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Jewish Feminist Scholar Elected President of Catholic Biblical Association · Crisis Point

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  Foreign.
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  Welcome to Crisis Point. This is Eric Sammons. Today I want to talk about what was a strange headline in the news last week, at least strange to people who kind of pay attention to this stuff. And it was that a Jewish woman was elected the president of the Catholic Biblical Association. So let me just repeat that.
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  A Jewish scholar, a woman named Amy Jill Levine, and she's a self described Jewish feminist. Not just Jewish, but she's a Jewish feminist and she is a biblical scholar. She was elected the president of the Catholic Biblical Association.
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  And I think a lot of people just saw that and were like scratching their head, like, wait, what? How could a Jewish scholar, a Jewish feminist be elected the president of the Catholic Biblical Association? Doesn't seem to make much sense. So how did this happen? And if you look at the history of the Catholic Biblical association, plus the history of the recent history, the last maybe hundred years or so history of biblical studies in the Catholic Church and even outside the Catholic Church, it actually starts to make a lot of sense.
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  And so what I'm not saying it's a good thing.
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  I don't want to bury the lead. It's awful. It's a terrible thing that this would happen. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of some of the bedrocks of Catholic biblical interpretation. But that being said, it makes sense when you see the history of how this developed, how the Catholic Biblical association developed, and the world of biblical interpretation in the Catholic world and outside of it. So I want to go a little bit deeper today to explain how this happened, how we got to a point where this actually happened. And many people just were like, oh, okay, that, that seems to be fine, but of course it's not. So first, let me just explain what is the Catholic Biblical Association?
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  I want to be clear. First of all, this is not an official institutional institution inside the Catholic Church. What I mean by that, this is not something like set up by the Vatican. It wasn't even set up by bishops per se. It operates outside of any ecclesiastical oversight.
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  That being said, so the history is it actually started in the 1930s. And here's the purpose that this is from the CBA website. The purpose is of the Catholic Biblical association of America is to promote, within a context of faith, scholarly study of scripture and related fields by meetings of the association publications and support to those engaged in such studies. So essentially it's supporting the scholarly study of Sacred Scripture.
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  And so how did it form? So it formed back in the 1930s. And I'm going to read this as something I found online. The occasion for the formation of the cba, the Catholic Biblical association, was the outcome of the desire of Bishop Edwin o', Hara, chair of the Episcopal Committee on the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, to improve quality, the quality of the New Testament normally used by Catholics.
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  So in 1936, Bishop O' Hara called a meeting of American Catholic Scripture scholars to help plan and carry out the project.
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  At this meeting, a proposal was aired and agreed to for the formation of an association of Catholic Biblical Scholars.
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  At a subsequent meeting on October 3, 1936, the CBA was voted into existence. So the CBA, that's what I was saying. I didn't say Catholic Biblical association, although I think we could argue now we could just call it the BA instead of the CBA. But the CBA came about in the 1930s, and it was the. The primary driver of it was to create a better translation of the Bible for American Catholics.
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  And so, in fact, this, this began. The project actually began in 1930s and 40s. And at first it was going to be essentially a translation of the Vulgate, however, an English translation of the Vulgate. However, in. In the Catholic world, there started to be this. This happened outside the Catholic world, but it kind of came in a Catholic world in the 1940s, this idea that really a translation should be based on the original, the original languages of the Sacred Scriptures. And just to make sure everybody understands what language we're talking about, most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the entire New Testament was written in Greek. Ancient Koine Greek is what it's called. Some books of the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, were written in Greek originally, but essentially we have two languages, Hebrew and Greek. However, most Catholic translations of the Bible after the Council of Trent around that time were made from the Vulgate. The St. Jerome's Latin translation, which he did from the Hebrew and the Greek. Now there's, there's a whole controversy in history about these translations, and I'm not going to get into here, but that's essentially what happened. However, in 1943, I think it was, Pope Pius the 12th wrote encyclical called Divino Afflante Spiritu, in which he encouraged translating from the original languages.
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  So the. The Catholic Biblical association kind of changed their direction and decided to do the translation from the original languages. The result of that, of that work is the New American Bible. The New American Bible, which so many of us know and don't like, was basically a creation of the Catholic Biblical Association. And this was supposed to be a better translation now, the, the New American Bible is the, the scriptural text that was used as the basis for the, the translations in the liturgy, that the, the biblical readings in the liturgy are from the New American Bible, essentially.
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  And, and so this was, like I said, a project of the Catholic Biblical Association. Now, I'm not going to get all into New American Bible why it's so terrible, but it is. First of all, the translation is just not, it just isn't good. And fine. I think Anthony Esalen talks about this a few different times.
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  Just as the English, as a product of the English language, it's just not very good.
