Welcome to the podcast, everybody. Our topic today is an atheist and a Jew

walk into the New Testament and out comes Amy Jill, AJ Levine.

Yeah, AJ was just a lot of fun to talk with her. She is the professor of New

Testament and Jewish studies at the Vanderbilt Divinity School. It spends a lot

of time in churches actually, which she talked to get up and about. Her books,

short stories by Jesus, The Misunderstood Jews. She's also the co-editor of the

Jewish annotated New Testament. There's a lot going on there. And she's one of the

more fun and thoughtful people to talk with about the New Testament. What I

appreciate about AJ is how she challenges simplistic Christian presumptions

about how to read the New Testament. It's gotten sort of like to be a no-brainer

at least in the day and age that we live in, but it's worth repeating that I think

Christian sometimes forget that Jesus was Jewish and he fit in his Jewish world.

Wait, what? Yes. Oh my God. Yeah. He converted from Protestantism. I think he was a

Calvinist. Yeah, right. But then he said, now that's ridiculous. Right. Descendant of Calvin.

Yeah. So Jesus, yeah, shocker, spoiler alert folks. Jesus was Jewish. Yeah. I'm

really actually Jewish. That was Paul by the way. And we do sometimes forget that we

read into the New Testament, which is a tendency, maybe an understandable tendency, but we do

read into the New Testament later developments of Christian theology. And when we do that,

we lose the flavor and I think the power and the provocativeness of things that Jesus is

talking about. All right. Well, let's get into our conversation with AJ the B. Let's do.

Yeah. I think the parables, a lot of them are really provocative and one of the reasons

parables are sometimes listed as difficult to understand is because they tell us stuff,

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