I received an early Christmas present from myself today. I had pre-ordered the hardcover edition of the full Revised New Jerusalem Bible from CBD a while back, with the expectation that it would arrive near the end of the month. That was several weeks later than other distributors were offering, but the discount CBD was offering was irresistible. To my delight, it showed up earlier than anyone was advertising delivery. In fact, Amazon is still promoting delivery on the “release date” of December 3rd. Three extra cheers for the good people at Christian Book Distributors.
I’ve had a paperback copy of the New Testament and Psalms of this translation for a year or so, and had been pleasantly surprised by the improvement in the translation over the preceding versions in the Jerusalem Bible lineage. I’ve only had a couple hours to peruse the new volume since it arrived in the mail today, but would like to offer a few preliminary thoughts.
Let me say up front, based primarily on my familiarity with the RNJB New Testament, that I am thrilled to see this new Catholic version being made available to the English-speaking Church. The editor (Henry Wansbrough) has clearly indicated that one of the guiding principles of this effort has been to produce a faithful, formal equivalence translation in the Jerusalem Bible literary tradition. I was perhaps cynically skeptical of that claim when I first heard of it it last year, but was quickly relieved of my skepticism when I got my hands on the text. Wansbrough has truly managed to transform the Jerusalem Bible into a largely formal equivalence translation, without losing the characteristic literary flavor of the Jerusalem Bible tradition. This was no mean feat, and my admiration for the man, and whatever his supporting team, is cannot be overstated. That being said, there are a few things worth pointing out concerning the new edition.
The page layouts appear identical between the Image/Random House hard cover “Study Edition” of the full RNJB and the Darton, Longman & Todd paperback edition of the NT & Psalms, although the hard cover edition has significantly larger pages (6” x 9.125” vs 5.375” x7.75”), allowing for both increased font size and expanded white space around the edges. This helps readability, but the paper is not as white as the paperback, which detracts from readability, at least for these old eyes.
Although the edition advertises itself as a “Study Edition”, there is little about it that warrants such a claim. It contains 8 color maps in the back, and about 30 pages of textual indices & study materials, but the annotations and cross references within the test – which had been by far the strongest elements of the previous versions in the Jerusalem Bible tradition – have been gutted for this version, and can be at best compared to the content of the Readers’ Editions of the previous versions in this tradition.
The Foreword for the full RNJB has been expanded from that provided in the NT & Psalms edition, and reiterates or introduces some strange assertions. It claims that the JB was the “first full translation of the Bible into modern English” (i.e., in 1966), but goes on to claim that “soon after”, the Revised Standard Version (and others) “began to appear”. However, the “Apocrypha” of the RSV had been published in 1965, so it’s hard to see how this timeline can be supported. Worse, the foreword goes on to suggest that: “A major impetus was given to biblical studies and to the use of the Bible by the decree of the Second Vatican Council on the Bible, Lumen Gentium”. The referenced document, also known in English as The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, is not in fact the conciliar document that addresses the use of the Bible in the Church; that is actually The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, or Dei Verbum. It’s easy enough to justify such a mixup in the drafting of the foreword, but it is hard to understand how such a statement made of through the editorial process.
as much as I’d like to see a translation of this caliber published with a set of annotations comparable to the original 1966 JB – or even the 1985 NJB – I will nonetheless be grateful for the significant contribution this version represents to the English-speaking Catholic world.