prison. Now, she holds a distinguished professor chair of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace.

She's written dozens of books, including an ongoing Beginners Guide series of Bible studies with Abingdon Press on books of the Gospel and unique topics such as The Difficult Words of Jesus: A Beginner's Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings. She also coauthored, with Marc Zvi Bretler, works including The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford, 2017) and The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (HarperOne, 2020). Her first trade book was Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (HarperOne, 2007). Over the decades she's given hundreds of talks around the world, taught at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute, and been honored by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2023 for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation.

Now 70, Levine is still out to end antisemitism, recover history, and wrestle with new questions. Her newest guide, Genesis: A Beginner's Guide to the Beginning (Abingdon, Aug.), prompted PW to ask Levine about her own beginnings. How did she come to focus on the intersections of Christianity and Judaism? Why does she aim for readers to see their own joys, sorrows, sins, and moral dilemmas in the ancient text?

Levine grew up Jewish in the largely Catholic town of North Dartmouth, Mass., where an elementary school encounter set her life course. "A little girl said to me on the school bus, 'You killed our Lord,' and I said, 'I didn't kill anybody because if you killed somebody, you would know.' She said, 'Yes, you did. Our priest said so,' " Levine recounted. "This was more or less my first lesson in interreligious dialog."

She recalls how she wept until her mother assured her, "God was doing just fine, which, to my seven-year-old heart, was very, very good news. But why was that girl’s tradition saying horrible things about me?"

It was an early indication that, for Levine, raising challenging questions and driving for answers is an essential part of who she is.

Worlds collide

At seven years old, Levine "announced to my parents that I was going to go to after-school catechism class with my Catholic friends two days a week—I had Hebrew school in the next town the other days," she says. Her reasoning, she recalls, was "to find out where this hateful teaching came from, and I'm going to stop it. So, I'm seven years old, and I'm going to end antisemitism." (She also wanted to be Pope but her mother told her, "I couldn't be pope because I wasn't Italian.")

As she soaked in the stories of both religions, where they were parallel, where they diverged, she "realized two other things that set off what eventually became a professional trajectory."

The first, she says, is that we choose how to read. "You can ask questions of the text, and you can come up with different answers," she remembers discovering. "I realized one can read the New Testament and come out as an antisemite, or one can choose not to. I want to be able to teach this to other people so little Jewish kids don't get accused of killing God."

Years later, when she studied the book of Matthew with inmates at Riverbend Maximum Security Institute in Nashville, she says, "They asked me questions that would never have occurred to me: Who took care of the men who died next to Jesus when he was on the cross? Who was standing there for them? If Judas is possessed by Satan, why does he get condemned? What's the unforgivable sin?"

The second thing she realized in her class with the nuns was "everything that I was reading was Jewish history. The first person in literature ever called 'rabbi' is Jesus of Nazareth."

Popular demand

Levine says that people write to her or her publisher asking for her take on the Biblical stories that puzzle them. Her Genesis guide, centered on key stories and characters, is an answer to popular demand.

The book has a video trailer with Levine's invitation to "stories of creation and responsibility, rivalry and loss, judgment, and mercy, promise, and perseverance. The stories of Genesis are ancient, but they remain as relevant as ever." At the conclusion of the trailer, she lists five suggestions for readers to engage deeply in Genesis on their own. One is to imagine they are casting it for a movie—which character would they be?

When Levine is asked that question, she considers two choices: Hagar, the handmaid who gave Abraham a son before Sarah could conceive, or poor misunderstood Cain. She dismisses him as "a whiner" and names Hagar "because she was a survivor," not simply a sex trafficking victim. "She secured the future for her son," says Levine. "She had agency. We all have agency—freedom of thought."