Great Adventure Catholic Study Bible

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Any thoughts about the Great Adventure Catholic Bible?
 
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It would be great to be used with the Bible Study, but as a stand alone Bible, not so much. For me (a former Baptist) the NT lacked footnotes of the RSV Ignatius Study Bible. I’ve used it for Cavins’ studies on Matthew and Luke and had to use NABRE and RSV as well.
 
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I tried the Great Adventure Bible Study course and did not find it useful. After trying it for about 2 weeks I quit and opted for my original plan to just read the Bible cover to cover. Since the course did not work out for me, I have no interest in a special Bible designed by the same guy.
 
I haven’t taken the course, but I have the Bible and love it. I find the timeline feature, and the marking of important events, very useful.
 
Gorgias said:
Interesting. What did you find ‘not useful’ about it?
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My first problem with it was technical. Because of my traveling around for work and family stuff, I could not take the course at a parish, so I signed up for a free Bible self-study on their website where every couple days or so, I was supposed to get a new assignment to read, via e-mail, that I could match up with the timeline. I got the first e-mail and maybe the second. After that they stopped coming, and weren’t hung up in my spam filter. I was also annoyed by the fact that Great Adventure had added me to a sales spam mailing list which I couldn’t seem to get off of, and I was getting their ad e-mails at the same time I was NOT getting the Bible study e-mails. (I particularly remember one ad for a video on How to Improve My Marriage which I definitely did NOT need or want but I got the ad like 3 times…I was wodering how they would just assume that somebody signing up for a Bible study course automatically had a marriage in need of improvement.)

After about 2 weeks of this I contacted them and they wrote back providing me with some website that had the assignments listed on it, so I didn’t need the e-mails. I looked at the assignment list and it was a whole lot of skipping around and skipping parts of the Bible, allegedly to tell the Bible stories in some coherent way or whatever, but skipping around and leaving stuff out bothers me because I always wonder what was in the skipped part. Plus the whole reason I was reading the Bible straight through again (I had done this already once as a teenager) was that the Mass readings skip all over the place and leave a lot of the OT out, so I didn’t see how more skipping and leaving out chapters was helping. I came to the conclusion that the course was more for people who had rarely or never picked up a Bible before and might not be familiar with the whole OT Bible story and how it led into the Jesus story. The Bible timeline was a bit interesting, but other than that, the study program wasn’t suited to my needs.

I am now up to Tobit in my own read-through of the Bible and it’s working just fine without having to do a course or worse yet pay to take one at a parish.
 
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That’s not good, @Tis_Bearself. I took it at our parish. We divided up our group into small groups of four. Did the reading and questions at home, then gathered and discussed our answers then watched the video. I would sit there with my mouth literally hanging open - what insight. We all learned so much. I would take it again. It was hard work, but well worth it. I could never sleep on Bible Study nights as my mind was just racing with thoughts and new learning. Maybe you can catch it at a parish some time.
 
We’ll see. My past couple of experiences with parish Bible study groups have not been great, since most of the people are at such a beginner level of Bible study that they don’t really contribute anything new for me and often have questions or insights that seem to me to be very basic. A lot of Catholic “bible studies” are often things where you read a couple passages and then everybody goes around the room sharing what thoughts or questions they have on them. I find that to be a little ho-hum. “Jesus is calling me to look at how I could do this better or do that better…” well, yes but I could have figured that out on my own without needing to sit in a group for an hour.

The Scripture subforum of CAF is actually a much better and more interesting place for me to ask questions and learn since we have people on here with an in-depth knowledge of the Scripture that I just don’t meet in my average parish group.

I also have really enjoyed some programs I’ve heard with Gayle Erwin on the radio. He’s a Protestant preacher but is not anti-Catholic and he is great at presenting the Bible, uses lots of humor.
 
I love that course. Highly recommend. The OT was always opaque to me and the Great Adventure helped me finally get a grip on the narrative and the basics of salvation history. I don’t know about getting the study bible on its own without the course though.
 
Neithan said:
The OT was always opaque to me
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If I may ask, because it seems like a lot of people have this issue, could you expand a little on how/ why the OT was “opaque” to you?

It has always seemed to be pretty clear to me, but others seem to find it not so clear, and I’m curious as to why that is. What am I missing?