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  It just is very. It's just very bland and it just doesn't read well. But also, the notes in the, the footnotes in the, in the New American Bible are awful. In fact, I, I remember at one point, I'm pretty sure some might even be heretical. I don't want to say that for sure because now I can't remember if they're just heretical or just. I know for a fact they direct people to.
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  Basically, they undermine your belief in the divine inspiration of the Sacred Scriptures, of the inerrancy of the Bible. They undermine that very much so. And so it's a terrible translation, but that's a product of the Catholic Biblical Association. So already we see, you know, 50, 70 years ago. It's not doing good work.
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  Now, right now, right now, taking us to today, it's actually been the past few decades involved in a revision the New American Bible Revised Edition, which it's been doing under the direction of the usccb. It's asked us to do that. And so it is doing that translation and has been doing it. I think a new translation of the New Testament, I think, is coming out soon.
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  I can't keep track. They've done a number of translations of the, of the Old Testament, New Testament over the past couple decades.
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  And actually it's the funding they're funding. A lot of it largely comes from, like, where does the money come from? It largely comes from the royalties from those translations from the New American Bible and the New American Bible Revised Edition. That's where they get. And it's a point of contention for a lot of people, including myself, that these translations, these translations have royalties attached to them and they very much aggressively pursue copyright usage and things like that. Like, I remember when I wrote my first book back in 19. I mean, I'm sorry, 2010, who is Jesus Christ?
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  Unlocking the mystery and Gospel Matthew. And I had to get, I had to use a Bible translation and I wasn't going to use New American Bible anyway. But basically though I found though some translations they're very strict on how many verses you can quote in your publication without paying royalties. A New American Bible is one of the worst. You cannot use a New American Bible anywhere without paying royalties. Just about and New American Bible Revised Edition and this funds the Catholic Biblical association is from this translation and they use this funding to foster academic work on the Bible. So they might, they might fund doctoral projects and and academic projects on some topic or something like that, studying the Bible. That's where they get their funding from a lot of it.
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  Also I, I want to note that membership in the Catholic Biblical association has long been open to non Catholics. That has been the case for a very long. It's not just like recently they opened it to non. In fact I'm pretty sure it was open non Catholics even before Vatican ii.
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  And over the years many non Catholics have been officers in the, in the Catholic Biblical Association.
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  And so one of the things to note with the Catholic Biblical association is that it has a strong emphasis. So what kind of, what's its attitude towards interpreting the Bible?
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  It has a strong emphasis on the historical critical method.
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  This is kind of the foundational assumption. The foundational direction of the CBA in looking at the Bible, interpreting the Bible is to use the historical critical method. So what is the historical critical method? I obviously I'm not going to spend hours on this, but I do want to give an overview because this is, this is the key reason why a Jewish scholar, a Jewish feminist scholar is now the president of the Catholic Biblical association is because of its reliance on the historical critical method and the presuppositions of the historical critical method.
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  So basically what this method does, it views the biblical text as simply historical documents produced by human authors in specific times, places and cultural contexts.
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  And the goal is to understand the text as it was meant to its original author and audience using the same critical tools historians apply to any ancient document. So attention to language, historical setting, literary genre and textual transmission. So essentially it claims the historical. The defenders of the historical critical method claim it's an objective way of interpreting the Bible. Just, just the the same tools you would use to study something like Homer's, Homer's Iliad or something like that or Aristotle or Plato's works you would use on. You use on the Bible. No, no different. And they, and they would argue this is a very objective look at it. In other words, you're not bringing your faith into it. You're not doing. There's a difference between exegesis, which is a study of the Bible and what does it mean, an eisegesis, when you bring your own beliefs into the passage and interpret it that way, they would, that gets rid of that. The defenders, the historical critical method would say, oh yeah, that's, that doesn't happen here because we're looking at like any other historical document.
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  And in fact, what they do is they, they focus only and solely on the human writer. They ignore the divine author. Now people who use the historical critical method, some may believe there's a divine author, they may believe in divine inspiration, others do not. Atheists would use it as well.
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  And somebody like a Jewish scholar, for example, reading the Old, the New Testament may not believe a divine author is present. But it doesn't matter when it comes to using historical critical method. That's what their defenders would say. And another thing they do, historical critical method does. It doesn't always, it rarely sees, in most cases, it doesn't really see the Bible as a unified whole.
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  So for example, it might look at the Gospel of Matthew and it will really try to pick apart the Gospel Matthew, yes, it will talk about maybe other gospels, how it might have been influenced, things like that.
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  But it's not looking at the Gospel Matthew as for example, part of the New Testament or part of the entire canon of the Bible. It's more looking at like the author of the Gospel Matthew. And by the way, most people who religiously follow the historical critical method would say it's not Matthew.
