Best Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture?

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Personally, I’m a fan of the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, but I wouldn’t call it the best. There are plenty of academic text books that are far better.

However, the CCSS is surely among the best for the average Catholic who wants to learn. But it wouldn’t replace the graduate level theology textbooks that priests & deacons study
 
BartholomewB said:
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G_Otis:
Is there even another multi-volume Catholic commentary that’s comparable to the CCSS? (and that’s finished)
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Four comments up from yours, @Bithynian recommended the Sacra Pagina series. It’s about ten years older than the CCSS, and larger. In both cases, the NT set comprises 17 or 18 volumes. The complete Sacra Pagina set runs to over 7,000 pages, compared with 5,000 pages for the CCSS.
Sacra Pagina: The Acts Of The Apostles (Volume 5): Johnson, Luke Timothy: 9780814659687: Amazon.com: Books
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Yes, a lot of priests love this one and I THINK (but could be wrong), it’s considered more for academic work
 
I’ve heard a lot of good things about the Navarre Bible, though I haven’t had much experience with it myself.
 
Here are some notes I wrote on commentaries and study Bibles.

TRADITIONAL RESOURCES

These resources largely pre-date the modern, skeptical historical-critical method of studying the Bible. The Catholic Church tended to crack down on use of the historical-critical method until the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu was released in 1943, and so approved Catholic Bible commentaries from the mid-20th century and earlier tend to take a very traditional perspective. They are dubious to the degree that they don’t benefit from modern historical-critical studies and sometimes make claims that don’t really hold up under scrutiny today, but they also arguably serve as a corrective to the hermeneutic of suspicion employed by more “liberal” works.

Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (1998-2010) - This is a series of many volumes of commentary on Scripture by the Church Fathers, selected and edited by modern scholars (not all Catholic). It is great if you want to know what was written about a particular part of the Bible by churchmen who lived much closer to the 1st century than we do, and had access to early Christian writings that are no longer extant. Modern historical-critical study tends to discount the testimony of the early Fathers about Scripture almost entirely, so this set provides some balance. It has many volumes and is very expensive; see if you can check out a volume from a university library near you.

The Haydock Bible (1859) - This is a Douay-Rheims-Challoner Bible (the traditional Catholic Bible in English, translated from the Latin Vulgate) published in 1859 with extensive commentary by Fr. George Leo Haydock. The commentary does engage (mostly with hostility) with 19th-century historical-critical stuff. Some of it is dubious, and I sometimes find it a bit hard to get through, but much of it is very good. It quotes plenty of ancient and medieval Christian writers, mostly western ones. Supposedly John F. Kennedy was sworn into office (as the first and only Catholic president of the United States) on a Haydock Bible. The text of the Haydock commentary is available online on various websites; if you find that a particular online version has disappeared, try using the Wayback Machine to access an earlier version of the webpage.

A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture (1953) - This classic, dense one-volume commentary led by Dom Bernard Orchard is pretty traditional, but also fairly engaged with historical-critical stuff. It is out of print and used copies are fairly expensive. There is a three-volume re-typeset version on Lulu with much less tiny print, but that version is also expensive. There was a successor to this volume published in 1975, A New Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, but that one is also out of print and does not seem to come up as much; its perspective probably lands closer to modern historical-critical commentaries than the Orchard commentary.

Other products in this category you might look into: Thomas Aquinas’s Catena Aurea, The Great Commentary of Cornelius A’ Lapide, A Practical Commentary on Holy Scripture, the notes released alongside various editions of the Confraternity Bible.
 
CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC RESOURCES

These products represent a kind of boutique school of Biblical interpretation aimed largely at an audience of practicing Catholics (EWTN-watchers, say). These resources are engaged with historical-critical study, but also engaged with conservative Protestant interpretation, the Church Fathers, etc. There aren’t a great deal of scholars in this little club, but they produce some of the best products for lay Catholics, and I personally find their arguments convincing on many topics. These are people like Scott Hahn, Curtis Mitch, Brant Pitre, John Bergsma, Jeff Cavins, Tim Gray, and Mary Healy. Arguably, they are unjustifiably conservative and have a bias against hard truths that historical-criticism has revealed about the Bible’s accuracy and reliability. But also arguably, they expose a lot of popular theories in historical-criticism as dubious and tendentious, and they represent a sober middle-ground between pre-modern Catholic interpretation, conservative Protestant/Evangelical interpretation, and historical-critical interpretation.

Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: New Testament (2010) - This New Testament contains the text of the Revised Standard Version Second Catholic Edition with extensive footnotes. It is a compilation of commentaries on individual parts of the New Testament originally published separately, combined in one volume along with a concise concordance. The commentary (almost exclusively written by Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch) is extensive and effortlessly ranges across many topics and approaches (textual, historical, catechetical, spiritual, liturgical, etc). The book is extremely affordable, and I highly recommend it for the average Catholic. Supposedly the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: Old Testament is text-complete and will come out in a year or two, but unhappily there are rumblings that Ignatius might only publish it as a separate volume (or two volumes) rather than giving us a complete one-volume Ignatius Catholic Study Bible.

The Navarre Bible: New Testament Expanded Edition (2008) - The Navarre Bible is a series of commentaries translated from Spanish, published along with the Biblical text, written by the faculty of the University of Navarra, which is associated with Opus Dei and its founder Saint Josemaría Escrivá. It is available in a variety of formats, mostly multi-volume sets of hardcovers or softcovers, but here I have highlighted the Navarre Bible: New Testament Expanded Edition because it gives you the whole New Testament with Biblical text (Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition) and extensive commentary in one volume. The commentary is largely explanatory and devotional, with lots of quotes from saints and especially from Saint Josemaría Escrivá. I do not like this volume quite as much as the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: New Testament, as it is more expensive and not as wide-ranging in the topics it covers. But many Catholics consider the Navarre Bible’s spiritual commentary to be very profound.
 
A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: The Old Testament (2018) - This single volume consists of general introductions and discussions of each book of the Old Testament (but not verse-by-verse commentary). Historical and liturgical issues are considered at length. It strikes a nice balance of taking claims from “mainstream”/liberal historical critics seriously without being slavishly deferential to them and accepting questionable theories as fact just because they have been popular among German liberal Protestants for 200 years. It is a great volume to have, given that the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible and the Navarre Bible lack single-volume products covering the Old Testament. This is another book that I personally highly recommend.

The Great Adventure Catholic Bible (2018) - This complete Bible (Revised Standard Version Second Catholic Edition text) contains study helps based on The Great Adventure Bible Study Series. That series is largely based on the narrative parts of the Bible, and so the bonus materials (articles, timeline charts, sidebars, etc.) are strong on certain books of the Bible and very thin on all the others, but they give you an excellent look at the overall narrative thrust of the Bible and salvation history. Also, this Bible costs $60 and doesn’t even have a sewn binding, so that sucks.

A Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (2008-2019) - This is a series of thick separate-volume commentaries on the books of the New Testament spearheaded by Mary Healy. These volumes strike a nice balance of taking the claims of historical-critical academics seriously while also challenging them. All the volumes are not necessarily of the same quality, so look up reviews before investing in one.

The Didache Bible (2015) - This is a complete single-volume Bible with footnotes throughout, but the footnotes are all based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. There are also a bunch of one-page apologetics inserts. So this is an excellent volume if you want a kind of fusion of Bible and catechism, but historical and other non-catechetical issues are not covered much. The Didache Bible comes in two flavors: one version uses the Revised Standard Version Second Catholic Edition for the Biblical text; this is the more ubiquitous version. The other version uses the New American Bible Revised Edition; it includes the New American Bible Revised Edition notes as well as the Didache Bible notes, making it a very stuffed volume indeed. (Occasionally the more skeptical historical-critical NABRE notes contradict the Didache notes, which is rather funny but also potentially alarming.)

Other products in this category you might look into: Inside the Bible: An Introduction to Each Book of the Bible, The Catholic Scripture Study Bible, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible, Walking With God: A Journey through the Bible, articles and books by Jimmy Akin about the Bible.
 
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I have come to distrust what is “new” and “modern” regarding scholarship. Is that fair or accurate? Maybe, but maybe not. What I do know is that it can be (“can be” I said) arrogant and revisionist to assume that, almost 2,000 years after the fact, our generation is more enlightened, more perceptive, more knowledgeable about those events than the eyewitnesses; than Saint Jerome; than the scholars who have handed the faith on to us.

As it is with bible translations, having recourse to several commentaries often provides the clearest picture for the believer.
 
HISTORICAL-CRITICAL RESOURCES

These works use the historical-critical method of studying the Bible, as it was developed in 19th and 20th-century German academia, liberal Protestant and modernist circles, secular universities, 20th century mainline Protestant scholarship, etc. Most Catholic Bible scholars at universities around the world work primarily in this tradition. This sort of work is often disturbing to practicing Catholics because of the skeptical positions taken. I personally think that many of the mainstay theories of the historical-critical method are extremely dubious, built on a whole pile of tendentious assumptions, and remain popular largely through scholarly inertia and mostly-unexamined inherited biases (against the supernatural and miraculous, against Catholic ideas of authority, etc). But many other practicing Catholics would argue that most historical-critical conclusions are justified and well-supported by the evidence, and that we need to accept and grapple with them. And these resources are not even especially radical by historical-critical standards; indeed, in some of the more skeptical corners of the academic world, the below works would be considered conservative.

