Literature professors are a determined lot. Our goal is to deepen our students’ engagement with the text at hand. We desperately want them to dive for the pearls deep below the surface and come up triumphant, gasping for air and eager to go deeper next time. I am aware that literature professors weren’t a thing in Jesus’ time. Jewish students who sat under their rabbis studied the Old Testament (though not as Christians today understand it.) They became rabbis and scribes, teaching what they learned to the next generation. And then came Jesus. He understood all the old texts and the traditional ways of reading them. But the way he…