As someone who teaches New Testament in a mid-sized liberal arts college, one of the biggest challenges I face is the insidiousness of anti-Jewish perspectives among many of my Christian, even culturally Christian, students. Students are not overtly anti-Semitic--they don't use slanderous language or ethnic stereo-types. Yet, when they read the New Testament, the Gospels in particular, they have an incredibly difficult time understanding that the depiction of Jewish groups in these texts are 1) the result of intra-Jewish conversation and conflict and 2) part of the authors' literary strategies. Students (including some adults I've had the opportunity to teach in church settings) tend to embrace the gnostic/ Marcionite perspective regarding the character of the divine. I can't even count how often I've heard a student say something along the lines of, "The God of the NT is so loving in comparison to the God of the OT." In other words, "the God" of the OT is described as vengeful, unloving, bloodthirsty, etc. My first response, as someone who's research is on the Apocalypse, is, "Have you read the Book of Revelation?" Yet, no matter how often I remind my class that "the God" of the NT is the same as the divine of the Jewish Scriptures and writings, from an early Christian and Christian perspective, there are always students who can not or will not shake this dichotomy. A-J Levine, in a speech at UNC-Greensboro a few years ago, explained that she responds to this by referencing the 23rd Psalm, an oft-memorized passage in Christian Sunday Schools: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want/ He biddeth me to lie down in green pastures/ He restoreth my soul." (Of course, when I grew up we memorized this in the KJV. Old school, represent!) Even this sometimes falls on deaf ears, as students explain that in "most of the OT" God is a big meany.So for many students (of course not all!) the multiple depictions of the divine in the Hebrew Bible are diminished into an image of an ogre and the depictions of a wrathful and justice-seeking God of the NT are dismissed as marginal. Revelation is at the end of the canon for a reason . . . it's not really meant to be read or taken seriously. (Of course, for some students, these perspectives are held deeply because they've heard them all their lives, from church pulpits, Sunday school teachers, etc. But that's a whole other can of worms.)
In light of this, I do try to find avenues for dismantling anti-Jewish thinking in my NT courses. In fact, this is one of the "unstated goals" of my Introduction to the New Testament and Early Christian Literature course. But as I write this, I am struck by the fact that, perhaps, I need to be more upfront with this goal. Maybe it is time to name this, along with uncovering how NT texts have been used to justify slave-holding and to oppress women, as one of my central student learning outcomes. In doing this, I think I also need to find new strategies for challenging these perspectives, new strategies for unsettling this simplistic and hurtful thinking. This is one thing I hope to think about this summer as I rework my Intro syllabus. Hopefully, I can begin to share some of these here.
Books to guide me as I explore these questions:
- bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress.
- Terrance Donaldson, Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament: Decision Points and Divergent Traditions.
- Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus.
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