The New American Bible footnotes (1986/2011) - The New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE) is the de-facto official Catholic Bible in the United States (an earlier version of the translation is used for the readings at Mass). Virtually all editions of the New American Bible come with rather extensive notes, enough that every NABRE could almost be called a compact study Bible. These notes range across a variety of issues and generally reflect historical-critical considerations. At times the notes are pitched over the head of a typical reader and reflect scholarly considerations that are not well-explained. They often take skeptical positions concerning historical issues like how much of the Pentateuch really happened, how many of the words attributed to Jesus in the gospels are things that he really said, etc. Occasionally they are so skeptical that they are, quite frankly, flagrantly contrary to the Faith (e.g. the infamous note to Matthew 16:21-23 which denies that Jesus planned to die to redeem the world). But in all of these respects, the NABRE notes are a good foretaste of the sort of thing you will find in historical-critical-oriented Catholic commentary.

The Jerusalem, New Jerusalem, and Revised New Jerusalem Bible notes (1966/1985/2020) - The accompanying footnotes to the Jerusalem Bible and its successors also belong in the historical-critical family, and are similar in number to the NABRE notes (they are perhaps slightly more conservative, especially in the original Jerusalem Bible). Note that, unlike with the New American Bible, there are plenty of editions of these Bibles that lack the accompanying notes. If you want the footnotes, make sure you are buying the standard or study editions of these texts.
 
The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (1989) - This one-volume commentary (and its predecessor the Jerome Biblical Commentary) are the de-facto standard for Catholic historical-critical scholarship. It’s editors are the biggest names in 20th-century Catholic Bible scholarship. It endorses pretty much every theory you might associate with middle-of-the-road “mainstream”/liberal Biblical criticism. It is scholarly in its presentation, with lots of citations. It is unquestionably packed with content: in additional to verse-by-verse commentaries on the whole Bible, it has a whole mess of topical essays. It may be out of print.

The New Collegeville Bible Commentary: One Volume Hardcover Edition (2017) - The New Collegeville Bible Commentary (like its predecessor the Collegeville Bible Commentary) was a series of separate commentary volumes, but it is newly available in a nice one-volume hardcover spanning the whole Bible. It is less technical in its presentation than the New Jerome and aimed more at preachers and teachers. Most of its content is somewhat more recent than the New Jerome, and thus presumably more up-to-date, but it doesn’t really have any separate topical essays.

International Bible Commentary (1998) - Another one-volume commentary on the whole Bible, but with a twist. This book was edited by William R. Farmer, famously an advocate of the idea that the Gospel of Matthew was written before the Gospel of Mark (contra nearly all historical-critical scholars). It also seems to have a broader range of contributors (geographically speaking) than the New Jerome. As a result, it might provide a broader range of perspectives on historical issues while still landing firmly within the historical-critical family.

The Oxford Catholic Study Bible (2016) - If you want a one-volume study Bible with commentary covering the whole Bible reflecting Catholic historical-critical scholarship, here it is. The text is the New American Bible Revised Edition, with the NABRE notes of course. This is basically the Catholic version of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, except the study materials take the form of essays on each book of the Bible, presented at the front of the book in one big section, with the Biblical text then following in a separate section, rather than footnote commentary on the same page as the Biblical text. I find that irritating, but your mileage may vary.

The Little Rock Study Bible (2011) - This study Bible uses the New American Bible Revised Edition (with the NABRE notes of course), and it is directly related to Liturgical Press and the Collegeville family of products. Compared to the Oxford, it is much less academic in presentation and aimed more at the average Catholic. Its study materials come mostly in the form of sidebars throughout the text, which talk a lot about life application stuff and social justice. It has an attractive single-column layout. It is probably the best complete, one-volume study Bible for the average Catholic on the market (only the Didache Bible really competes).
 
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The Sacra Pagina series (1991-2008) - This is a series of separate commentaries on the books of the New Testament, the main such series in the English-speaking Catholic world. If you are doing a historical-critical deep-dive into a particular New Testament book, see if you can get the relevant Sacra Pagina volume from the library. The Old Testament equivalent of the Sacra Pagina series is the Berit Olam series, but the Berit Olam series seems less specifically Catholic and doesn’t bother to cover the entire Old Testament canon.

