Faculty

Biography

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine is the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace.

Professor Levine has been awarded grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In addition to receiving three audiences with Pope Francis, in Spring 2019 she was the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute. In 2021, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has held office in the Society of Biblical Literature, the Catholic Biblical Association, and the Association for Jewish Studies. She served as Alexander Robertson Fellow (University of Glasgow), the Catholic Biblical Association Scholar to the Philippines, and is a member of the Woolf Institute, Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations, at Cambridge University, UK. She has given close to 1000 lectures on the Bible, Christian-Jewish relations, and Religion, Gender, and Sexuality across the globe.

Her books include The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus; Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi;  The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us (with Douglas Knight); The New Testament, Methods and Meanings (with Warren Carter); and The Gospel of Luke (with Ben Witherington III; the first full-length biblical commentary co-authored by a Jew and an Evangelical). Her most recent books include The Bible With and Without Jesus, co-authored with Marc Z. Brettler, and The Pharisees (co-edited with Joseph Sievers), to which Pope Francis contributed an essay.

With Marc Brettler, she co-edited The Jewish Annotated New Testament; she is also the editor of the 13-volume Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings, and The Historical Jesus in Context. Presently she is editing several volumes in the Wisdom Commentary series, and she is the New Testament editor of the new Oxford Biblical Commentary Series. Along with several children’s books on biblical stories co-authored with Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, she has written six “beginner’s guides” to the Gospels.

Background

• B.A. (Smith College)
• M.A. (Duke University)
• Ph.D. (Duke University)

Honorary Doctorates (University of Richmond, the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, the University of South Carolina-Upstate, Drury University, Christian Theological Seminary, and Franklin College)
Elected member; American Academy of Arts and Sciences

University Professor of New Testament Studies, Emerita, Vanderbilt University
Mary Jane Werthan Chair of Jewish Studies, Emerita, Vanderbilt University
University Professor of Jewish Studies, Emerita, Vanderbilt University
Affiliated Professor, Woolf Institute: Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations, Cambridge UK