Jew Made President of Catholic Biblical Association, Will Edit Antisemitic Bible Verses

She denies Jesus is the Messiah, believes abortion and homosexuality are fine, and thinks Christians have bore false witness about the Pharisees, promising to rehab their image.

The Catholic Biblical Association of America has spent nearly ninety years shaping how American Catholics read the Bible. It publishes the Catholic Biblical Quarterly, supplies scholarship to seminaries, helps train the people who train priests, and is well within the institutional machinery Rome uses to teach Scripture to Catholics. Last month, they acquired a new president. Amy-Jill Levine became the first Jewish scholar elected to lead the Catholic Biblical Association.

Levine joined the CBA in 1988, spent twelve years as book review editor of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly, served as vice president last year, became the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute, and met with the previous pope, Pope Francis, multiple times. The National Catholic Reporter celebrated her election as a milestone for the first Jew to serve as editor of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly. She now sits at the head of one of the Roman Catholic Church’s most important academic institutions.

Which is weird, because Amy-Jill Levine does not believe Jesus is the Messiah. Nor God. In fact, she doesn’t even believe He’s a true prophet sent by God. To her, he’s a mascot of the Jewish religion who was a tad too harsh on the Pharisees.

Levine’s breakout book, The Misunderstood Jew, does not dance around the central disagreement, and she lays out the Jewish case against Jesus’ messianic claim in remarkably plain terms. She argues that because the world still has cancer and AIDS, wars and genocide, earthquakes and hurricanes, the promised messianic age of peace and restoration has not arrived. And in Judaism, as Levine describes, the Messiah and the messianic age come as a package: no messianic age, no Messiah. Jesus didn’t come bearing gifts. Except, that is, for eternal life. Just that. Nothing big.

She has repeated the argument for years. In a public dialogue with evangelical New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III, Levine explained that this is not principally a question of whether Jesus was admirable, spiritually profound, or personally compelling. She finds him all three. The problem is that if the Messiah came, where is the world the Messiah was supposed to bring? She does not factor into the equation that Jews read the Old Testament with the interpretative prowess of a fruit fly, and maybe don’t understand it. All Jesus did was raise from the dead. He was supposed to turn the goyim into slaves and establish a kingdom throughout the world for Jews, and didn’t do that at all, so he must be a phony.

Levine’s Jesus is not God incarnate, the Lamb slain for sinners, the promised King of Israel, or the resurrected Lord before whom every knee will bow. He is a first-century Jew whom Christians subsequently came to understand in those terms. But no worries! She does “like” that Jesus. So, I mean, she’s practically Catholic.

Jesus, she said, “teaches like a Jew.” He speaks in parables and is “just a fabulous Jewish storyteller.” His religion was “Judaism, not Christianity,” because “he was not coming to innovate and start a new religion,” but rather “to reinforce the Torah.” She has not mentioned his order to demolish the Jewish temple. Her project has therefore been to recover Jesus from what she regards as “centuries of Christian readings that detached him from his Jewish world and turned Judaism into the dark backdrop against which Christianity could appear bright.”

In other words, her goal is to make Jesus more Jewish, less Christian, less Messiah, and to do some Jewish public relations work to make Judaism less “the bad guy” in the New Testament. Apparently, the Biblical Catholic Association was down with that.

That project has made Levine extraordinarily useful to Christian academics. She can illuminate Jewish customs, recover the Jewish arguments happening underneath Gospel disputes, correct “lazy caricatures of the Pharisees” who have been “greatly misunderstood”, and remind Christians that Jesus, Mary, Peter, Paul, and the first disciples were Jewish. It apparently takes a Jew to remind Christians of this, who must have forgotten.

But there is a rather large difference between so-called “restoring the Jewish context of Jesus” and denouncing what the New Testament very clearly teaches about Jesus, what He said, and the miracles He performed. She believes none of that. Her goal, essentially, is to take back Jesus for the Jews, de-crown Him as King, and make Jesus a mascot for the Jewish religion. To her, Jesus was not the Son of God, but a rabbi, who some people alleged was the Son of God at some point after he died and stayed dead.

She claims “that the more [she] reads the New Testament, the better Jew [she] becomes.” The New Testament does not convert her. It reinforces her Judaism.

The remarkable part is why Catholics want her to teach them how to interpret the Scriptures about the God-Man she doesn’t personally believe in. The scholar now presiding over the Catholic Biblical Association has spent her career studying the New Testament while rejecting it, and rejecting its God. She can teach them about the world in which Jesus lived - one in which the Pharisees were actually the good guys - but she doesn’t believe in almost any of the New Testament’s claims.

Her forthcoming book pushes more of the same. It was originally titled Jesus for Atheists before her publisher broadened it to Jesus for Everyone, Not Just Christians. The intended audience includes the religiously unaffiliated and, by Levine’s personal description, “Jews who have never given the New Testament a serious look.” Its purpose is to convince the world that Jesus can be extracted from Christianity and then offered to everybody, but as a guru, not a Savior.

