Catholic Bible Press (part of Harper Collins Christian Publishing) published an extra-large NABRE in 2022 as a follow-up to their Large Print NABRE which I reviewed here. The large print edition has been one of my favorite bibles for the past few years. The text is easy to read, and I like having the notes printed at the end of each biblical book. It reduces distractions and helps me to read longer sections at a time without interrupting the flow of reading to glance at notes.
For a long time, I had no interest in the NABRE XL until I saw a photo of the text layout and realized that the unusually-wide pages allow lines of poetry to be printed with fewer newline breaks than in the Large Print NABRE. I recently purchased a copy to check it out.
The cover is made of the same excellent quality imitation leather as the Large Print NABRE and the NRSV-CE personal edition. Compared to the Large Print NABRE, the NABRE XL is shorter in height and wider in width:
The pages in the NABRE XL measure 8 inches wide. From the spine to the outer edge of the leathersoft cover, the total width is approximately 8 7/16 inches wide. This is easily the widest bible I own—exceeding the width of the New Interpreter’s Study Bible (NRSV) by 1.25 inches. It is much wider than the Cambridge NRSV Reference Bible with Apocrypha, which has always felt a bit too wide for comfort when I read it.
It is surprisingly not as difficult to hold this bible as I expected, although quickly flipping pages to a different chapter and verse requires a little bit of fumbling to compensate for the extra width. Turning individual pages requires extra care to avoid tearing pages due to how wide and thin they are.
I’ve tried taking the bible along with me in the car and reading it outside my home, but I won’t be doing that regularly. The extra-wide floppy construction doesn’t lend itself well to carrying it, especially if I’m carrying more than one book in my hands. It has been living on the side table next to my reading chair lately, and I find it comfortable to sit and read it at home.
The advantage of the extra width is wider text columns, which make poetry much more pleasing to the eye than the frequent broken lines that appear in the Large Print NABRE. Here is a side-by-side comparison:
Similar to the Large Print NABRE, the notes are printed at the end of each biblical book in the NABRE XL with the same basic format. Notes are organized in two columns, and cross references are printed along the outer margin next to the notes. The font size in the notes is much smaller than the biblical text:
The biblical text is printed in 12-point font, and to my eyes, it is almost too big. The 11-point font in the Large Print NABRE is very comfortable to read for me.
Despite the huge font and extreme width, this bible is only 1.5 inches thick. It appears to be ever so slightly thinner than the Large Print NABRE:
It is also thinner than the Cambridge NRSV Reference Bible with Apocrypha, and similar in height to that edition:
The binding is sewn, but sadly, there is only a single ribbon marker while the Large Print NABRE has two ribbons. This is a definite drawback. With the notes printed at the end of each book, I’ve found it helpful to have two ribbons in the Large Print NABRE. One ribbon marks my place in the biblical text, and the other ribbon takes me to the notes if I want to look at them.
Overall, this is an interesting edition. It’s worth a look if you are in the market for a large print bible. The width is unusual, but it allows poetry to be printed in a much more pleasing manner than narrower editions. This extra-wide format is an interesting way of getting around the thickness that is often unavoidable in single-column formats. By printing two wide columns instead of a single column, there is a good amount of space for lines of poetry while keeping the book’s thickness from expanding beyond the average range for Catholic bibles.
Is there a single column NABRE?
Might have to consider getting a large print bible. Eyes are getting weaker.
There are a couple of other single-column options for the NABRE:
1. Little Rock Catholic Study Bible
Large study bible with the biblical text in single-column format. Font size estimated as 9 or 10.
2. OSV Catholic Notetaking Bible
Small font size. Wide margins with ruled lines for notes. Single column.
That’s the chief virtue of e-books, you can adjust the size of the font
If you want a premium rebind of this bible, Cherry Hill Bibles has one available, along with a number of NRSV-CE’s.
https://cherryhillbibles.com/rebinds
Random thoughts:
1. The Amazon listing has the following description: “NABRE XL, Catholic Edition, Leathersoft, Burgundy, Comfort Print: Holy Bible Imitation Leather“.
This had me smiling, a Catholic edition of the NABRE !
2. Per the Catholic Bible Press website the text has been Anglicized with British english spellings. Another smile, British spellings in the New AMERICAN Bible. What’s the market for this edition ?
3. I could not find a photo of the back of the box, so don’t know where it was printed. Harper Collins has bibles printed in China (PRC) and South Korea.
4. Although the extra wide format does not appeal to me, it’s good to see these types of options come to market, particularly for a Catholic bible.
5. I’m waiting for the USCCB to publish the next revision of the NAB before purchasing another. I really like the NABRE and am anxious to see the next edition.
It’s possible if not probable that the “New Liturgical Bible” (tentative title for the NAB overhaul) won’t be out until 2028 at the earliest, considering sometime in 2025 is, again, the earliest date the new Liturgy of The Hours is expected to be approved by, and even then, that’s only for the biblical material found in the Daily Liturgy and not the entire Bible. Adding in the fact that even after Vatican approval (a slow process, though we can certainly pray that it’s given it’s due considering the gravity of the project), the various publishers would have to obtain the text, typeset it, print it, and get it in stores (and even then, the death of the USCCB’s own publishing house means it’s going to be a scramble for which third party publisher is going to get it out first), AND finally that it’s likely missals will also be printed to include the updated Biblical text, and i’d be hard-pressed to have a copy in my hands before 2030. While in the past publishers have gone on ahead and published texts well before even a nihil obstat has been granted, I feel like the Bishops are trying to keep this project under wraps until it’s absolutely finished to prevent the backpeddling situation the NAB and other texts (see the aborted ICEL psalter from the 90’s that got pulled back following an imprimatur) has undergone in the past. This is supposed to be THE American Catholic Bible in their eyes, so they can’t afford to mess this up. And being frank, the fact the NAB has from the beginning had a “stink on it” based on the cadence being wonky and deeply skeptical footnotes means that this seems like the American Bishop’s last shot to prove that it’s good we’re not using the RSV or ESV in Mass long after many other English speaking countries have made the switch.