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  They would just look at that and they would just say, what's the context? What is the, who is the audience that he originally wrote to? Who is the author?
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  Who, what, what sources did he use? Things like that, that's how they interpret the Bible.
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  And there's a number of kind of sub methods within the historical critical method is like a umbrella term for a number of different sub methods. And a few examples would be, for example, textual criticism. Textual criticism is comparing surviving manuscripts which might disagree in small ways to reconstruct it because remember, we actually do not own any original copies of the Bible. What I mean by that, there's no biblical writing where we own the actual document that the original author wrote down. So for example, the Gospel of Matthew we don't own, we don't have, there's no, there's no record, we don't think it exists anymore of what Matthew or whoever the author was wrote down himself.
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  We just have copies. And of course, when you make copies, this isn't you know, this is before they had copy machines. When people, when humans make copies, they, they can make mistakes.
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  And so textual criticism, what it does, it takes our various copies and tries to bring them together and say, what did the original document say?
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  So, so, and that's first. Source criticism is another part, a method in historical critical method. Source criticism is identifying underlying written sources a biblical author may have used or combined. So for example, I mean a very generic one would be like the Gospel of Matthew. He quotes a number of documents in the Old Testament, so those are some sources he used. But what source criticism really means, it's the assumption often that the author is copying other sources.
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  And maybe, or I guess a better way to put it is that somebody brought together various sources into a final document.
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  Two of the most classic versions of this are the JEDP hypothesis about the, the, the Pentateuch that there were four sources. The jedp. I want to say it's Yahweh, Elohim is Priestly, and Deuteronomy.
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  Yeah, you know, I can't pronounce words. Those four sources were four different sources of this material. And then somebody got together, some person brought them together into what we now consider the Pentateuch.
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  Another famous example of this is the Q hypothesis that Mark, the Gospel Mark, was first written another document called Q, which is for German of quell, meaning source or document. I can't remember which one. It means that's it's an unknown, it's a document that did not survive. But that Matthew and Luke used both Mark and Q to combine them and make their gospels.
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  And so source criticism is probably one of the most controversial of them. Because first of all, I would just want to state outright I think the JEDP hypothesis is nonsense. And I also think the Mark and Q hypothesis is the marking priority with Q as a source is nonsense. I mean, literally, you're creating sources out of thin air. Like in the case of Q, you literally were just like, okay, I see some similarities between Matthew and Luke that aren't in Mark.
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  And I think Marcus first, therefore I'm going to say they use this document called Q. I mean, it just, it's ridiculous. It's, it's silly.
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  And so that's source criticism. I, I honestly, I'm very tempted to spend the next 20 minutes explaining why this is so stupid, the, the marking Q and the JEDP hypothesis, but I won't. But this, that's what source criticism is. And I just want to say that it doesn't mean there aren't so that, that certain writers of biblical texts don't use sources. They do. I mean, the fact is, if you look at the three synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, there are cases where there are passages that are written exactly the same, like the exact same Greek words are used. Clearly somebody copied from another. And this is something that the early church knew as well. They did not try to act like they were all written without using the other. The, the, the most common hypothesis back then was that Matthew wrote first and both Mark and Luke, who were not apostles like Matthew, they used Matthew in some way in their own creation of their gospels. And so I'm not trying to say there were no sources, but the way source criticism works today, they just, they're making stuff up a lot.
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  Another for another method in historical critical method is form criticism. This is classifying smaller units of text like parables or miracle stories or hymns or legal codes by, by literary genre and asking about their original oral setting before they're written down. So was it originally a liturgical formula, teaching aid, community role? We know, for example, we know that a lot of this, a lot of the information in the Bible was first orally transmitted. The Gospels are an example of this in that we know the Gospel Matthew was at earliest. And I, I do believe in early Matthew by the way, was probably written in the 40s. Maybe the, the Hebrew version of it and the Greek version, Mark and Luke were probably written in the 50s.
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  So this is decades after the time of Christ. And it's very plausible that these stories, we know these stories were told orally first before the Gospel. And of course the Gospel of John wasn't written until, well, it could be as early as the 60s. But a lot of people think, a lot of scholars think it's the 90s. And definitely with the Old Testament we have cases where these are, stories are, are handed on generation, generation orally before they're written down. But form criticism does have a tendency to take things completely out of context and try to explain everything.
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  They kind of try. It's almost like using surgery to dissect the, the sacred Scriptures.
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  Another, another method is redaction criticism.
