An Orthodox Jewish woman who has spent nearly five decades defending Christianity from misreadings of Judaism was just accused online of hating Christians and killing Jesus. The accusation came days after she was elected president of the Catholic Biblical Association of America, and became the first Jew to hold the position since the organization’s founding in 1936.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine learned she was being considered for the role last year and was so startled she wrote to a member of the nominating committee to ask if it was a joke. It was not. Members affirmed her as president for the 2026-2027 term at the association’s annual general meeting in Baltimore on July 20. The association has grown from 50 charter members in 1936 to more than 1,070 worldwide. It ended its requirement that members be Catholic in the 1960s, and elected its first Protestant president in 1985. Levine has been a full member since 1988, having served over the decades as associate editor, consultant, vice president, and, for 12 years, as book review editor of The Catholic Biblical Quarterly. “It’s a recognition for the hours and hours and hours I have put into the work of the association,” she said, “and I’m very appreciative that that work has been recognized.”

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 at Vanderbilt University. In 2019 she became the first Jewish scholar to teach the New Testament at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, and she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021. She has written or edited some of the most widely read works in the field, including The Misunderstood Jew, The Bible With and Without Jesus, and The Jewish Annotated New Testament. None of that stopped the wave of antisemitic posts that followed her election, posts that called her “anti-Christian,” accused her of trying to “hijack Catholicism,” and folded in attacks on Israel for good measure.

Levine is a professor at Vanderbilt and a member of Sherith Israel, the Orthodox synagogue in Nashville. Rabbi Mark Fishman, Director of North American Engagement for Israel365, reacted to the diatribes aimed at Levine.

“There is a painful irony in seeing a Jewish scholar who has spent decades helping Christians understand Jesus in his Jewish context attacked simply because she is Jewish,” Fishman said. “Ancient accusations of collective Jewish guilt should have no place in Christian-Jewish relations today.”

Deb Campbell, Director of Israel365 Nashville, also responded.

“Dr. Amy-Jill Levine has spent decades building Jewish-Christian understanding. Genuine Jewish-Christian friendship allows us to learn from one another while remaining rooted in our own convictions. Antisemitic accusations have no place in that dialogue; understanding requires humility, honesty, and respect.”

One example shows how far the backlash reached beyond anonymous social media accounts. Integrity Magazine, a traditionalist Catholic outlet devoted to what it calls “the complete restoration of both the civil and ecclesial orders under the Kingship of Christ,” published a piece attacking the Catholic network EWTN for reporting Levine’s election without hostility. The magazine complained that EWTN had abandoned its “kosher approach,” a phrase that turns a Jewish dietary term into a slur for coverage the outlet considered too lenient toward a Jewish scholar. The same piece faulted EWTN for failing to expose what it called Levine’s “Jewish agenda,” language that recasts four decades of academic collaboration as an ethnic conspiracy rather than a career.

A second Integrity Magazine piece, published five days earlier, made the conspiratorial framing explicit. It described Levine’s election as evidence of what it called “the conciliar rapprochement with the Synagogue,” tying her presidency to Pope Leo XIV’s outreach to Jewish groups and to the appointment of an EWTN executive it labeled “ultra-Zionist” to a Vatican communications post. Leo XIV, elected in May 2025, sent a letter to the American Jewish Committee on the day of his own election pledging to continue strengthening “the Church’s dialogue and cooperation with the Jewish people.” Integrity Magazine treated that pledge, the Vatican appointment, and Levine’s election as a single pattern rather than three unrelated events, the same logic that turns an academic honor into a Jewish takeover.

Integrity Magazine’s coverage did not stop at Levine’s election. The same outlet also cited her past writing on abortion and sexuality as further grounds for alarm, work that has nothing to do with her role at the Catholic Biblical Association. That pairing may explain why the “Jewish agenda” language mattered so much to the outlet in the first place. Ordinary theological or political disagreement does not usually get filed under someone’s ethnicity, but once a critic has decided a scholar’s positions add up to a “Jewish agenda,” every disagreement with her becomes further evidence of it, and the accumulation of evidence becomes proof that her Judaism was the real objection all along.

The Catholic Biblical Association’s leadership did not stay quiet. Executive board chair Gregory E. Sterling and executive director Archie Wright issued a joint statement rejecting the criticism outright. “She was not elected because she is Jewish, but because she is an exceptional scholar and has played a very important role in Catholic-Jewish dialogue,” they wrote. Numerous past presidents of the association signed a companion statement. Bishop Joseph Bambera of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who chairs interreligious relations for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote to Levine directly to congratulate her, calling her election “a fitting celebration of the genuinely interfaith character of biblical scholarship.”

The gap between what critics accused Levine of and what she has actually spent her career doing is the real story here.

