The NAB is awful. When I lived in NY, the pastor of my church was one of the scholars who had worked on this. He began every homily with “it is commonly misunderstood” and went on to describe how every miracle or even teaching was simply a translation error by prior translators.
The poor man. It had destroyed his faith, and he ruined a lot of souls, too, no doubt. But I think that years before he had gotten into Biblical criticism, from what I knew about his history, he had actually believed and even when I knew him, I think he would occasionally have flashes where he wanted to believe. He was an arrogant, stubborn man in a lot of ways, and hated Cardinal O’Connor and Catholic moral teaching. He did love good liturgy and music, however, but he was mentally and spiritually more of an Episcopalian than anything else. Liturgy was aesthetically attractive but devoid of any doctrinal content and I doubt that he thought anything really happened at the Consecration. And I attribute it all to Higher Biblical Criticism.
I think one can learn a lot that's useful from modern "criticism" and all the various bullsgeschichtes they offer.
But, and it's, you should excuse the expression, a Big But, if you waver for an instant from thinking that God directed, guided, chivvied along, the process from the first story told around a campfire in Padanaram to the closing of the canon at Trent, then you start coming up with your own, new and improved, mo' better version of Scripture. And you rapidly go barking crazy.
I would look at some passage, and my looking would be assisted or encumbered -- hard to tell which -- by all the stuff I learned in Seminary. But I always ended up with, "This here before my eyes is what God, through the Church, gave me as Sacred Scripture. This here, in the context of the Church (as I then understood Church) is where I must look for the Truth, and where I must hope the Truth will show Himself to me and give me what He wants me to preach to His people."
I see now that my thinking that when I was an Episcopalian was one of the hooks God used to lead me finally to think that as a Catholic.
So I would say of your pastor, may God have mercy on Him, that what threatens his soul is not scholarship and criticism but pride, and maybe a little desire to be accepted by the gang he runs with, the gang of scholars. The so-called Higher Criticism provided the tinder, but the fire was lit by the spark of prideful disobedience.
Wow! Just another way God saved my arrogant butt! Alleluia!