What do you think of the original Jerusalem Bible (if you have read it) and the New Jerusalem Bible? Or do you not have an opinion of it?
The Old Jerusalem Bible is decent - it’s in the top rank of Bibles that I don’t recommend. That is, it is far better than those Bibles that I actively avoid, and is the best of those to be used in a pinch (except for the Psalms, which are to be avoided). It is good, as I’ve mentioned, for long readings of prose sections of the Bible, and (along with the NJB) has the best formatting of any Bible that I’ve ever seen - I’m modelling the formatting of my own “Catholic Standard Version” translation on it - single-column, paragraphed, interpunct versification.
The New Jerusalem Bible is a tragedy. It has gone even further away from traditional, faithful Catholic exegesis than the OJB - and the OJB went pretty far away as well. If the OJB is the “full edition” from the 1960s, it sucks: the modern Reader’s Edition (with most of the notes and introductions excised) is the one I speak of.
The OJB is kind of like the Catholic counterpart of the RSV: a liberal-dominated translation that departed from traditional interpretation (as the RSV departed from traditional Protestant interpretation, which is what made it semi-acceptable to Catholics). Likewise, the NJB is the counterpart to the NRSV: an even more liberal revision with the goals of gender-neutering and eradicating any possible “Christian residue” left in the Old Testament, and a restoration of dubious passages “that we wish Jesus said” in the New, in contravention of textual scholarship (the supposed basis for both updates to the OJB and the RSV), like the Pericope Adulterae.
In the NJB, the annotation in the NT isn’t bad (there are only a few places where it explicitly condemns the teaching and understanding of the Church), but it isn’t that good either. The annotation in the OT is heterodox at best. It also embraces to an even greater degree than the NAB secular liberal critical scholarship of the Bible, and its annotations and theories are even more out of date (being in place in a late-70s Unitarian theological seminary). The text itself is mediocre to bad in the New Testament: it engages in Protestant interpretations of many passages, explicitly denying that there were deacons, priests, and bishops in the Apostolic age, and engaging in heavy neutering of the text (albeit slightly less than the NRSV did). The text is unforgivable in the Old Testament: one would think it was a polemically-orientated Jewish Tanakh with the goal of eradicating any Messianic prophecy or interpretation in the text (and some of the notes), the only hint of it being otherwise being the inclusion of the deuterocanonicals (which is balanced by giving Ecclesiastes its traditional Jewish name, “Qoheleth”, in the NJB), and that it was a monument to the most developed kind of anti-faithful secularist reductionist scholarship in the notes and introductions. The NJB OT is better than the NAB/RE OT on purely literary grounds, by far, and is slightly better in the annotation, and is about equal in the introductions. And that’s saying a lot.
I don’t have room to tackle the NEB/REB series of translations here, but I believe
my feelings align with those of TS Eliot, with the addition that the translation is technically incorrect in many places (including Gen 1:1, from whence the NAB imported that horrible mistranslation), is exegetically incorrect in many others, and is unfaithful through-and-through. However, just like the NAB, the NEB/REB does have
one redeeming factor or rendering: in the NAB, it is made abundantly clear that Jesus is repeatedly calling himself “I am” as a title of deity in John, something obvious in the DRC/KJV/NASB/NKJV, but less obvious in other translations; in the NEB/REB, John 1:1 is rendered, “In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God: everything that God was, the Word was”, which is a startling departure from the normal rendering, and also captures the essence of the Greek more precisely, while eliminating a seeming contradiction and possible Sabellian and Monarchic interpretations.
The Orthodox Study Bible is a good way to go for someone who likes the New King James version and wants the Deuterocanonical books.
Much as I was thinking. The OSB was my first exposure to the NKJV, as before it I wouldn’t use editions that didn’t contain the full canon, and I liked what I found - far better than many self-described Catholic Bibles out there (the OSB and the NKJV both). I then realized that one can use a 66-book Bible for most things, and read the deuterocanon out of a separate translation (I think the RSV-2CE deuterocanonicals are the best), except for the case of Esther, because the additions to Esther are too interspersed throughout the text to be able to integrate them mentally, as one can do with Daniel (i.e. open with Susanna, end with Bel and the Dragon, and read the Hymn of the Three Jews after 3:24).
However, the Book of Esther is well worth reading in its Protestant form, and has an entirely different story and message like so. It becomes much like a less religious ultranationalist book like Judith, which has not to do with the Providence of God.
