That link doidn’t work. This seems to:
(I think you typed “htmlt” - rather than “html”
)
A quotation:
- Recently, we’ve noticed that the detailed text notes of the The New Catholic Answer Bible have “some theologically liberal errors.” This should not deter a Roman Catholic from purchasing this volume. According to the author, “That’s not why readers have (and buy) the Bible in the first place. Most probably don’t even read the footnotes. They want the apologetic notes.” Okay, ignore the notes, at least you’ll have the inserts and Biblical text… or do you? Do you have a Biblical text you can trust?
The author of the weblog, a Calvinist (& a member of CAF ), is unlikely to have much time for that Bible, simply because Calvinists are typically very conservative in Biblical matters: the Calvinist position is close to that of Biblical consevatives in Catholicism. Since one can be Catholic without being a Biblical conservative, Calvinists are unlikely to approve of the NCAB, which has been criticised by Catholic Biblical consevatives. Hence the comment quoted above.
The NAB is not flawless - no translation is. It has the necessary ecclesiastical licenses such as the Imprimatur & Nihil Obstat, & the meaning of these is that “nothing stands in the way” of its publication; these are permissions to publish it, not agreements with every last opinion in it: they approve the book as free of doctrinal error. The Church allows positions about the Biblical books that certain Christians (such as Calvinists) would not - so what counts as “liberal” by one reckoning will not necessarily be “liberal” by another.
If the NAB is so riddled with error, what does that say about the bishops who approved for public use it in 1970 ? To criticise the NAB on doctrinal grounds is very close to accusing the US bishops as a body of doctrinal error. Just possibly - this is rather improbable, admittedly - the bishops may be slightly better aware of just what it is & is not acceptable for a Catholic to say.
Criticisms quoted by the owner of that weblog, from a Catholic critic of the NAB, include this:
- **J’accuse: the NAB, in many places, daringly redacts, rearranges, or otherwise mistranslates the sacred text, and it does so in the service of the modernist critical hermeneutic which is revealed in its “perverse” introductions and commentary. **
The critic does not specify what he means by his words “mistranslat[ing] the…text”. As to the other things, this is no more than a rather hostile description of what any editor, translator, or commentator might be expected to do. It is not confined to Catholics, nor is it confined to the Biblical books.
A lot could be, and needs to be, said about that “accus[ation]” - what needs to be known (among other things) is,
by what standard is the critic criticising the NAB ? Unless one knows that, his comments are next to meaningless.
BTW - a more appropriate forum for the thread might be that concerned with
Sacred Scripture. You could always ask a moderator to move the thread.
The NAB is most often criticised for its notes - it does not include many variant readings, unlike the RSV in its various forms, including the Ignatius Bible. Equally, there are no notes on the composition or origin or structure of the books in the RSV; including the Ignatius edition - whereas the NAB does have these.