I’ve said before on CAF that the disjointed presentation of the OT via the Mass readings, where you pretty much only get little sections of each book that support whatever the Gospel theme is, don’t to me convey a coherent understanding of the OT, so I can see that maybe being a problem for people if they did not learn the OT stories in some way other than Mass readings.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
If I may ask, because it seems like a lot of people have this issue, could you expand a little on how/ why the OT was “opaque” to you?
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I didn’t have a good sense of the chronology of the narrative and how all the books fit into it. There is a little bookmark in the Great Adventure study — the “timeline” — that was just the missing piece of the puzzle for me. Jeff Cavins’ talks also connected a lot of things. You’re right about the way the OT is presented in the missal, it’s difficult to put it together.

The “next level” of study would probably be reading a scholar like Scott Hahn. I haven’t read any of his books yet, but I saw a talk with him once about the Davidic Kingdom that was amazingly insightful. I think it was an EWTN program but I don’t recall exactly.
 
I notice that Cavins started out at CFNI in Dallas, a Pentecostal / Evangelical Bible college. I imagine he learned a lot about scriptural study there.Of all the many Scripture courses I’ve taken, including Catholic grad, the Baptist and Evangelical schools have been among the best. And not a word against Catholics.
I don’t sneer at Bible colleges. Many are quite good at what they do.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
My first problem with it was technical. Because of my traveling around for work and family stuff, I could not take the course at a parish, so I signed up for a free Bible self-study on their website where every couple days or so, I was supposed to get a new assignment to read, via e-mail, that I could match up with the timeline.
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Hmm… was it their full study? For free? hmm…

Anyway, I’m with you – I’ve led their studies over the years, and the most recent time I did so (about two years ago, now), they had added an online component. Some glitches, though. I just figured it was growing pains…
Tis_Bearself said:
I looked at the assignment list and it was a whole lot of skipping around and skipping parts of the Bible, allegedly to tell the Bible stories in some coherent way or whatever, but skipping around and leaving stuff out bothers me because I always wonder what was in the skipped part.
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So, if it really was the “Great Adventure” study, then what they attempt to do is to cover the narrative books, so that a sense for the greater picture. To my experience, they don’t “skip around”, but they do omit portions in the 8-week study (there’s just too much material and not enough time to expect that folks will read whole books of the Bible between meetings). In the 24-week study, it’s a little more manageable, but still challenging. In a self-study, though, I think it’d be ideal – you could take your time reading the Scriptures, and then once you’d finished the assigned book(s) / chapter(s), you’d be able to go back to the lesson.
Tis_Bearself said:
I came to the conclusion that the course was more for people who had rarely or never picked up a Bible before and might not be familiar with the whole OT Bible story and how it led into the Jesus story.
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That’s probably a good take on it. 👍
Tis_Bearself said:
If I may ask, because it seems like a lot of people have this issue, could you expand a little on how/ why the OT was “opaque” to you?

It has always seemed to be pretty clear to me, but others seem to find it not so clear, and I’m curious as to why that is. What am I missing?
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To my mind, it’s critical to have an understanding of the culture which gave rise to the texts, if we want to understand the Scriptures well. A personal read-through of the Bible doesn’t enable you to pick up on things that a 21st-century Westerner would understand. We end up glossing over things that have real impact! A good Bible study fills in those gaps.
Tis_Bearself said:
the disjointed presentation of the OT via the Mass readings… don’t to me convey a coherent understanding of the OT
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Neithan said:
You’re right about the way the OT is presented in the missal, it’s difficult to put it together.
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Correct. Remember, the Lectionary isn’t a Bible study, it’s Liturgy. If you’re coming to Mass hoping to get a Bible study out of it, then you’re missing the point.
 
Gorgias said:
Hmm… was it their full study? For free? hmm…
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I doubt it was the full monty that I would have gotten if I’d paid fees and/or attended one at a parish. I thought the freebie study would be a good way to try out their product and if I liked it, there are a couple parishes where I might have been able to pick a few weeks when I’d be able to attend most sessions, and go in person. However, since they managed the freebie study so badly, it ended up being a marketing failure, as I wasn’t inclined to hand them my money when they couldn’t even manage to send me regular study e-mails, but could send out the daily ad spam just fine apparently.
Gorgias said:
Remember, the Lectionary isn’t a Bible study, it’s Liturgy. If you’re coming to Mass hoping to get a Bible study out of it, then you’re missing the point.
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It’s not that we expect Mass to be a bible study, although skilled homilists are often able to weave in some tidbits about the readings so one does learn something.