Levine does not accept the Christian belief that Jesus is divine. She never has, and she has never hidden it. What she does believe is that Jesus was a first-century Jewish teacher whose sayings and miracles map directly onto the world of Second Temple Judaism, and she has built an academic career proving it verse by verse. She describes her decades inside Catholic institutions plainly: “I have been carrying on a love affair with the Catholic Church since I was 7 years old, and that hasn’t stopped. It’s chaste, and it continues.” She calls herself “a guest in this house,” albeit a nearly permanent one, and says her goal has never been to challenge Catholic doctrine but to recover the historical and human setting in which Christianity emerged. She co-wrote a commentary on the Gospel of Luke with Ben Witherington III, a New Testament scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary; it is the only Gospel commentary written jointly by an evangelical Christian and a Jewish scholar. Witherington’s assessment leaves no room for the accusations circulating online: “She loves Christian people, and she loves the Bible. What she doesn’t love is people using the Bible to beat other people over the head, including Jews.”

Levine’s priorities for her one-year term include strengthening ties with the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, expanding outreach to Spanish-speaking Catholics, and confronting anti-Jewish interpretations of Christian scripture that she says still circulate freely in parishes. Much of it comes down to clergy training. “The problem is getting the academic material into the hands of priests and homilists,” she said, arguing that many clergy still rely on commentaries from their seminary years rather than newer scholarship on the Jewish context of Jesus, the Pharisees, and the Gospels. She raised a newer concern as well: clergy using artificial intelligence to generate sermons, which she warned can quietly reproduce antisemitic stereotypes pulled from the broader material those systems are trained on.

Sr. Mary C. Boys, a scholar of Jewish-Christian dialogue at Union Theological Seminary, said the problem Levine is describing runs deeper than most clergy realize. “In my experience, most homilists are unaware of the potential of texts to reinforce certain stereotypes about Jews and Judaism,” Boys said, adding that bishops give too little emphasis to serious scriptural study. For Boys, Levine’s election reflects relationships built over years inside the association, not a symbolic gesture. “It’s not just that she’s a Jew, but because she has been part of the work of the CBA for years, the friendships, the collaboration, the commitment to working — those are what counted.” At the Baltimore meeting, colleagues surprised Levine with a book of essays written in her honor, titled Disruptive Readings: Essays Honoring the Work and Wisdom of Amy-Jill Levine.

That scholarship is precisely what made her an asset to Christian institutions for decades, including at the highest levels. Levine and fellow scholar Marc Zvi Brettler personally presented Pope Francis with The Jewish Annotated New Testament, the volume they co-edited to place the New Testament in its Jewish historical setting. Levine recalled that Francis “reached out and he took my hand and he took Marc’s hand and said, ‘this is very important, please continue your work,'” then instructed an aide to keep the book where he could use it. That record is also, apparently, no defense against a mob that decided her Judaism alone made her the enemy.

The accusation that Jews bear collective guilt for the death of Jesus has a long and bloody history in Christian Europe. The Catholic Church built centuries of persecution on that premise, and it fed the Crusades that wiped out Jewish communities across the continent in the Middle Ages. The Church broke with that teaching in 1965, when the Second Vatican Council issued a declaration called Nostra Aetate. The document formally rejected the claim that “all the Jews, without distinction” could be blamed for Jesus’s death, repudiated antisemitism in any form, and affirmed that God’s covenant with the Jewish people remains unrevoked. Pope John Paul II went further two decades later, declaring antisemitism to have “no justification” and to be “absolutely reprehensible.” The line being thrown at Levine this month is not a new insult. It is the resurrection of a doctrine the Church itself disavowed sixty years ago.

Levine has described her own career as a direct response to that reversal. “Much of what I do is in reciprocation for the Church’s willingness to change its teaching,” she told Religion News Service. Where Nostra Aetate committed the Church to rejecting anti-Jewish readings of scripture, Levine has spent four decades providing the scholarship to carry out that commitment, showing Catholic clergy and laypeople what the New Testament looked like within the Jewish world that produced it. The backlash against her accuses her of the opposite of what she has actually spent her career doing.

Levine has not backed down from her defense of Catholicism even while absorbing attacks from people claiming to speak for it. “Hate and demonizing, name calling and slandering, are not good forms of evangelism,” she wrote on Facebook, adding that she now has to explain, again, that the posts targeting her “are not indicative of the best of the Church.” She said antisemitism spreads through several channels at once: family, social media, the conflation of Israeli policy with the views of all Jews, and, she said bluntly, “problematic readings from the New Testament or sermons that introduce or reinforce, often because of ignorance and tone-deafness, antisemitic messages.”

The support has not come only from Catholics. Beau Stringer, director of adult discipleship at Resurrection Downtown in Kansas City and an author with Abingdon Press, wrote an open letter to Levine that she shared on her own Facebook page. “Amy-Jill Levine’s work has quietly shaped how I understand Jesus more than almost anyone else’s,” Stringer wrote. “She’s spent her whole career reminding Christians of something we should’ve never forgotten in the first place. That Jesus was a Jewish man, living a Jewish life, teaching in a Jewish context, and that you can’t actually understand him if you strip that away.” Stringer called the backlash “a betrayal of everything her work has stood for” and thanked her for “decades of pushing Christians toward a fuller, truer picture of Jesus.”

The Catholic Biblical Association elected Levine because thirty-eight years of scholarship earned it. The backlash against her election proves the opposite point every one of her defenders is making: that centuries after the Church renounced the blood libel of Jewish guilt for Jesus’s death, it still has to be renounced in public, one online mob at a time.