The Jewish Annotated New Testament ed. by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (review)

This book uncannily converts the New Testament into the format of Jewish commentary, offering a dense social history of Jewish life in the time of Jesus, as well as biblical analogues and literary analyses, philological and textual histories, philosophical contexts, and, not least, histories of religious thought, all strikingly achieved through verse-by-verse annotations (though concluding with a series of scholarly essays as well). What emerges is a vivid and thick description of issues, practices, ideas, and events of the Second Temple period, with the Gospels in particular looking more and more like extensions of Jewish life and textuality. The result is a bridge of connection between the cultures, almost to the point of losing sight of the chasms of (mis)understanding that have divided them for centuries.