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  This is studying how author or final editor selected arranged and modified existing material to serve their own theological narrative purposes. This is a, this is a common, a favorite among historical critical scholars. They always assume that no, nothing is written by the, the person we think it was written by. So like Isaiah, it's commonly said that Isaiah is three, there's, there's is proto Isaiah. I think it is in Deutero Isaiah and I think they even had three Isaiahs maybe that different sections of it. And it talks about how did the final author, who never seems to be the person we think it is, like Isaiah or Matthew or whatever, how did they bring this stuff together and what was their purpose in doing this? So these are different methods of historical critical. The historical critical method, these are kind of some sub methods in it.
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  And the history of historical critical method is it. It really came to the fore in the 19th century in Germany and it really has a origins with a very progressive liberal Protestant background.
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  We're talking, you know, not Catholics at all. Catholics in fact, initially rejected all these methods. The church basically rejected them and it was really progressive liberal Protestants and then even atheists who, who embrace these methods. However, that being said, the Catholic Church did slowly begin to embrace certain aspects of historical critical method. That encyclical I mentioned to you before, Divino Afflante Espiritu by Pope pius XII in 1943, it did open up the possibility for Catholic biblical scholars to use historical critical methods. Now it, it cautioned about the dangers of it, but it was embraced by the Catholic Church before Vatican ii, but with cautions. And you see that if you look at biblical scholar, Catholic biblical scholarship and texts in the 20th century, you see how this develops. You see in the early 20th century, no historical critical methods are really used per se, but then over time they begin to be used more and more. Until then, after Vatican ii, the floodgates were opened and essentially it was embraced without reservation, wholeheartedly, uncritically. I want to make sure I use that keyword. The historical critical method was embraced uncritically by Catholic scholars after Vatican ii. And I do think this is another case of the spirit of Vatican ii. If you read the, the text, the document of Vatican II that's about Scripture, which is De e verbum. It actually it does, it does in endorse that you can use historical critical methods. They don't use that term, by the way, but it does say yes you can, but it doesn't. It makes sure. It's clear that, that we have to always make sure we understand the Bible is as a divine author and we. And it's connected to traditional. That stuff. Dave Aramil I think is a great document of Vatican II've said that for all my years. I've loved that document. But in the quote unquote spirit of Vatican ii, biblical scholars, basically categorical scholars just said, okay, we're going to embrace the historical critical method, uncritically now I just want to also in this context, I am getting, by the way, this, this, this podcast is about the Jewish president, a Jewish woman becoming president of the cba. But we won't understand how that happened unless we know a little bit of this history.
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  Now I also want to be clear. There's other methods of, more traditional methods of interpreting the Bible that before the historical critical method. So for example, one method was typology. And this is the idea of that you read persons or events or institutions in the Old Testament as types or foreshadowings of their fulfillment in the New Testament. Typology was huge in the early church. It's always been a, a great way to understand the Bible using typology. In fact, the Bible itself uses typology. St. Paul talks about Christ as the new Adam.
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  That's typology even. In fact, that's where the term comes from. He says he is a type of Christ.
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  Think about how you have a typewriter and it puts an impression down that's a type of it, of what it is. So also there is the allegorical or spiritual reading. This was very common in the, in the school of Alexandria and in the early church in origin. People like that. And they look beyond kind of the literal historical sense and they just, they, they would find allegorical meanings or spiritual meanings in any text. Even if it had nothing directly to do with Christ, they'd find a way that it did have to do with it.
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  Now what happened was really what became the Catholic way of interpreting the Bible by the Middle Ages. What is what you call the four senses of Scripture.
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  And here you have the literal historical sense, which is, should be obvious. What is the original meaning of the text?
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  What did the human author, in other words, intend to write? You have the allegorical sense, which is what it teaches about Christ and the faith.
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  You have the moral sense, which is what teaches about how to live. And then you have the anagogical sense, which is, points us to its, the future fulfillment and the second coming of Christ and the end of the world.
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  And so this, these four senses, this is the way the church in the Middle Ages particularly studied the Bible. They looked for the four senses of a passage. Some passages might have all four senses. Other passages may not have all four. There may not be any way to interpret a passage pointing to the end of the world, for example, but they would find multiple meanings. And it makes sense that passages in the Bible have multiple meanings because they have multiple authors.
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  Every word of scripture was written by a human, most Likely all of them were written by men.
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  But every word of Scripture is also written by God, by the Holy Spirit. So it can have multiple meanings in one passage. Can have more than one meaning. But note one thing.
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  With the four senses of Scripture, it was always assumed that the basis, the first was the historical, literal meaning of the text.
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  It's not like the historical critical method in the 19th century came up with the idea, oh, we're going to all of a sudden now look at the historical meaning. We're now going to look at the literal meaning. No, what the human author intended. No, this was always done by the church. Always done. It didn't use these methods always. And had radically different presuppositions. And that's the most important thing. It had radically different presuppositions because it presumed always a human and divine author. Never in. In Catholic biblical understanding of any text.
