The Catholic Biblical Association of America has a new president, and she’s not Catholic. She’s not even Christian. Amy-Jill Levine, a lifelong practicing Jew and one of the most widely read New Testament scholars in the country, now sits at the head of a guild whose name carries both the word “Catholic” and the word “Biblical.” An appointment like this one is a signal, and signals are worth reading carefully.
Her election says less about one scholar’s résumé than about where a major current of Catholic Biblical scholarship has been drifting for a long time. Levine didn’t force her way into that chair. The organization handed it to her, which tells you more about the organization than about her.
A Jewish Scholar Now Leads a Catholic Biblical Guild
This appointment is possible because the CBA stopped requiring confession of Christ as a condition of belonging a long time ago, and Levine’s election just makes that fact impossible to ignore. The Catholic Biblical Association was founded in the 1930s to train and credential Catholic scholars working under the Church’s own oversight, back when Biblical scholarship and ecclesial confession were still assumed to travel together.
Over the following decades, especially after the Second Vatican Council pushed Catholic scholarship hard toward the historical-critical method, membership loosened. Non-Catholic scholars joined. Then non-Christian scholars joined. The qualifying credential became the academic kind, not the confessional kind. Levine’s presidency isn’t a break from that trajectory. It’s the natural, almost inevitable endpoint of it.
What Amy-Jill Levine Actually Teaches About Jesus
Levine studies Jesus with real seriousness, but she does not confess Him as Lord, and that’s not a footnote to her work; it’s the whole issue of her recent appointment. She’s spent a career recovering the first-century Jewish world behind the Gospels, and on that narrower point she’s done real, needed work. Christian readers for centuries flattened Jesus into a figure detached from His own people, His own Scriptures, His own synagogue. Levine pushed back on that, and plenty of careful evangelical scholars have learned from her on that front.
But recovering Jesus’s Jewish context is not the same thing as recognizing who He is. Levine remains, by her own repeated description, a practicing Jew who studies Jesus as a first-century rabbi worth understanding, not a Messiah worth worshipping. She does not affirm His resurrection as God’s saving act in history. She does not affirm His deity. Her lens is historical-critical, not confessional, and she’s been consistent and honest about that distinction her entire career. Jesus did not leave that question open for debate. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
Scripture is blunt about what’s at stake in that confession, and it’s worth sitting with the weight of it rather than rushing past.
By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. [1 John 4:2-3]
That’s not a verse meant to be weaponized against a respected scholar as a personal insult. It’s a plain statement about what the New Testament itself treats as the dividing line. Denying that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh as Lord isn’t a minor variation within the faith; it’s outside it. Nothing about Levine’s genuine learning changes that line.
The Catholic Biblical Association Isn’t What Its Name Suggests
Whatever doctrinal statement the CBA still carries on paper, it’s clearly thinner now than the New Testament’s own description of a teacher worth following, and this election proves it. The organization today functions much like its secular counterpart, the Society of Biblical Literature: a professional guild built around academic credentials, peer-reviewed publication, and conference papers, open to any qualified scholar regardless of what that scholar actually believes about the text’s central claims.
That shift mirrors a broader move inside post-Vatican II Catholic scholarship, where the historical-critical method became the dominant tool and interfaith collaboration became a prized value in its own right. Both of those things can be done well or badly. Neither of them requires a confession that Jesus is Lord. Put a premium on method and dialogue long enough, untethered from confession, and eventually leadership follows wherever the premium points. It pointed here.
Where Rome Already Parted Ways With Scripture Alone
Levine’s election is this week’s headline, but Rome’s divergence from a Biblical Christian worldview didn’t start with her, and it didn’t start with Vatican II either. It started centuries earlier, at the Council of Trent, when Rome formally placed Church Tradition alongside Scripture as a co-equal source of authority rather than letting Scripture stand as the final word over the Church. Compare that to what Scripture claims for itself.
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. [2 Timothy 3:16-17]
“Complete” and “equipped for every good work” doesn’t leave room for a second, equally authoritative source standing alongside Scripture to fill in the gaps. A Biblical Christian worldview holds Scripture as sufficient and final. The Magisterium’s teaching office is, at best, fallible and subject to correction. Rome holds the opposite: the Magisterium interprets, and Tradition supplements, and the believer submits to both alongside the text. Add to that the Marian dogmas pronounced without direct Scriptural warrant, the doctrine of purgatory, the sacramental system in which grace is administered through the Church’s own hands, and a view of justification that folds faith into a process of merit rather than resting on faith alone — and you’ve got a structure that parted ways with a Biblical Christian worldview long before anyone had heard of the Catholic Biblical Association.
How Far Has the Catholic Faith Drifted From a Biblical Worldview
Put the pieces together and the honest answer is: pretty far, and further every decade. The institutional drift didn’t begin with historical-critical skepticism toward the text, and it didn’t begin with interfaith enthusiasm either — it began with the decision, formalized at Trent and never reversed, to let something other than Scripture alone stand as final authority. Everything downstream from that decision had room to grow, and it has. Twentieth-century Catholic scholarship absorbed the historical-critical method with far less resistance than its Protestant counterparts, treated inerrancy as a negotiable question rather than a settled one, and increasingly prized ecumenical and interfaith collaboration as a good in itself. Levine’s presidency isn’t a sudden break with all of that. It’s the visible fruit of it, finally grown ripe enough to see from a distance.
Fairness matters here, though. Millions of Catholics in the pew every Sunday still recite the Nicene Creed and mean it — still affirm the deity of Christ, His virgin birth, His bodily resurrection, His coming return, and believe in Him as both Savior and Lord as the basis for salvation. On those core Christological points, a faithful Catholic and a faithful evangelical stand closer together than either stands to the historical-critical skepticism now comfortable at the top of Catholic academic life. The drift this piece is describing is institutional and academic, concentrated in the guild that credentials scholars and shapes seminary formation, not a verdict on every believer sitting in a Catholic pew. That distinction matters, and it’s worth holding onto rather than flattening into a blanket judgment the facts don’t support.
What Faithful Christians Should Take From This
The lesson here isn’t to panic over one election at one scholarly society. It’s to remember that academic credentials and institutional titles don’t guarantee confessional faithfulness, and they never have. A name like “Catholic Biblical Association” sounds authoritative. It sounds like it must mean something settled. It doesn’t, not automatically, and neither does any other institutional label — including ones inside evangelical circles that sound impressively orthodox on a letterhead.
The Bereans gave us the better model centuries ago, and it still works: they received the message eagerly, “examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11). That’s the posture worth keeping no matter whose name is on the credential or the conference podium. Test it against the text. Not against the title, not against the degree, not against how many books someone has published — against the text itself, read plainly, in context, as God gave it. That standard hasn’t drifted an inch, whatever else has.
Salvation – Eternal Life in Less Than 150 Words
Distributed by – BCWorldview.org
Editor Comment: When a scholarly body with 'Biblical' in its name hands leadership to someone who doesn't confess Christ, Christians need a clear-eyed look at what's actually being taught in His name.