For our Sunday morning Bible study at my church, we are currently
watching Dr. Amy-Jill Levine’s The Great Courses DVD series, “Great Figures
of the New Testament.” This week’s session was on the Virgin Mary. I thought
that I, as the lone trained Biblical scholar in the group, would probably be
the only one who could truly appreciate Levine’s effortless command of multiple
scholarly methodologies. There she was, my hero, slinging everything from form
to redaction to canonical to doctrinal criticism like a veteran short order
cook, all in the service of helping people appreciate and resonate to those
biblical texts.
But it turns out that you don’t need an MTS to appreciate
Levine. Already several people have come up to me, positively glowing, and said
how wonderful they felt it was to be a part of the experience of having a
Jewish New Testament scholar explain so ably to us—a group of Protestants who
normally never think about Mary except at Christmas—the significance of these
stories and ideas about Mary. They couldn’t precisely identify each
intellectual turn Levine made in her account—all they knew was, thanks to
Levine, they were able to hear the stories about Mary with “new ears”!
This just confirms me in my belief that scholarly
methodologies are the best tool we’ve got for the proclamation of Good News.
We’re lucky to be living in a time when this material is so get-at-able: on TV,
DVDs, phone, tablet, or laptop. It’s a Golden Age for laypersons who value biblical
scholarship.
