I use only a small number of Bible versions regularly, although I possess many. The Confraternity Version is one of those which I most cherish and regard as authoritative (along with, among others, the Douay-Rheims-Challoner version). I have noticed a number of things in earlier replies that seem to be somewhat uninformed. Here are some rather lengthy comments about this great Bible version, especially considering the matter of degree of completeness in published editions of it.
The Confraternity Version (C.V.) of Bible took many years to complete. The New Testament thereof came into print long before much of the Old Testament appeared, the latter bit by bit in separate volumes, with single volume editions of the full Bible (including, of course, the deuterocanonical books, which Protestants term Apocrypha) in the intervening period rounding out the Old Testament (O.T.) with the balance in the Douay-Challoner Version for those books of the O.T. which the Confraternity Version project had not yet finalised. As the 1950s rolled by into the mid-1960s, increasingly more of a Confraternity-Douay Bible included the books of the O.T. in the on-going Confraternity Version translation.
The most satisfactory solution, for consulting the Confraternity Version Bible in its fulness, is to use the complete Confraternity O.T. that only appeared separately (in multi-volume and, even more difficult to find, single-volume editions) along with a separately published Confraternity Version N.T.
The Confraternity Version, indeed, was completed when the full O.T. text of the C.V. at last appeared, a fact of which many Roman Catholics and other Christians are not aware. Alas, far inferior New American Bible (N.A.B.) appeared (rather confusingly, also under the auspices of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) with the complete texts of both the N.A.B.'s O.T. and of its N.T. in editions that had them together in a single volume rather quickly upon the heels of completion of the C.V., unjustly causing the N.A.B. to displace the C…V. from favour, which resulted in the withdrawal of edtions of the C.V. from the market. Very few (if any) editions (multi-volume or otherwise) of the C.V. with the full O.T. appeared because of this.
Even after the C.V. Old Testament had been completed and, at last, was available in a single volume for the O…T., publishers continued to market single-volume C.V. Bibles comprising both the New and the Old Testaments only in editions that continued to mingle its O.T. with books from the Douay Version; perhaps this was to sell off stocks of Confraternity-Douay Bibles before finally issuing Bible editions including the entire O.T. and N.T. Confraternity texts, something that, regrettably, seems never to have happened.
The best that the buyer can do who wishes to have the great Confraternity Version Bible in a single volume, whether to obtain through the Amazon WWW sites or even otherwise (as of late 2008), is to obtain a mixed edition of the Confraternity Bible that includes its N.T. and as much of the Confraternity O.T. as he can find, with the balance of the O.T. in the Douay-Challoner Version. The better and more comprehensive option with the fewest number of volumes to buy and to use, is to obtain the Confraternity complete O.T. separately, of which
Amazon.com has listed two editions, as accessed Nov. 2008, on the
Amazon.com WWW site, along with a Confraternity N.T. in another single volume, which thus provides all of the Confraternity Version.
The Knox Bible (a 20th century translation, of high literary quality in its English style, by Ronald Knox, based on the Latin Vulgate with resort also to the Hebrew and Greek texts of, respectively, the O.T. and N.T.) remained in print, but it, also, began to in lose popularity; at any rate, Knox’s translation was too often too paraphrastic to be any kind of rival either to the preceding Douay-Rheims-Challoner Version (from Latin) or to the C.V. (from Hebrew and Greek). There consequently is a crying need all the more for a new printing or new edition of the full C.V., with its entire O.T. included.
There are some inconvenient aspects of the Confraternity and Knox versions for users unfamiliar with them and with earlier Roman Catholic (R.C.) translations, e.g. the numbering of the Psalms (being that of the Latin Vulgate and Greek Septuagint), the use of Latinised forms of names rather than the forms that are more familiar most Protestant Bibles, and now in subsequent R.C. ones, too (e.g. Noe rather than Noah), the Latinised titles used for Old Testament books which in some cases differ significantly from what one is accustomed to encounter both in Protestant and in subsequent R.C. translations, but, due to its overall excellence, one bears gladly with these traits of the C.V.
While the use of a form of the so-called Greek “Critical Text”, inferior to the faithful variants of the Textus Receptus (T.R.) characterises even the C.V.'s New Testament (N.T.), the C.V. had a much more cautious approach to the variants available in surviving manuscript “families” of the Greek N.T. and in the “marginalia” of in the various Greek Critical Texts that depart from the Ecclesiastical Text found in the Textus Receptus and the Complutensian Polyglot; indeed, the N.T. of the C.V. seems to have relied upon a more moderate form of Critical Text than of the Critical Texts used by translators in subsequent R.C. and Protestant English Bibles alike.
God blesses the believer who reads His revealed Scriptures carefully and who meditates upon them. That is all the more reason to avoid poor, inadequate, or compromised versions of the Bible, and to read all of it, including the deutero-canonical writings.