Other products in this category you might look into: Catholic Bible: Personal Study Edition, The Anselm Academic Study Bible, The Paulist Biblical Commentary, An Introduction to the New Testament by Raymond E. Brown. Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI for more stuff that challenges historical-critical dogma while still largely standing in the historical-critical tradition. The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church for the latest detailed statement by the Church on how we should view the historical-critical method, and how we should study the Bible generally.

OTHER RESOURCES

Logos/Verbum - Verbum is the Catholic version of Logos, a high-tech platform that sells digital versions of Bible-related and other Christianity-related products. Books on Verbum are extensively indexed, and Verbum has lots of great tools for cross-referencing between different products you own. So among other things, if you own a whole bunch of Bible commentaries on Verbum, you could select a particular Bible verse, and then Verbum could instantly pull up every relevant commentary passage in every product you own. Many of the above products are available on Verbum. The downside is that Verbum is very expensive, both to buy in and to get additional books.

Biblia Clerus - This is a free website maintained by the Holy See’s Congregation for the Clergy. You could think of it as a poor man’s Verbum, with a focus on pre-modern Biblical commentary, papal writings and addresses, and official Church documents. You can look up a particular verse of the Bible, click on the ugly little blue banner, and links to a whole bunch of relevant commentary from Church Fathers, popes, etc. will pop up on the left side of your screen.

The Word of God in Sacred Scripture – MaybeToday.org - Check out this useful website for more opinions on Catholic Bible products. You want the drop-down labeled “SCRIPTURA” at the top.

http://catholicbibles.blogspot.com/ and http://catholicbibletalk.com/ - The (now closed) Catholic Bibles Blog and its successor Catholic Bible Talk are really the only place on the internet for informed discussion of new Catholic Bible products.
 
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phil19034 said:
Yes, a lot of priests love this one and I THINK (but could be wrong), it’s considered more for academic work
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That’s right. It functions in the same category as the historical-critical Hermeneia series and the evangelical Word commentary series: it presumes a working knowledge of Greek and Hebrew (and sometimes other languages like Latin and Syriac)

I think it’s important to note that most of these academic commentaries don’t do a lot of “explaining” (as I’ve discovered): they mainly summarise the scholarship, explore points of contention and cite other sources profusely to enable the reader to easily investigate other scholars (instead of wandering aimlessly through a library like I do often).

They’re still excellent texts, especially for Catholics who go on to do formal study in theology, but they’re not texts that are supposed to be read from cover to cover.
 
po18guy said:
As it is with bible translations, having recourse to several commentaries often provides the clearest picture for the believer.
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Bithynian said:
They’re still excellent texts, especially for Catholics who go on to do formal study in theology, but they’re not texts that are supposed to be read from cover to cover.
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I agree.

Out of the 3 commentaries on Luke in our home, my wife’s go-to commentary is The Gospel of Luke by Father Pablo Gadenz of the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture series while attending the Women’s Catholic Bible Study (WCBS) in our archdiocese.
 
CCSS is good (and written well with approachable language), and I have most of them for the Gospels, but I also like the New Interpreters Bible Commentary, the Navarre Bible commentary, Sacra Pagina series, and William Barclay’s Daily Study Bible Series. The later is not Catholic, but just like eating a turkey leg, there is a lot of meat there, but you just have to avoid the tendons (non-Catholic teachings). I feel having a good breadth of commentaries is needed and placing all your eggs in one basket while less costly, may not be the best. Mind you, I did not buy the whole series for any of these… mostly I just concentrated on the gospels.
 
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@Bithynian, would you care to summarize, in a sentence or two, your view of the similarities/ differences between Sacra Pagina and the CCSS? The Sacra Pagina series is about 10 years older, and also close to 50 percent longer. I prefer longer to shorter, but I also tend to prefer newer to older, which leaves me in a quandary here.
 
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BartholomewB said:
our view of the similarities/ differences between Sacra Pagina and the CCSS
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That’s a good question! Put very briefly, CCSS is intended for laypeople, Sacra Pagina is intended for more scholarly interests.

I would get the CCSS. As a layperson (even one who did study Classics), I’ve become less enamoured with strictly scholarly commentaries like Hermeneia and Sacra Pangina: they’re far too comprehensive subject-wise and far too dense content-wise to make for general edifying reading.
 
Thank you! You put it in a nutshell. Just the kind of answer I was hoping for!
 
G_Otis said:
The 17-volume Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (CCSS) series for the New Testament is finally complete. Deacons and clergy, would you agree that this is THE BEST Catholic Commentary on the NT currently available? I know of Bible study groups using it as an additional resource.
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In a hopefully connected manner - it should also be noted… that

The Church and Popes oft-suggest simply jumping into the Bible - starting with the New Testament

Always in a Faith-Filled Prayerful to the Author God manner…
 
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