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  Did you ever read the Bible without understanding that there's two authors of every word in the sacred Scriptures? Yes, you should look for the literal historical meaning and build upon that. But knowing even that literal historical meaning has a divine author.
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  And so another big principle, though, of this Catholic way of looking at the Bible, a principle that goes all the way back to the church, is the idea that the Old Testament, I'm sorry, the New Testament is hidden in the Old, and the Old Testament is revealed in the New.
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  And so the idea, though, is being that the Bible is one book. I know it's. It's a collection of books, it's a library in one sense, but it really is one book in a sense. It's a unified whole. They will all have. Every single tech document in the. In the Bible has the same author, the Holy Spirit. It also has other various authors, but the Holy Spirit wrote everyone.
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  So there's a unity. You cannot understand.
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  You cannot understand the Old Testament unless you read it in light of the New Testament. Likewise, you can't understand the New Testament unless you read it in light of the Old Testament. They're a unified whole. This is fundamental to the Catholic understanding of the Bible, of Catholic Scripture interpretation. It has been for two millennia.
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  So that's my setup to my long setup to the fact that now we have Amy Jill Levine. Is it Amy Jill Levine? I don't want to get her name wrong. I apologize if it's not Amy. Let me look back here, my notes. Yeah. Amy Jill Levine.
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  She is now the president of the Catholic Biblical Association. And I want to read a little quick bio of her. She was born in 1956. She earned her A.B. from Smith College in 1978 and her Ph.D. from Duke University in 1984 ran her dissertation on, quote, the Mathian Program of Salvation History under advisor D. Moody Smith. So her, her, the, her dissertation was on the Gospel of Matthew. And yes, she's always been Jewish.
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  She's taught at Swarthmore College and Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville. She spent the bulk of her career in Vanderbilt where she held the University professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies emerita. She was a professor of Jewish, of New Testament and Jewish Studies.
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  I know some people might be like, wait, this doesn't seem to make sense. How can a Jewish person be a professor of New Testament and also of Jewish studies? But we're talking about the historical critical method as the baseline, as the fundamental presupposition of all, all scholarly work on the Bible is a historical critical method. And its presuppositions are that you treat the Bible just like any other historical document.
• 28:30
  So a Jew could study the New Testament with as much value as atheist or a Muslim or a Catholic or a Protestant or an Orthodox. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you are. You can still bring it out. Now, I do want to say, I'm not saying a Jewish person or a, a, a non Catholic, a Protestant or, or an atheist couldn't maybe have something of value they bring in studying the New Testament, but it's something that would be very much like, let's say they discovered some type of doc, you know, archaeologists discovered some document or something like that from the New Testament. Okay, Something like that. I'm not saying there's no value, but it just doesn't make sense from a Catholic perspective that you would have a, a Jewish person as a guidepost, somebody you look to, to interpret the New Testament as a Catholic.
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  She currently. Levine currently holds the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished professor of New Testament Jewish Studies Chair at Hartford International University for Religion Peace in Connecticut. Get that. There is a chair of New Testament Studies that's named after a rabbi. I mean, what, what are we even doing here, people?
• 29:44
  It just, it doesn't make any sense. But it does make sense, again, if you take the historical critical method as the way you understand the Bible because again, you don't need to be a Catholic or even a Christian to understand the New Testament under that way of, of studying the Bible because they, they throw away the whole divine inspiration. They throw not, I'm not even saying they deny it. Some do. Obviously she does denies it for the New Testament or she wouldn't be Jewish still, but they just ignore it. They act like it doesn't even exist.
• 30:17
  And if it doesn't exist, why not study it as any other historical document? Why can't a Jewish person be just as much of an expert on the New Testament as a Catholic?
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  Levine specializes in the Jewish context of the New Testament and historical Jesus. Reading this Christian scriptures through the lens of first century Judaism. This is a big thing in the cat like the, the, the scholarly world of scripture studies is this idea of understanding the Jewish context. And I just want to say, I'm not saying that's all a bad thing. For example, Petrie, Brant Petrie, Is that right? Oh boy, if I got that name wrong, I apologize.
• 30:53
  I have it, I can see it here. I'm trying to look at the book. He's done a lot of studies on that.
• 30:59
  You know, the idea of, of the Jewish context of the first century Judaism, of first history Judaism, Jewish context of Jesus's life. There's a lot that can be, we can benefit from that. I'm not saying that's not true. However, Levine, she has one of her priorities is to combat, quote, unquote, anti Jewish interpretations of the New Testament.