A Jesus for everyone is a Jesus for no one in particular. Once the incarnation, the atonement, resurrection, and coming judgment are removed from the equation, Jesus belongs to Christians in roughly the way Marcus Aurelius does: admirable, quotable, historically fascinating, and definitely not God.

When asked whether the truth of the Gospel would eventually become an unavoidable question between Jews and Christians, Levine answered by stating that “Theological claims are not open to empirical testing, at least as far as I can tell. Belief is not like Sudoku. It is like love.”

A Jewish hippie was unavailable to translate the above quotation. We’re unsure what it means at the time of publishing.

It does sound like something you’d hear in an interfaith dialogue. It also performs a remarkable bit of theological surgery, becuase Christianity does not merely claim that Jesus was “meaningful” to his followers, that belief in his resurrection “enriches our lives,” or that Peter “experienced something spiritually profound” on Easter morning. We claim that a man who happened to be God was murdered by Jews, buried, and then rose again from the dead. Paul understood the historical character of that claim well enough to assert that “…if Christ Jesus is not raised from the dead, we are, above all people, to be most pitied.”

When Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” He is not describing his preferred spiritual experience. “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me” does not leave Judaism and Christianity as equally valid expressions of religious affection. And “if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain” is about as far from belief is like love as Paul could get. Christianity rests its entire case on whether the Resurrection actually happened. She says it didn’t.

Levine takes particular issue with Christian supersessionism, the doctrine that the church fulfills and succeeds Israel in God’s promises. What makes Levine interesting here is that she does not simply wave the doctrine away as a Christian corruption of the Scriptures. She acknowledges that superseding the Old Covenant is intrinsic to Christian identity, and the troublesome doctrine really is there. But conceding what the New Testament says, Levine shifts the question from whether it is true to what Christians should do about it. He task has been to rework the New Testament interpretively so that it takes a “less antisemitic vibe” so that “the Jews are the bad guys in the historical narrative.”

For a Christian, however, whether the church fulfills Israel is not principally a problem of interfaith relations. Either Christ fulfills the promises made to Abraham and Israel, or he does not. Either Gentile believers have been grafted into the same olive tree, or Paul badly mangled his horticulture metaphor. Either Peter can apply Israel’s covenant language to the church or he cannot. The answer may have uncomfortable consequences for modern Jewish-Christian dialogue, but discomfort does not get a vote in exegesis.

Consider what would happen if there was a conservative Baptist New Testament scholar who affirms the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection, and Christ’s messianic kingship. He believes every word of the Apostles’ Creed without crossing his fingers. He believes Jesus Christ walked out of the tomb and will return to judge the living and the dead.

He also believes that the pope has no biblical authority, that transubstantiation is false, that the Mass is not a propitiatory sacrifice, that baptism does not regenerate, and that the Marian dogmas are inventions unknown to the apostles. That man is not becoming of the presidency of the Catholic Biblical Association. The objection would be he isn’t Catholic and rejects doctrines the Catholic Church considers true. Putting him at the head of Catholic biblical scholarship would be bizarre.

Amy-Jill Levine rejects it far more than a Baptist does. Apparently, being Jewish makes her denials of Christ’s Godhood less significant than a Baptist denying Popes speak ex cathedra infallibly.

What does she hope to accomplish in this role for the Catholic Biblical Association? She wants to help Catholics re-legitimize the Pharisees. One of her major aims will be “confronting what she calls anti-Jewish interpretations of Christian Scripture.” She told the National Catholic reporter, regarding her work on rehabbing the Pharisees, “I would like to get this better material into the hands of people who are speaking to people in the pews, into the hands of people in parochial schools who are teaching biblical studies to teenagers or to little kids, and mainstream it. It hasn’t been done.”

Rehabbing the Pharisees hasn’t been done yet because…they’re actually the bad guys in the Bible.

In 2021 she co-edited The Pharisees: An Interdisciplinary Study with Father Joseph Sievers of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, a five-hundred-page volume published by Eerdmans that includes, remarkably, a contributed essay from Pope Francis himself. The book’s stated premise is that “many Christians, following certain Gospel passages, regard the Pharisees and, by extension the Jewish tradition, as lifeless, legalistic, and so toxic,” and that after “two millennia of misunderstanding and in consequence, bigotry, it’s time for a more historical, less negatively stereotypical understanding.”

The irony writes itself. She said of the Pharisees being seen negatively, “First, Jesus looks perfectly good on his own. He doesn’t need the negative foil. Second, I shouldn’t bear false witness against my neighbor.” And now, the Pharisees are our neighbors.

Her essay on the Pharisees, “Bearing False Witness: Common Errors Made About Early Judaism,” is printed alongside the opening pages of the Jewish Annotated New Testament (which turns out is an actual thing). She writes, “If priests, pastors, and religious educators would stop bearing false witness against Pharisees, if people in general will stop using ‘Pharisee’ as a synonym for ‘hypocrite,’ and if Jews and Christians had better knowledge of both our common roots and our distinct branches, we’d be closer to the love of neighbor and love of stranger.”