It’s more that if one’s only exposure to the OT is the Mass readings, without more - and that “more” could be something as minor as children’s stories or Bible cartoons on the patriarchs and prophets, or “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” - you’re not going to be able to put the whole OT timeline together just based on what you hear at Mass. And even the Great Adventure timeline only covers about 12 books of the OT plus 2 of the NT. It leaves a lot out.

When I was a kid I had several of those “Arch Books” that churches would sell in the nave, about people like Abraham and Jonah. I also remember reading a fairly long weekly Sunday comic strip dealing with OT Bible stories in the newspaper (you wouldn’t see that nowadays), which covered people like Lot, King Saul and King David. We learned a little bit in Catholic grade school about the OT (But not much). “The Ten Commandments” film played on TV so we knew about Moses from that, and of course every kid knew Adam and Eve and Noah and the ark. Therefore I had a reasonable understanding at least of the patriarchs and kings before I ever actually read all the OT. But I can totally see someone else not having that background so it’s all new stuff.
 
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Gorgias said:
A personal read-through of the Bible doesn’t enable you to pick up on things that a 21st-century Westerner would understand. We end up glossing over things that have real impact! A good Bible study fills in those gaps.
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It works for me pretty well at this stage because I’m old and have listened to enough Bible scholars, including some of the priests who had such skills, talk about the Bible over the years, I’ve read various Wiki articles and gone to the Holy Land with a guide as well as reading the commentary in the text and whatever other commentary I feel I need. There is always something new to learn, Bible-history-wise. I did not have this background the first time I read through the Bible, as I was about 14, and there was no Internet to go look stuff up on, so I didn’t appreciate it as much and some of it didn’t stay with me, which is why I’m reading it again now.

The other thing is that like I said, Catholic “Bible Study” often does not get into the cultural or historical overtones of Scripture. Most of the time it is just an excuse for people to sit around sharing their very high-level impressions of God’s/ Jesus’ teachings, or sometimes ask the kinds of questions that CAF answers in 2 posts. I am not faulting people for asking basic questions, but it’s not what I want to be spending meeting time on.
 
I think it’s a great Bible to have, regardless of whether you go through the Great Adventure Bible Timeline video study. It has some very helpful essays, maps, and charts, and the color-coding helps you keep straight what time period the book was written in.

That said, it’s not really a “study Bible” (nowhere does it refer to itself as such, and Ascension Press does not call it that anywhere). It is also definitely not a Bible commentary (with verse-by-verse notes). So if that’s what someone is expecting, I can see why they would be disappointed.

It’s mainly designed to help you read through the Bible while keeping in mind the overarching story. It’s not going to go in-depth into the meaning of every verse.
 
I loved it! I bought the Bible and followed the 90-day program. It was incredible and I finally have an understanding of salvation history. It was a big commitment, so be prepared for that. You read on average 4 chapters per day. I had a notebook where I would make notes and try to visually put the puzzle together as I read the Scripture. They also have great timelines for all the important time periods of salvation history and I would constantly go back to those as I was reading. I just finished the 90-day program and now feel prepared to tackle on the rest of the Bible!
 
I realized that I had to be Catholic after reading the historical books listed for the course, and hearing the lectures related; I found the only way to legitimate participation in Jesus is via the person he 'In Person" sent to me, found in the Catholic Church.
I have now read these historical books several times and know the heritage I now share as a Catholic.
If attachment works, here is the bookmark that came with the course, listing the books to read for the historical narrative.
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

John Martin
 
We had different levels of knowledge at our study, but the way the questions are phrased and the Bible reference given, all answers were on point - not the well I think it is saying… type of answer. The Cavins’ studies are more “factual” rather that the touchy-feely type. I have always preferred the OT for some reason. Maybe it’s because so much of it is a history and I like history. It covers so many years, where the NT is a shorter time span. I’m with you about Bible studies where everyone goes around and says what it is saying to them. It reminds me of the Bible studies in my Baptist days. Self-interpretation.
 
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