• 31:23
  Red flag, red flag, red flag. Because, you know, I mean, if a Jewish person in 2026 a, a progress, a feminist, a progressive saying they want to combat anti Jewish interpretations of the New Testament, what they're really saying is they want to make sure they, they neuter anything that they don't like about, like for example, the Gospel of John or something like that. That's a huge red flag.
• 31:48
  It's a huge red flag because what it's doing is it's, it's anti Jewish in a modern context. We need to read the Bible as it was written, not through the lens of 21st century woke ideology about anti Semitism or something like that, or feminism, which is something else she does.
• 32:07
  So again though, so I mean, to my audience, my assumption is you think it's crazy that Levine is the president of Catholic Biblical association and you'd be right to think that. But if you put yourself in the shoes of people who are deep in the world of the historical critical method of modern academic scripture, study it. There's nothing, there's, it's a nothing burger. There's no reason this is a problem because what they're trying to do is completely divorce from the context of the Bible in the church of the Bible as it and tradition of the Bible with a divine author, it's completely divorced from that. So you could Be an atheist, you could be a Jew. Jew, you could be a Catholic. Doesn't matter when understanding the Bible from this perspective. And also I want to note something.
• 32:54
  I was looking through the past CBA presidents. It's almost uniformly progressives. I recognize a few names. I did some research on some other ones. Here's an example. One past president was quote a at Baylor, it was at Baylor University. And here's his description of his job at Baylor University. He was a liaison for various faculty focused diversity initiatives such as the Black Faculty and Staff association, the Latinx Faculty Staff association, the Faculty of Color alliance, the Women's Colloquium and Women in Science and Engineering.
• 33:27
  That was a past president of the cba. That was his job at Baylor University. He was a scripture scholar. I want to make sure that's clear. But that's the type of stuff he got involved in. If you look at the past presidents, it's almost uniformly progressives, mostly progressive Catholics. I think that guy wasn't even Catholic. He never said, but didn't look like from his background in the way he taught, in the way he things he wrote that he was even Catholic. So I don't think this is the first non Catholic to be the president of the Catholic Biblical Association. Don't quote me on that, but I'm pretty sure there's been non Catholics before. But no question, it's been uniformly, just about uniformly progressives that have dominated it.
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  And so again, the.
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  Because The CBA is 100 all in with a historical critical method, it doesn't matter to them.
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  They don't accept this idea. The idea that the New Testament lies hidden in the Old, the Old Testament is unveiled in the New simply is something they reject. They think you can understand the Gospel of Matthew, for example. They would say it's got to be in the context. They understand the, excuse me, the, the writer of Matthew would have used the Old Testament and stuff like that, but they don't see that unified whole, the integral whole. It's just a bunch of historical documents is all it is for them. Just like if you gave them a collection of, of the works of Aristotle or actually they wouldn't say Aristotle, Plato, Socrates and throw them all together and other Greek philosophers.
• 34:51
  And this actually the thing is though, this, the cba, it is the mainstream of biblical scholarship. And I, I can't deny that. But it's actually only one of three different schools of thought when it comes to biblical scholarship.
• 35:09
  One is the historical critical method, which is the dominant school today. And it's the One that, that you deal. We deal with more than anything else. There's another small, very small school which would be the traditional school, which basically rejects the historical critical method totally. There's not many people in this school, excuse me, the third school is the one that I would consider myself part of. Not that I'm a scripture scholar, but this is the one I kind of endorse and I agree with.
• 35:37
  And it basically, I would call it like a careful use of the historical curriculum method while embracing all the traditional tools of Catholic Scripture interpretation. So people in this school, I don't really have a name for it, but people in this school would be somebody like Scott Hahn, somebody like Ratzinger, Carl Ratzinger, Pope Benedict xvi.
• 35:58
  They all, all the disciples, students of Scott Hahn, like his, his students. They would be people in this school. I'll call it the Han School, frankly, because he is the most prominent member in America and he is kind of the leader of this school. The Han School. That's what we'll call it. I just made that up. The Han School. Now I will say many members of the. Of academia who are part of the Historical Critical Method School, they would. They mock Scott Hahn, they mock Han and his. And his, his school. They. And, and honestly, there are some trads who distrust this as well. They don't really embrace it either. I think they're wrong as well.
• 36:35
  I'm part of the Han School unapologetically and basically Han. The Han School is again, it's not anti historical critical method and it's not trad.
• 36:47
  But what it is, it's willing to be critical of the historical critical method, particularly of the presuppositions of the historical critical method. And really the true leader of this, I would honestly say, was Cardinal Ratzinger. Pope Benedict XVI became pope, and even when he was pope, he was the one who in the 1980s called for a critical reading of the historical critical method, a crit. A criticism of the critical methods.
• 37:15
  And Hahn and along with some other scholars really took this and they ran with it and they became the real, you know, the, the criticizers of the historical critical method. So what they do is they, they will take aspects of the historical critical method, but they are willing to see it not as the only way you interpret it. And that does have some problems. Now I want to recommend a couple books to you real quick. I got them right here, three books that I want to recommend about this politicizing the Bible. This book is Just Excellence by Scott Hahn and.
• 37:47
  Oh, I can't Remember his first name, Winker? Oh yeah. Benjamin Weiker. And it's Political Politicizing the Bible, the Roots of Historical Criticism and the secularization of Scripture 1300-1700. Basically in here, Hahn and Weicker show the, the presuppositions in the Historical Critical Method. Because a lot of the advocates of the Historical Critical Method, they act like it from down on high immaculate, that had no real political background or presuppositions and that's all false. And, and they prove it and politicizing the Bible.
• 38:18
  And then they have a follow up which is actually by Han and Jeffrey Morrow and it's called. And it basically, you know, I said the last one went to 1700, this goes on the 1900. So this one's Modern Biblical criticism as a tool statecraft 1700-1900. What they're showing is, is that the Historical Critical Method was a political, what was born out of a political era that wanted to use the Bible as a political weapon. And the Historical Critical method let them do that. And now those two books are scholarly books. They're not easy reads. I mean, they're great books, but they're not. A book that kind of synthesizes it all is this book by Hahn and Weicker called the Decline and Fall of Sacred how the Bible Became a Secular Book. The Decline and Fall of Sacred Scripture, how the Bible Became a Secular Book. This one is very good for like just the average reader to understand the, the arguments in the, in the, in the thicker text showing that the, the, by the way the Historical Critical Method looks at the Bible is a very secular method.
• 39:24
  And so, and this is why you can get Jewish president of the cba. And so these books are great. And so Han has really led this charge. And so what, what Han and his. The Han school does, I'll call it that the Han school. What they do is they, do they, they really embrace the idea of the four senses of Scripture.
• 39:43
  The historical, the historical literal, the allegorical, the anagogical. I'm sorry, the moral and the anagogical. And what they do though is they use some of the tools of the Historical Critical method. When they're doing the first sense, the historical literal. What they're doing is they're saying, okay, some of these tools actually are pretty good that, that people have come up with. If we use them without the presuppositions in the context of the four senses of Scripture, we can truly understand the Bible a lot better than the people who use it outside of the, the who use it with those presuppositions. And the number one presupposition, by the way of Historical Critical Method people is a rejection of the supernatural.
• 40:26
  If there's a miracle story in the Bible, it's assumed, it's presumed that the miracle didn't actually happen. That wasn't actually a miracle. I should say so. Like the miracle of sharing on when we talk about the lows and fishes. This comes from the Historical Critical Method, the idea that you presume a actual miracle didn't happen and then you explain what actually happened and what the author was trying to say when he made up the story of the miracle.
• 40:53
  And so what the Han School does is say, no, absolutely, miracles can happen, absolutely. The spiritual, the supernatural can happen, absolutely. The Scriptures were written by a divine author, every single one of them. And so we're going to use some of the tools at Historical Critical Method to understand that first sense of the four senses of Scripture.
• 41:11
  And so that's really the way to do it. And I think this is, this is the way to go. In fact, the kind of. One of the big results of this whole method is the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, which of course, who is the editor of it, Scott Hahn. And this basically is the Bible. And it has all these lots of footnotes in here. And they use what I call the Han School, where it does use some of the tools, a historical critical method, but only in the context of the four senses of Scripture as we found in the medieval ages. I don't think we need to reject every aspect of the historical Critical method as just. It's awful because it does have some people using it who have bad presuppositions. I think we can use certain aspects of it. And I think that's what the Hahn school does to really flesh out that historical literal sense that the Church has always said we need to have as the basis of any interpretation, starts with that first sense of Scripture, because every passage has that first sense.
• 42:11
  Then after you know the first sense, then you build on the other three senses on top of that.
