I will be interested in seeing how this turns out. In the review referenced in post #42 a note from the publicist states that cross references were not included because it was not clear who owned them. I’m not sure that I totally ‘buy’ this explanation. Cross references were included in the original RSV-CE (1966 edition).
Meanwhile, as you all may know, the combination of Oxford University Press and Ignatius have put out various RSV-CE versions. The original compact editions mixed a 1971 New Testament with the ‘Catholic’ changes in the original RSV-CE. Later, in their Reader’s version, Oxford tried to go back to the original text…but didn’t quite catch all the changes needed to revert to the original. Much of this is discussed in this thread:
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=91598&highlight=rsv-ce+needs+corrections
An output of this thread was this list of differences between the various RSV-CE versions:
web.archive.org/web/20071218022237/http://umsis.miami.edu/~medmunds/RSVCEdiff.htm
Recently, the Oxford University Press/Ignatius ‘combo’ put out a large print Reader’s Edition. This edition had the lectionary of readings and the newly formatted RSV-CE text (presumably the 1966 first edition) with ‘new’ headers within the text (I’d be interested in knowing if they are not in fact the same headers now appearing in the RSV-CE Second Edition). This large print version also suffered from a lack of cross-references, as all Oxford University Press versions have.
From what I’ve seen, I suspect that the St. Benedict Press version may be using this same reformatted text, just in different or smaller font, as the large print versions. That would provide a very simple explanation as to why cross references were not included in the St. Benedict Press version. Interestingly enough, the text headers were not present in the original RSV-CE version (1966), but the cross-references were…so why include the headers but not the cross-references? I guess for me I’d place more importance on being faithful to the original 1966 RSV-CE rather than whatever text the National Council of Churches is currently using.
I wish I knew how this all really works. For instance, are these new bible editions all using the same ‘electronic’ version of 1966 RSV-CE text that has had to be re-created, or are they all really going back to the NCC version and starting from there?
And is this one reason why Ignatius developed their 2nd RSV-CE edition…so that they could be ‘free’ from the original NCC text in some ‘legal’ way?
rocketrob