The news that the Catholic Biblical Association of America has elected a Jewish scholar as its president might come as a bit of a shock to some, and understandably so. One might reasonably suppose that just as the president of a Jewish biblical association would be Jewish, or the president of a Lutheran one, Lutheran, the president of a society dedicated to Catholic biblical scholarship would be Catholic. Some have taken Levine’s election as evidence of yet one more entity labeled “Catholic” ceasing to be such. Since I reflexively sympathize with such a worry, I thought it was worth looking into. 

Let us begin with the incoming president herself, Amy-Jill Levine. University Professor Emerita of Vanderbilt Divinity School and currently the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at the Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, Levine has long been an active member of the CBA. While familiar with her name, I had not read any of her many books. The sole exception was her well-received Jewish Annotated New Testament, which she edited with Marc Zvi Brettler. For this newsletter, I read, in whole or part, her The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (2006), Jesus for Everyone (2023), and The Gospel of John (2024). I found the first of these quite good, the other two less so. That said, the scholarship is consistently first-rate. Besides being highly conversant with Christian biblical scholarship, she possesses a deep knowledge of the relevant Jewish sources. More than that, her writings evince sensitivity to what it means to be a serious Christian or a serious Jew. This, despite acknowledging that she rarely attends services at her synagogue, does not observe the dietary restrictions, and describes herself as someone who is not a “believer in divinity.” She does, however, “live as if there is a God.”

Raised in a largely Portuguese neighborhood in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, Levine experienced the beauty of Catholicism up close. “I have been carrying on a love affair with the Catholic Church since I was 7 years old, and that hasn't stopped," she says. "It's chaste, and it continues." This love, however, was not always requited. At a tender age, she learned that Jews were viewed as alien and even as enemies of the religion she so admired. It was from within this ambivalence that her vocation as a Jewish expert on biblical Christianity formed. In addition to becoming an expert on Second Temple Judaism and first-century Christianity, she has dedicated great energy to teaching Christian interpreters of the Bible how they can uphold their faith in Jesus without denigrating the Judaism of his time. Much of this work has consisted in challenging traditional interpretations of biblical passages that make unwarranted and negative assumptions about Palestinian Judaism. Protestant exegesis, with its law-gospel contrast, provides a particularly rich target environment, but there has been plenty of work to do in Catholic circles. I found particularly interesting her willingness to criticize liberation and feminist theologies for casting ancient Israel as a patriarchal power bent on oppressing the poor, women, and other marginalized groups.