It is difficult to imagine a more extraordinary decision than that of the Catholic Biblical Association of America to elect as its president a scholar of the New Testament who does not herself believe its central proclamation: that Jesus Christ is Lord. Yet the appointment is more than an institutional curiosity, I think it is a sign of a deeper malaise within contemporary Catholic scholarship: an increasing willingness to separate the sources of the faith from the dogmatic realities those sources proclaim, until “Catholic” risks becoming little more than an inherited institutional label rather than a confession of what is actually true.
The obvious problem is not simply that Professor Amy-Jill Levine is Jewish, although her adherence to Judaism is plainly relevant insofar as it entails her rejection of the Christian confession that Jesus is the Messiah and Lord. Nor should that observation be remotely controversial. Levine herself is admirably candid about what she believes. She is also a distinguished scholar whose work on the Jewish context of Jesus and the New Testament has been widely recognised. Catholics can and should learn from Jewish scholars, Protestant scholars, agnostic historians and anyone else whose research illuminates the languages, cultures, history and intellectual world in which the Scriptures emerged. Indeed, part of my own love of Sacred Scripture developed through studying Jewish sources on the Old Testament, precisely because they can illuminate so powerfully the world of the New and, from a Christian perspective, the extraordinary coherence between promise and fulfilment. Truth does not cease to be true because the person who discovers or elucidates it is not Catholic. No, the problem here is considerably more interesting than that. It is that an explicitly Catholic association has chosen to be led by someone who does not believe the central truth to which Catholic biblical scholarship ultimately bears witness: that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Son of the living God.
The Catholic Biblical Association is not called the Society for the Historical Study of Biblical Literature, it is not a secular university department and it is not an inter-religious institute for the comparative study of ancient texts. It is the Catholic Biblical Association of America, founded in 1936, and its own constitution explains exactly what that adjective is supposed to mean. It proudly declares that, “in fidelity to Dei Verbum,” it devotes itself to the scholarly study of the Bible “in conformity with the teaching of the Magisterium.” It goes on to quote Dei Verbum 10, which teaches that the authentic interpretation of the Word of God has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church, whose authority “is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ.” The constitution further says that the Association offers its expertise to the Church to assist her in discerning the meaning of the Word of God for the faithful. This is not some dusty provision which everyone has quietly forgotten, as recently as August 2025, the Association formally reaffirmed its commitment to precisely these constitutional principles and to the Church’s “love and veneration” for the inspired Word of God. And now its president is Amy-Jill Levine.
The Association announced her election with considerable enthusiasm following its 88th annual meeting in July, describing the result as historic because Levine is the first Jewish president in its history. The conspicuous celebration of that ‘historic’ first should itself set certain alarm bells ringing, suggesting that the contemporary grammar of diversity, equity and inclusion may have begun to displace the more fundamental Catholic question: not who is represented, but whether the person chosen to lead an explicitly Catholic institution actually professes the truths that make it Catholic. Levine is undoubtedly accomplished, she has written or co-written more than twenty books, taught at Vanderbilt Divinity School, lectured at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, worked extensively in Jewish-Christian relations and had three audiences with Pope Francis (more alarm bells). She has also been involved with the CBA for decades and served as its vice-president before her election to the presidency so there is therefore no question about her academic credentials. There is, however, a rather more fundamental question about her theological credentials to preside over an organisation whose purpose is explicitly Catholic biblical scholarship.
Levine herself deserves credit for being perfectly candid, discussing her fascination with the parables of Jesus in an interview with Perkins School of Theology, she explained that she regarded them as profound Jewish stories addressing universal human concerns. Then she stated the decisive point with admirable simplicity: “I do not believe in Jesus as Lord.” There is no scandal in a Jewish woman saying this. It would be astonishing if she said otherwise while remaining Jewish. The scandal, if that is the right word, lies elsewhere; with a Catholic institution deciding that disbelief in the central claim of Christianity presents no apparent impediment to presiding over an organisation devoted to the Catholic interpretation of the Scriptures which reveal that claim.
This was the question raised recently on Raymond Arroyo’s Prayerful Posse. The discussion contained some sweeping criticism of the contemporary biblical guild, but Fr Gerald Murray put his finger on the essential difficulty. Catholics, he observed, should appreciate scholarship produced by people of different religions. Yet the Catholic Biblical Association carries a particular presumption: that Scripture is being approached according to what the Catholic Church understands Scripture actually to be - one would think this would be obvious and fundamental?
For the Catholic Church, the Bible is not simply an anthology of ancient religious literature whose meaning can be exhausted by philology, archaeology, textual criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism or historical reconstruction. All these disciplines have their legitimate place. Indeed, Catholic biblical scholarship has benefited enormously from them. Dei Verbum itself insists upon attention to literary forms, historical circumstances and the intentions of the human authors. But the Church makes an additional and radically consequential claim, Scripture has God as its author, the texts are inspired, they belong within a single economy of Revelation, they must be interpreted within the living Tradition of the Church, according to the analogy of faith, under the guidance of the same Holy Spirit by whom they were inspired, and the centre of this entire economy is not an academic hypothesis but a Person: Jesus Christ.
Benedict XVI addressed precisely the problem at issue in Verbum Domini. He strongly affirmed historical-critical scholarship while simultaneously warning of the danger of separating exegesis from theology. Catholic interpretation, he insisted, requires both methodological levels. Scripture must be approached historically because God truly spoke through human authors situated in history, but it must also be approached theologically because Catholics believe that it is God who speaks. Benedict called the separation of these levels a “sterile separation” capable of creating a barrier between exegesis and theology, something which, he observed with characteristic understatement, occurs “even at the highest academic levels.” That warning now seems remarkably prescient. For the peculiar thing about the Levine appointment is that it almost perfectly symbolises the separation Benedict feared, the historical object remains as does the texts, the languages and the literary forms. The reconstruction of first-century Judaism remains. The conferences, journals, academic apparatus and professional guild all remain, but does the confession of faith remain constitutive? I think that is the essential question.
