I just found these old posts about The New Jerome Biblical Commentary which seem to be saying: “its not very popular.” I purchased the 1968 version of The Jerome Biblical Commentary way back yonder and use if now and again. So, with all old chatter about the New JBC it makes me wonder if the old one has similar problems and I’m too blind to see them. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
I was one of the earlier posters on this thread and I panned it.
I like to look at it. There’s some really good articles on Paul, Church pronouncements, etc.
It’s so big, it’s really a library of books.
a couple things I found:
- Way in there someplace, it says that the best way to study the bible is under somebody who has some genuine academic credentials. Now some of the same editors and authors, who were on the Pontifical Biblical commission, issued their document The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, where THERE they recommend somebody read and study the Bible alongside a commentary book. So, there’s two legitimate ways to dig into scripture.
- By comparing its essay on the Book of Ruth with the Jewish Publication Society’s commentary on Ruth, I came across this variance of opinion: NJBC says the marriage of Ruth and Boaz WAS a levirate marriage, but JPS says that it was NOT a levirate, and text in the first chapter of Ruth seems to favor this side of the discussion.
- At the appropriate spot in the essay on the gospel of John, it supports the idea that the “last supper” (a term not known in the Bible, but rather the title of a painting by DaVinci), was probably not on Thursday of “holy week.” Whether you agree or not, this book presents the case that it was not.
- This book seems to stress the importance of (is it) Rudolf (?) Bultmann, who, in the early 20th century, was the liberal Protestant who said the story of Jesus was embedded in myth. He proposed that the story of Jesus should be “demythologized” and “re-mythologized” for modern audiences. to my knowledge, no one has done this de-/re-mythologizing, but there seem to be a lot of “Bultees” around who are influenced by him. somewhere within “Jesus of Nazareth” Benedict XVI skewers one of Bultmann’s ideas
- There is an essay on “dogmatic pronouncements” but there is nothing that I’ve found in NJBC cross-referenced to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which was published about the same year (1993).
As I have proposed several times, everyone should decide how big a library of Bibles and study Bibles and commentaries they want to have. I think if your budget is at or above $1500, you should have this book. I think it would take a good ten years to get comfortable with this material.
Somewhere near the beginning, the late Fr. Raymond S. Brown (who is deeply revered by a lot of aging Catholic priests) said that this “new” edition of the JBC revised about 75% of the original JBC. He suggested if anybody wanted to attempt to revise this “new” version in the future, they’d probably throw out a lot of this edition, too. 1) I’m not smart enough to know what he really meant here. 2) therefore, I’m not smart enough to challenge this assertion, either.
He definitely says not to quote NJBC as ‘gospel’ or in some fundamentalist fashion. Brown’s remarks about the NJBC are a fair warning about its contents – notwithstanding the obligatory nihil obstat and imprimatur on the book.
