In today’s prayer meeting, a participant who owns an STB mentioned something like ‘Course (Quartz? Kurz?..) Allen (Alan? Ellen?..)’ as the most comprehensive critical edition of the Catholic Bible. He said that all three generations of the German family have devoted their lives entirely to printing Bibles with critical apparatus.
As mentioned, it’s likely Kurt Aland, of the Nestle-Aland
Greek New Testament (Novum Testamentum Graece) fame.
What are some beginners’ and more advanced critical editions of Bibles especially for Theology students? I want Catholic instead of Protestant criticism.
If you’re looking for
a ‘critical edition’ of the biblical texts (which really means an attempt to reconstruct of the biblical text into something close as we can get to the original versions as the authors would have written them using available manuscripts), the modern standards are really the
Nestle-Aland (NA) or the United Bible Societies’
Greek New Testament (UBS / GNT) for the (Greek) New Testament (the actual text of the two editions are pretty much the same, they only differ in the extras - to be precise the UBS is geared more for translators, while the NA is more geared for scholars and students), while for the OT you have the German Bible Societies’
Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS, the fourth edition of the
Biblia Hebraica critical text) or
the older editions by Rudolf Kittel (BH or BHK) for the Hebrew (Masoretic) OT.
(For the Septuagint, there’s the so-called
Göttingen Septuagint and the Cambridge Septuagint, but unlike the GNT / NA or the UBS - which are just single books - these are hefty multi-volumes edition. Many people seem to use the more affordable one-volume
Septuaginta by Alfred Rahlfs instead, but this isn’t a true critical edition.)
Obviously, these critical editions are in the original languages - Greek and Hebrew. Or are you referring to something else - a translation?
Any language would be fine. What are some contemporary big names in the field of Biblical criticism and exegesis?
Depends on whether you mean ‘lower criticism’ (aka textual criticism) or ‘higher criticism’. In the textual criticism side, the universally-recognized contemporary names in that field would be folks such as the Alands (Kurt Aland, Barbara Aland) as well as Bruce Metzger. Kurt Aland and Metzger are pretty much the top two names in contemporary New Testament textual criticism. Yeah, they’re both German, and they’re both deceased (RIP). (To be fair, Germans - usually Germans of Protestant background - had dominated biblical scholarship ever since it kickstarted in the 18th century up to the early 20th century. I’ll be honest: Protestants have historically been more active and more prominent in the field of modern biblical criticism than Catholics.)
This page lists some good bibliography on NT textual criticism. (Yeah, I know, this is an Evangelical blog, but thankfully this is really an inter-denominational field of study.)
evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.jp/2012/09/top-ten-essential-works-in-new.html
