(OSV News) – OSV News sat down with biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine following her July appointment as president of the Catholic Biblical Association, founded in 1936 to further biblical scholarship and research in related disciplines. The CBA also works to foster dialogue between Christian and Jewish biblical scholars.
Levine is the first Jewish person to lead the organization, which has previously been directed by scholars of Protestant affiliation.
An internationally recognized New Testament expert, Levine is the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, and professor emerita of New Testament and Jewish studies at Vanderbilt University. She has also taught at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome.
Levine is co-editor with Marc Z. Brettler of "The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently"and "The Jewish Annotated New Testament."
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
OSV News: What is your vision for the Catholic Biblical Association, and how do you hope to help guide and shape it as president?
Levine: During my one-year term, I will be working with the executive board and the membership to further the association's goals, among them, promoting excellence in biblical studies.
I would like to continue my work with Catholic churches, and churches in other confessions, to help congregations and clergy learn how understanding Jesus and Paul requires understanding first-century Jewish practice belief.
I would also like to continue my work with Catholic and other clergy and with religious educators to help eradicate the antisemitic teaching that arises from a combination of ignorance and tone-deafness.
I would like to work with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to help ensure that textbooks used in parochial schools, catechesis and preaching do not promote antisemitic messages.
OSV News: What do you think your historic appointment means in the larger context of Catholic-Jewish relations following "Nostra Aetate,” the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions?
Levine: It is vivid evidence of the rapprochement between the Catholic Church and Jews in the last 60 years. Pope Benedict XVI wrote (in his 2011 book "Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two") that "after centuries of antagonism, we now see it as our task to bring (our) two ways of rereading the biblical texts – the Christian way and the Jewish way – into dialogue with one another, if we are to understand God's will and his word aright."
In "Evangelii Gaudium," Pope Francis wrote that "God continues to work among the people of the Old Covenant and to bring forth treasures of wisdom which flow from their encounter with his word. For this reason, the Church also is enriched when she receives the values of Judaism."
My appointment is thus in continuity with Church teachings. It is indicative of both trust and respect, on my part and on the part of the CBA.
Perhaps this position will allow me to do more work with Catholic clergy and religious educators in showing how understanding Jesus and Paul requires knowledge of first-century Jewish practice and belief, and that one does not need to make Judaism look bad or serve as a negative foil in order to make Jesus look good.
Perhaps it will encourage the USCCB, seminaries and book publishers to make more widely available for Catholic readers information about Jewish biblical interpretation, the Jewish settings of the Gospels and Paul, and the history of Jewish-Catholic relations.
Perhaps it will inform Jews, many of whom are unfamiliar with changes in Church teaching since "Nostra Aetate," of the enormous progress that has been made.
In this conversation, we do not give up the particulars of our own traditions on the altar of interreligious sensitivity. We will disagree on fundamental theological issues, and those will not be sorted until the messianic age arrives in full.
But we can, in the interim, work with each other, learn from each other, and support each other when hatred arises.
OSV News: How would you sum up, for the average person in the church and in the synagogue, the importance of collaboration among Catholic, Christian and Jewish scholars in Scriptural research?
Levine: We are stronger when we do this work together, when we can point out gaps in knowledge, and when we can bring to the text different questions from our own traditions.
From the Jewish side, reading the New Testament is part of Jewish history. Mary and Jesus were Jews; Paul, Peter and James are Jews, and they never lose, deny or reject that identity. My work can fill in parts of my own history that the synagogue did not preserve.
As to the Christian side, the Pontifical Biblical Commission's 2002 document "The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible” states, "Dialogue is possible, since Jews and Christians share a rich common patrimony that unites them. It is greatly to be desired that prejudice and misunderstanding be gradually eliminated on both sides, in favour of a better understanding of the patrimony they share and to strengthen the links that bind them."
In reading together, we can learn what texts would have meant in their original contexts, how they were interpreted over time, and how Jews and Christians came to take different messages from shared Scripture.
You can see this work in the book I co-authored with Marc Z. Brettler, "The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently." He and I are also the co-editors of the "Jewish Annotated New Testament" (now in its third edition, issued in 2026 by Oxford University Press). The volume's notes and essays show how deeply embedded Christian origins are in Jewish sources and Jewish practice.
In studying texts together, we learn both more about our neighbors and more about ourselves.
We can recover our common history, better understand why and how we disagree, see how our relationships have changed over the centuries, and recognize that demonization is neither informed nor normative.
OSV News: What areas of biblical scholarship hold significant research promise at this moment?
Levine: New Testament scholars are recognizing the importance of understanding Jesus and Paul as first-century Jews.
We realize that Jesus is not doing away with Torah, but in fact making it stricter. To the commandment against murder, he adds a commandment against anger; to the commandment against adultery, he adds a commandment against lust. These verses in the Sermon on the Mount are not "antitheses,” but in fact intensifications.
On the issue of "eye for an eye” versus "turn the other cheek,” we know that Jews are not plucking out people's eyes. Rather, rabbinic Judaism makes clear that in a case of physical injury, there must be compensation awarded the victim. Thus, the rabbis speak to the responsibility of the perpetrator.
Jesus quotes "an eye for an eye,” and then changes the subject to being slapped across the right cheek – that is, a back-handed slap meant to dismiss rather than to damage. He then provides instruction not to the perpetrator, but to the victim.
On matters of ritual purity, we now recognize that Jesus is not dismissing purity laws but restoring people to states of purity. We also have a better sense, from archaeology, of how important purity and other Jewish practices were for first-century Jews. Such practices affirmed Jewish identity despite Roman pressure, and made being Jewish a way of living rather than just a belief system.
We take Paul seriously as the "Apostle to the Gentiles” and so realize his comments about Torah are not addressed to Jews. His interest is in convincing Gentiles to worship Israel's God, but to do so not as converts to Judaism – for then only Jews would worship G-d, and Jews on the whole expected that in the Messianic age, the nations would turn to the G-d of Israel without converting – but as Gentiles-in-Christ.
OSV News: How would you respond to antisemitic backlash, particularly on social media, regarding your appointment?
Levine: Since the election was made public, I have been denounced me as a child of Satan, a baby-eater, out to destroy the Church, a supporter of Palestinian genocide, a hater of Jesus and the Church, and so on. Some people have contacted the CBA office to insist that I be removed.
I have not only studied but also appreciated the beauty of Catholic worship and traditions since I was a child. As someone who has dedicated her life to fostering better relations between Jews and Christians, with a focus on Catholicism, I find this sad and indicative of the continuing power of antisemitism.
Readers who question how a Jew who does not recognize Jesus as the Messiah can preside over an association dedicated to Catholic biblical scholarship are not antisemitic. That is a legitimate question. The association has had Protestant presidents, and I do not recall vitriol following their appointments.
I have been a member of the CBA for decades, served on numerous CBA committees, taught at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, done numerous programs for Catholic primary and secondary schools (especially in Australia) and have defended Catholic teaching to uninformed Jews, Protestants and people of no religious affiliation. My work has enhanced Christian belief and better Jewish-Christian relations.
I do not call into question the central claims of the Catholic tradition, be it the Incarnation, the Resurrection and so forth. While I do not share these beliefs, I can honor them, respect them, and even bring them additional meaning by locating them in their historical contexts.
Concerning the Incarnation, I am interested in Jewish stories of miraculous births, in the Jewish philosopher Philo's description of the Logos, in how the Nativity stories would have been heard by their first audiences and how they connect to the Scriptures of Israel.
I am also very interested in Mary – what life was like for Jewish women in Galilee, how her story is presented differently across the Gospels, how second- and third-century texts told stories of her childhood and her death.
For the Resurrection, I am interested in locating the accounts of the Resurrection in the context of diverse Jewish views of resurrection or of life after death, and how those views change over time, from disagreements between Pharisees and Sadducees, to Rabbinic insistence on the resurrection of the body, to the Reform movement's questioning of this idea in the nineteenth century, to various Jewish views today.
I am also interested in how belief in Jesus' resurrection changed how people acted then, and subsequently.
One does not need to believe in Catholic doctrine (some of which is post-biblical in its formulation, such as the creeds), to interpret Matthew, for example, as a text that proclaims the Lordship of Jesus.
One should always read someone else's Scriptures with generosity and grace. I see myself in this process as an ally to the Catholic tradition.
