A Jewish scholar was elected to lead Catholic Bible scholars

On August 28, the Associated Press reported that the Catholic Biblical Association of America had elected its first Jewish president. Her name is Amy-Jill Levine. She is a New Testament scholar, professor emerita at Vanderbilt, and for four decades she has taught Christians to read their own Bible with more care and less harm.

The association is a society of Bible scholars, most of them Catholic. Its leaders were blunt about why they chose her: her scholarship, and her long work building trust between Catholics and Jews.

Then the attacks came.

On social media accounts with tens of thousands of followers, strangers called her "anti-Christian." They said a Jew was trying to "hijack Catholicism." They reached for the oldest line of all, that the Jews rejected Jesus, so this one had no business near a Christian book. A few asked a fair question, whether a non-Catholic should lead a Catholic group. That question is not hate. Most of what surrounded it was.

Here is what makes it strange. The thing they accused her of is the exact thing her life's work has been undoing.

Levine studies a habit Christians slipped into early and never fully dropped. To make Jesus shine, teachers painted his own people dark. The Pharisees became hypocrites. Jewish law became a cage. The crowd that shouted at his trial became every Jew, everywhere, for all time. Judaism was drawn as cold and dead, so that grace could look like it arrived from somewhere else.

None of that is good history. Her summary of the problem is one plain sentence: we do not need to make Judaism look bad in order to make Jesus look good. Read the Gospels slowly and Jesus keeps the law, argues inside it the way the rabbis did, and often makes it heavier rather than lighter.

Paul saw this temptation in the first years of the church. He pictured the newcomers as a wild branch cut from a roadside tree and grafted onto a cultivated one. Then he turned and spoke straight to that branch. Do not look down on the older branches, he told it. The branch never carried the root. The root carried the branch.

The people attacking Levine are the branch, looking down.

And the tree under them is Jewish all the way down. Every author of the New Testament was a Jew. Its first readers were Jews. Jesus himself learned to read it in a synagogue on the Sabbath, the way any Jewish boy would.

Luke 4:16He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. He entered, as was his custom, into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up to read.

So a Jewish teacher leading Christians deeper into that book is not an intrusion into the faith. It is something closer to the shape of the faith at its beginning. The loudest voices online believe they are defending the root. They have mistaken themselves for it.