• 42:17
  So the truth is the Catholic Biblical association is lost. It's really just the ba. The Biblical association. It's not Catholic in any real sense. The usccb, of course, still uses it for their translations and they recommend things like that. But it's, it's, it's, it's not Catholic, you know, it's Catholic in Nemo only Sino, I guess you would say, is not Catholic. But the good news, that's the bad news. But the good news is there is a major pushback that's been happening over the past few decades in America to the false presuppositions and the problems of the cba. It's led by Scott Hahn, but many other, you know, Bergsma, obviously, Petrie, others have been our scholars who are really embracing the methodology of this new school that does not just reject historical critical method out of hand, but uses it in the full context of how Catholics have always been told and, and been encouraged to interpret the Bible. So that's the good news of, you know, the bad news is that CBA's lost. It has juice, a Jewish lady feminist lady running it. It's the president. But the good news is that a, a new school has been growing over the past few decades. Okay, today's Tuesday, so that means we have the live chat. So I want, I appreciate all. Some people were chatting. I want to encour people to join us on Tuesday afternoons for the live show and join the live chat. Let me see. Pull up some of the comments. Jarams40 says at what level insanity does a quote situation of necessity exist if it does not exist now? Asking for tens of thousands of friends, I assume of course you're referring to the sspx. I don't really think that's related. I mean, I, I've said from the beginning that we're in a crisis and having a Jewish feminist become the president of CBA is a great example of the crisis. And the question always becomes how do you respond? I think actually this is a good question because it was asked at the beginning of the podcast. You know, how what we do, we do what Scott Hahn is doing. That's what we do. We don't, we don't. I'm not going to get in the whole thing. We don't go into schism. We don't consecrate our own bishops. We do what Scott Hahn and people like him are doing.
• 44:26
  We find the bet, we find the true Catholic way and we fight back within the church. And that's, that's, that's what the way to do it.
• 44:32
  Okay. D Music247 says the NAB is okay. The new American Bible, not great. But it's the notes which are really bad. And those notes go with the translation. Can't separate them. You know, I think you're right. I mean, nab the translation itself, it's okay. I mean, I don't know. I think it's still subpar, but I, I can understand some of you like, that's fine. But the notes, yeah, the notes are awful. They're really, really bad. And he's right. You can't get the NAB Bible without that translation, without those notes.
• 45:03
  So, yeah, they're terrible.
• 45:05
  D Music247 says Father Raymond Brown was a big influence, promoted the historical critical method. Father RAYMOND brown, I, I was studying my master's program, including in Scripture, when Father Raymond Brown was still around. I actually went to a talk. I'll tell a little story here.
• 45:19
  I went when I was at Steubenville in graduate school in theology in the 1994, 1995, he came to speak. Father Raymond Brown came to speak at a school in Pittsburgh. He didn't speak at Franciscan. And I went to see him and Father William Brown, for those who don't know, he was a giant in the Catholic biblical scholarship field in the late 20th century, but he very much embraced the historical critical method, and he was one of the biggest promoters of it. I will say this, though, and I have to say this because I feel like it's something I saw firsthand. And so I want to give him credit.
• 45:51
  He was asked at this talk I gave to. He was asked if he believed in the resurrection of Christ because this might sound like a silly question, but many, many biblical scholars reject the resurrection of Christ because they reject the supernatural. And actually, in the 80s and 90s, there was a, there was a glut of, of scholarly works that rejected the resurrection, the bodily resurrection of Christ. They would say either, like it was just his, his, his influence that continued on that the, the apostles just, they totally talk about his body that was still buried and dead.
• 46:28
  Father Raymond Brown said, yes, I believe in the resurrection, the resurrection actually happened, that Jesus Christ did rise from the dead. So I do want to give him credit for that. But I personally think a lot of his works really did lead people astray, maybe unintentionally, I don't know. But they just, they were not, they, they had, they went along with a lot of the presuppositions that are contrary to the faith, even if he himself did not do that.
• 46:53
  Who is considered a traditional biblical scholar? I mean, I don't think anybody is today.
• 46:59
  I don't think there's any scholars, traditional biblical scholars, but I would say there are traditionalists who promote a traditional, like a wholesale rejection of the historical critical method, and they don't use it at all. So I think that's, you know, that's part of it. I would just say so, you know, oh, somebody in the comments said, Peter Kwasneski, Dr. Peter Kwasnowski is a more traditional theological scholar, not biblical scholars. Well, yeah, Peter is not a theologian biblical scholar. I don't know his thoughts on this, on this matter. I just know there are some trads who kind of reject the Iverbum and they, they kind of reject the whole idea of this circle critical method. I don't think that's the way to go. I think the better method is to use what's good of it. But then I'm starting to lose my voice here.
• 47:49
  Use what's good of it, but reject a lot of presuppositions that. That come behind it. So. Okay, because I'm losing my voice, I probably should cut it here. I appreciate everybody joining in the live chat. Pray obviously for. Pray for biblical scholars, Faithful Orthodox, Catholic biblical scholars. They are completely rejected in their field by a lot in a lot of places. And so they really should be. And yeah, everybody like this video. Thank you, Rob.
• 48:14
  And so they really should be prayed for because they're doing like people like Scott Hahn and other people like that. They're doing the Lord's work in a very anti Catholic environment.
• 48:25
  So I think we should pray for them. Okay, everybody, until next time. God love you. And remember the poor.