Manfred,
Nice to read your comments, even if some are more pertinent than others on the issues raised. An inexpensive paperback edition of the A.V. (K.J.V.) Bible with the Apocrypha bears the ISBN no.: 9780192835253. If you put in this ISBN number (with no spaces between any of the numbers for that WWW site’s search engine) to plumb
Amazon.com or another of the Amazon WWW sites, you can find this. I seem to recall that this cheap Oxford University Press edition is a text only edition, i.e. without the marginal notes and references. Cambridge University Press is notable for having the best and most authentic editions of the A.V. Bible, with a choice of leather-bound editions, at relatively high prices, which have the A.V. with its “Apocrypha”, original marginal notes and references, and other amenities. So, if you are willing not to compromise due to cost, a Cambridge University Press edition is the route to go in purchasing the A.V. (Those marginal readings and notes, and, I think, the references too, were added after the initial 1611 printing by members of the translation teams themselves, and it is they which a really good and authoritative A.V. Bible would include, in full. The marginal notes notes and references include lead the reader at times throughout the O.T. to the deutero-canonical writings in the A.V.'s “Apocrypha”; often sectarian-minded editors and publishers delete those particular references, frequently others as well. Some American editions even dare to replace or augment them with sets of marginal notes and references other than those which the A.V. intended, and those alone and in full, to be used in conjunction with its text.)
The A.V. translators and their Anglican auspices, the Crown and bishops of the Church of England, certainly did not deny the existence of the “Apocrypha”, even if the 39 Articles of Religion of Anglicanism redefined the place of the deutero-canonical writings in Holy Scripture. The vulgar sectarians who have tampered with the A.V. are culpable, certainly, but one should not lay at the feet of the C. of E. the desecrations to the A.V. Bible that non-conformists and sectaries carried out in excising the “Apocrypha” and marginal references throughout the Bible pointing to it. The Crown still insists on the use of the A.V. Bible with the Apocrypha for Royal use, e.g. for Coronation oaths sworn on the Bible.
While it is natural and fitting for a Catholic Christian to prefer the Douay-Rheims Version to the A.V., the place of the A.V. in Bible studies remains important. It is a very precise and beautiful translation of the Holy Scriptures from the Masoretic Hebrew O.T. and Byzantine Ecclesiastical Greek N.T., the best ever undertaken or published deriving uniformly from those sources. There are some passages where a moderate Protestant (i.e. Anglican) bias is evident, but the A.V. never goes to the extremes of the later translations which are so dear to the sectaries (e.g., the New International Version and other such deplorable translations and/or paraphrases, which, of course, never included the deutero-canonical writings at all).
Anyway, good luck finding a true A.V. Bible with “Apocrypha” included! I wish that the kind of extra-Eucharistic devotions that you mention even were available here in modernist R.C. dominated Rouyn-Noranda. I miss them, as well as the litanies and novenas that used to be part of every parish’s weekly fare.
Jerry Parker
Bottom-line: I want a COUNTER-REFORMATION Bible. Fighting the Reformation was one of the most glorious spiritual wars ever fought, in the history of Western Man. Git’r done. :knight1:
