Jousting With John: A Conversation with Adele Reinhartz

This is Season Three, Episode Six is here, featuring Dr. Adele Reinhartz,Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa, in Canada. Her main areas of research are New Testament, early Jewish-Christian relations, the Bible and Film, and feminist biblical criticism. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Befriending the Beloved Disciple: A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John (2001), Scripture on the Silver Screen (Westminster John Knox, 2003), Jesus of Hollywood (Oxford, 2007), Caiaphas the High Priest (2011), and Bible and Cinema: An Introduction (Routledge, 2013). In this episode we spent a lot of time discussing her timely new book Cast Out of the Covenant: Jews and Anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John. The title of this epsiode, however, is taken from her forthcoming book, Jousting with John.

Adele has been a Member of the Institutes of Advanced Studies in Princeton and in Jerusalem and has been a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School (1999), Yale Divinity School (2010), and Boston College (2015-17). She was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in 2005 and into the Academy for Jewish Research in 2014.  Adele has been the General Editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature, and President of the Society of Biblical Literature.

She is a significant figure in NT studies and in my own life as I studied with Adele both as an undergrad and a grad student at University of St. Michael's College and McMaster University respectively. Adele tells me that I should not think about her as my teacher, as it was many decades ago, but as colleagues. I know we are colleagues and she is a wonderful and supportive colleague, but it is hard not to think about the person who introduced me to Judaism in the Second Temple period, the love of my academic life and vocation, as my teacher. With her I read books for the first time by Victor Tcherikover, Ellis Rivkin, Jacob Neusner, Elias Bickerman, and Saul Lieberman. If you do not know those names, you are a part of the 99.9%. if you know those names, you too are a Second Temple Judaism nerd and might have studied Judaism in its Hellenistic environment.

Another reason it sticks with me is that I went to study in Toronto due to Fr. Jim Roberts, with whom I studied at Vancouver Community College Langara and took a course on the history of Christianity. It was here as a naïve 19- or 20-year-old I learned about antisemitism in Christianity. I was shocked and I asked Fr. Roberts, where should I go study to learn more about this? He directed me to St Michael’s College at U of T and Gregory Baum, whom I would find out later had a significant role in drafting Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document that categorically separated the Church from earlier teachings and practices regarding the Jews. Adele too studied with Baum earlier.

So here we are in 2024 and it is essential for us as Christians to continue to combat antisemitic readings of the Bible, which have too often in the past and even today led to antisemitic language and behaviours. This can be tough going for Christians to repudiate beloved passages or books of the Bible such as the Gospel of John. But it can and it must be done. There is no option but to stand against it, whether intentional or unintent