Hi, Kotek et alia!
Kotek, your wrote: I am aware that Oxford University Press came with an ESV with “Apocrypha” which of course makes that ESV edition usable for Catholics but it does not have any formal Church approval. I wish [that] someone would try to get the ESV approved so Catholics can canonically use it. I personally feel it is much better than the RSV-CE and maybe better than the NRSV.
How right you are about the English Standard Version (E.S.V.)! It really is superb and elegantly readable. With the “Apocrypha”, i.e. with the deuterocanonical writings of the Old Testament (O.T.), now included (even if rather aggravatingly relegated to the end of the Bible, following rather than preceding the New Testament (N.T.), it makes an excellent resource for Catholics. Either the hierarchy should approve this E.S.V. with Apocrypha, or move actively to have a “Catholic Edition” of the E.S.V. moved into editorial action. I wrote a fairly long review of the E.S.V. for various Amazon WWW sites, if anyone cares to read my views more fully.
Of the others, the N.R.S.V. is seductively appealing. The use of “inclusive language” is fairly restrained (e.g., there is no effort to make the God of the Bible paganly unisex or female!) but there are nagging textual issues still involved that have weakened every Bible in the line of the Revised Version/American Standard Version-Revised Standard Version Bibles (the R.V., the A.S.V., the R.S.V. in its various texts; these version are, most importantly, the New American Standard Version in its two texts, the R.S.V. in its usual Protestant-Anglican and oecumenical texts, the R.S.V.-C.E., the N.R.S.V., the R.S.V.-2nd C.E., and the E.S.V.). However, almost all Bible Versions which have come out since the World Wars are afflicted with the use of these aberrent “Critical Texts” for the N.T. The major exception has been the New King James Version (N.K.J.V.), which now exists in a form, in the excellent and pious
Orthodox Study Bible (ed. by Jack Norman Sparks; T. Nelson, 2008; ISBN 978-0-7180-0359-3), which Eastern Orthodox and, by extension, Roman and Eastern Catholics can use to great spiritual profit, and which retains the N.K.J.V.'s N.T. and puts the O.T., with
all of the deuterocanonical writings accepted variously by Orthodox and Catholics into the canon of the O.T., within an unbroken sequence, and which has been edited to conform the N.K.J.V.'s O.T. with the Greek Septuagint O.T.
Anyway, the N.R.S.V. is flowingly easy to read and, for the most part, gracefully worded; I would commend its use, but caution that a Catholic should consult other versions before accepting the N.R.S.V.'s readings as authoritative. For that, one needs to have on hand for comparison and spot-checking such an orthodox and conservative version as the old Confraternity Version (with O.T. text from no later than that of 1969 and the N.T. text of 1941), easily available on the used book market and which is** not** to be confused with its putative successor, the New American Bible (N.A.B.);
Amazon.com’s WWW site lists dozens of the old pre-1970 Confraternity Bibles available for purchase. Another older and rock-solidly reliable English Bible to use for comparison and spot-checking later versions, is, of course, the venerable and still pre-eminent Douay-Rheims-Challoner Version.
I very much like the Jerusalem Bible (J.B.) and its revision, the New Jerusalem Bible (N.J.B.). The wording of each of these is marvellously gracious and truly of literary refinement. One does need to keep in mind that these two versions are paraphrases and that at times one must compare their renderings with those of “formal equivalence” translations (e.g., any of the R.V./A.S.V./R.S.V. Bibles mentioned above, the old Confraternity Version, etc.) for a stricter translation. However, the paraphrasing in the J.B. and the N.J.B. is restrained and careful, so such problems do not arise very often.
Happy and blessed reading in your studies of the Holy Scriptures!
Jerry Parker