She doesn’t stop at correcting the record. She wants the lectionary itself edited. In a 2025 sermon at Washington National Cathedral, she argued that “sometimes texts need a warning label” and that “sometimes lectionary, and not just for Holy Week, need to be revised,” reasoning by direct comparison: “If symbols of slavery can be removed from flagpoles in public parks, why can’t Christians change Sunday readings that can easily lead to prejudice against Jews? If people can be reprimanded or canceled for making comments that reinforce the sins of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and so on, why can’t ministers be trained to follow the commandment about not bearing false witness against their neighbor?”

She is actually calling to edit which passages of the New Testament get read aloud in church, framed as morally equivalent to taking down a Confederate flag. She can have both when she pries them from our cold, dead fingers.

For example, she says that in Matthew 5:38-39, “an eye for an eye,” no one in ancient Israel carried the principle out literally. That rabbinic Judaism itself says it cannot be applied literally, meaning that when Jesus says, “You have heard it said, an eye for an eye, but I say to you, turn the other cheek,” he isn’t opposing the Torah at all. In her words, “he’s changing the subject.” The passage that generations of Christians have read as Jesus correcting a harsh legal standard, on her account, isn’t a correction of anything because he’s basically making it up, and the reader just isn’t savvy enough to know that.

She has taken direct aim at specific gospel readings used when preaching. For example, she argues that the standard homiletical contrast, drawn from Luke’s Prodigal Son, between a loving God and a Judaism that supposedly believed God only loved the righteous, “makes no sense” as a reading, and that “each of the typical approaches has problems,” concluding “the best solution would be to change the lectionary.” She complained that there is a Catholic homily on Jesus healing the woman with the hemorrhage, where the priest contrasted Jewish law’s supposed harshness against Christian grace to explain why her condition made her ritually impure and Jesus’s touch, healing her. That puts Jewish tradition “in a bad light, and we should consider whether it’s necessary at all.”

She’s circulated a “you might be a Pharisee if...” list built from supposed historical data, reframing Pharisees as hypocrites and instead imagines them as people who have a lot in common with Christians. Her purpose was so that people could compare her material on the Pharisees with the Gospel of Matthew’s “seven woes against the Pharisees” in a single chapter, and hopes that “they will see Matthew doesn’t give the full picture about our neighbors, the Pharisees, and could send the wrong image.”

No worries, though. As a specialist in Judeo-Christian ethics, she’s also a giant leftist. In her essay titled “How to Read the Bible’s Clobber Passages on Homosexuality,” she argues that because modern readers do not live in the early Iron Age or the first-century Roman world, “those ancient standards do not still apply” and “have to be judged fresh, on contemporary terms.”

Amy-Jill Levine now sits at the head of one of the Roman
Catholic Church’s most important academic institutions.

But, but....Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah.

Levine doesn’t even believe Jesus is a true prophet sent by God.

To her, he’s a “mascot” of the Jewish religion
.....who was a tad “too harsh” on the Pharisees.

As a lapsed Catholic I find it interesting that the Church couldn’t find a nice little Irish Catholic lass to take the job.

I could ask Ms. Levine if she had ever considered the fact that if the Jews hadn’t handed Jesus over to the Romans to be crucified maybe he would have gotten around to the messianic thing.

As for Ms. Levine herself, based on her beliefs as stated in the article, not only is she not Catholic, she doesn’t sound like a very devout Jew either. She sounds like your typical far left academic. Not someone I’d take a lot of religious or spiritual advice from.

I’m not a biblical scholar so if I’m mistaken on this then someone can correct me, but isn’t the Jewish idea of the messiah someone who comes down girded for battle, smites all Israel enemies and then sets up a Jewish paradise on earth? Kind of like the 13th Mahdi.

A.J. - as she is known- is highly respected in New Testament field. as a modern Orthodox Jew, she has a passion for Jesus and for restoring him to his time, 2nd Temple Judaism. with a great depth of knowledge, she brings context to the study of the Gospels that fills in background and dispels misconceptions. her scholarship is high - just look at her annotated New Testament. and she has a great sense of humor. which is why she is in great demand in Christian institutions- churches and universities.

This is insanely bad for the Jews. Because to someone who already doesn't like Jews, it's not just this one guy, it's THE JEWS rewriting the New Testament.

This is a globalist/Democrat enterprise to harm Roman Catholics and Jews alike, while also setting them at each other's throats.

It also sets up a line of attack on Protestants who still use the "uncorrected" New Testament. Because that proves they are Jew haters, see.

Will they also get someone else to rewrite the "homophobic" bits?

Oh you shouldn’t have pinged Ebby.

He hates Catholics. All he ever does is post anti Catholic - anti Pope hate threads.

He’ll probably repost this as a Catholic Caucus.

reading her books - rather than shooting from the hip based on one person’s opinion in an article might be an informed way to proceed. this writer’s sarcasm/viewpoint is quite obvious. dig deeper.

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