When the celebrated Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth published his groundbreaking commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans in 1919, Catholic theologian Karl Adam famously remarked that the book fell “like a bombshell on the playground of the theologians.”
Barth fiercely opposed Nazism and theological antisemitism. Reflecting on a key verse from the prologue of John’s Gospel about Jesus’ incarnation, Barth wrote: “There is one thing we must emphasise especially. The Word did not simply become any ‘flesh.’ It became Jewish flesh.”
For centuries, anti-Judaism has been the default hermeneutic for Christians reading the Christian Bible. Christians have mostly read the Bible with supersessionist lenses predicated on the premise that the Christian Bible usurps the Tanakh, the Church replaces Israel, and the God of Israel has rejected the Jews in favour of Christians as the “Chosen People.”
The election of a top Jewish biblical scholar as the first Jewish president of the Catholic Biblical Association in the US feels as if a bombshell has just struck the playground of Catholic biblical scholarship, shattering the bunker of supersessionism with a head-splitting bang.
On July 20, this prestigious guild of Catholic biblical scholars announced Professor Amy-Jill Levine’s appointment at its 88th annual general meeting in Baltimore. Levine is the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, in Connecticut.
“I have been carrying on a love affair with the Catholic Church since I was seven years old, and that hasn’t stopped,” Levine responded, with her characteristic effusive warmth. “It’s chaste, and it continues.” In 2019, Levine became the first Jewish scholar to teach the Christian Bible at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, the Oxbridge of Catholic biblical studies, in Rome.
Catholics who dream of reviving the pre-Vatican II era of punitive supersessionism, i.e. God punished the Jews for rejecting Jesus as the Messiah, reacted with revulsion. “You can’t even make this stuff up,” quipped John-Henry Western, editor of LifeSiteNews, a Catholic website that has, among other things, published a series pushing the idea that the Antichrist will be a Jew.
Traditionalist Catholics, who have Jew-hatred in their DNA, as editor Mike Lewis elaborates on the Catholic website Where Peter Is, erupted in a social media lynching of Levine and “the Jews.” On X, one person concluded: “Jews are Edomites cosplaying as Israelites,” recycling the Khazarian hypothesis popularised by Candace Owens, a traditionalist Catholic.
Apart from vilifying her for her Original Sin of being Jewish, others attacked her for “lesser” sins – her position on abortion and homosexuality. Mainstream Catholics rejoiced with Levine and apologised to her for the bigotry of their co-religionists.
On August 23, Levine issued a poignant statement. “Ironically, while I have worked to defend Catholic teaching and Catholic individuals, members of the Church are now demonising me,” she wrote. “I’m being daemonised by some for the simple fact I am Jewish, which is, sadly, not surprising today, but should, for Catholics, be off limits.”
Levine’s love for the Catholic Church makes the libels against her particularly heartbreaking.
As a Jewish child, she insisted on attending catechism class at a Catholic church. She even administered Holy Communion to her Barbie doll.
“Hate and demonising, name-calling and slandering, are not good forms of evangelism,” Levine noted. “My historical work shows that we do not need to make Judaism look bad to make Jesus look good.”
In that sentence, Levine sums up the raison d’être of more than five decades of her prodigious scholarship: vilifying Judaism to glorify Jesus is an oxymoron. As a scholar of the Tanakh, I urged my students ad nauseam to interpret the Jesus Movement as one of the Jewish sects spawned in the crucible of Second Temple Judaism and the Christian Bible as a Midrash on the Tanakh.
Levine’s pioneering efforts largely account for the exponential growth of a significant body of biblical scholarship under the rubric of “Jesus within Judaism,” “Paul within Judaism,” and “New Testament within Judaism” in the last few decades. Scholars in this field range from Jews such as Mark Nanos and Daniel Boyarin to Catholics such as Luke Timothy Johnson.
These scholars posit a simple premise: Don’t read the Christian Bible texts anachronistically. If you do, it’s like Charlton Heston wearing a Rolex while acting in the movie Ben-Hur.
In 1988, Levine published her doctoral dissertation, The Social and Ethnic Dimensions of Matthean Social History, arguing that Matthew’s Gospel must be understood firmly within its first-century Jewish matrix. In 2006, she wrote her widely acclaimed book The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus.
Five years later, Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler co-edited The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford University Press), released in its third edition in July. It features articles from 80 Jewish scholars. When the Christian Bible authors were writing, the “parting of the ways” had not yet occurred – i.e., Christianity was still a Jewish sect, Levine and Brettler emphasise.
So how does one understand anti-Jewish verses in the Christian Bible? Scholars in this movement interpret such polemic as intra-Jewish sectarian rivalry bedevilling the Judaism(s) of Jesus’ day. Luke Timothy Johnson, a Catholic, is one of several scholars who examine polemical texts from Second Temple Jewish sects in his peer-reviewed article on “The New Testament’s Anti-Jewish Slander and the Conventions of Ancient Polemic.”
Tragically, such scholarship hasn’t yet percolated to the parishioner in the pew. I have taught scripture and preached at Catholic seminaries. I see most priests continuing to moralise from the pulpit rather than preach the fruits of faithful exegesis. Worryingly, traditionalist Catholics who are most in need of such catechesis dismiss critical scholarship as “modernism.”
This is precisely why Levine’s appointment could have a domino effect on Jew-hatred in the Catholic Church – which has seen a loathsome digital resurgence among traditionalist Catholics during the pontificate of Pope Francis, who warmly received her on three occasions.
Levine acknowledges that “the problem is getting the academic material into the hands of priests and homilists.” She sees her mission as getting “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.”
“It hasn’t been done,” she laments. Levine will need the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, the endurance of Jeremiah, and the courage of Esther as she strives to fulfil her vocation.
Jules Gomes is a Hebrew Bible scholar and journalist based in Rome. He has a doctorate from the University of Cambridge and is a senior fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute. For over 30 years, he has taught the Tanakh in Protestant and Catholic seminaries, universities, and churches
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