Perhaps I’m wrong on all of this and the process is further along than I think, but my instinct is to say wait awhile and cope the best you can with the NABRE or other translations until there’s definite signs and dates that the new Bible is coming out.
“It’s possible if not probable that the “New Liturgical Bible” (tentative title for the NAB overhaul) won’t be out until 2028 at the earliest,”
What on Earth is the basis for this assumption? The deadline of 2025 was set in 2011, 14 years ago. They have had plenty of time to get this done, and there has as yet been no announcement of a delay, and yet every time someone talks about it, a later estimate of when it will be completed is given, I wouldn’t be surprised if, by the end of September, someone says it won’t be ready until 2050.
The last we heard, the bishops announced that the revision would be up for a vote by the full Bishops Conference “in the 4th quarter of 2024”, this has not been revised as far as I know.
Assuming the deadline for the full vote does happen later this year as scheduled, why would it take 5-10 more years to get it published? That isn’t what happened in 2011. The final vote on the 2011 happened in late 2009 and it was published in February 2011.
I don’t understand the skepticism.
Time will tell. However, you’re assuming that the same amount of time to review and publish the missal, a shorter and, really, isolated text (as in, not contingent on others, although the collects are of course going to be the same in it and the LOTH) will be the same as a text that is far longer per word count and will be utilized by basically every official liturgical text in America for the foreseeable future. Perhaps I have my perceptions skewed, and you’re right in saying the 2025 APPROVAL date seems possible and even on schedule, but I also repeat that it seems like the Bishops want to “get it right this time” and not toss out another simple update to the same Bible Catholics have groaned over since the 70’s, so even if it doesn’t seem like it, I’m actually sympathetic to delays if it means that most Catholics (someone always has to come out of the woodwork and preach the values of an alternative ) will finally have a singular Bible they like hearing and reading throughout their life, like the Douy Rhiems did for anglophiles for about 200 years.
BiblicalCatholic is flat-out wrong on numerous points. For one things, a release date of 2025 was never announced. What was announced is that the expected publication would be around 2025. Around 2025, meaning it could be 2026, 2027, or 2028. Folks here need to read this article, “2026 is the new 2024” from Pillar Catholic: https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/at-usccb-2026-is-the-new-2024
Another thing BC is wrong about is the USCCB vote being held later this year. It is not a vote on the entire new Bible, it is a vote pertaing to the passages of scripture to be used by the new Liturgy of the Hours (also known as the LOTH 2nd Edition). It’s a vote about the scripture citations that will be in the new breviary.
A vote for the entire Bible might come next year. If it does come next year, we could hope for a 2026 publication date.
And to clarify, this coming Liturgical Bible is not a revision. It’s not just simply another revision of the NAB. It is an entirely new translation of the New Testament. Not a revision, a brand new translation. Furthermore, the NABRE OT is getting updates, so even the OT will not be the exact same as we have in the NABRE.
2025 is not happening and that was never a definitive date. The absolute earliest we could get this new Definitive Liturgical Bible, whatever the naming the settle upon for marketing it, will be sometime in 2026. No earlier.
Your take doesn’t sound wrong to me.
But I doubt we’ll see the NABRE in 2026. Maybe not even by 2030.
First, political differences between the wings of the church are vast and growing. Tensions seem to be mounting. I don’t think the key decision makers can arrive at a translation that will satisfy all of their supporters in the US, let alone Rome.
Second, I also doubt the degree of expertise available for such a mighty project given how quickly our Church is shrinking.
In any case, NABRE has always struck me as a vanity project. Even excluding the ideological problems with the translation of the New Testament, the Old Testament’s transation has obvious grammatical/content errors that don’t show up in the NRSVue or in the ESV.
What are you talking about, “political tensions”, things are much less tense today than they were in the ’70s, ’80s, or even in 2011. The so-called “progressive” wing has been decimated, not just by retirements but by scandals, such as the scandals that brought down Cardinal Mahoney and Archbishop Weakland. The bishops are much more on the same page than they have been in a long time. You can tell just by reading the documents the bishops publish. I can remember the controversial documents the bishops used to publish back in the ’80s and early 90’s, which asserted stuff like “abortion is bad, but it isn’t right for Catholics to impose our views on others or “it isn’t clear that St Paul’s condemnation of homosexuality applies today”, that kind of stuff. Such documents would be simply unthinkable today.
BOTH Josh and Anonymous are CORRECT.
A Catholic answers host once said that the NABRE tried to achieve becoming a translation for all purposes, which is what the Church wants right? But some people think there should be an exclusively liturgical translation, an exclusively academic one, and to have yet another one for devotional or idiosyncratic purposes. The wings of the Church are actually a fabrication of the polarization of US political and media culture; Catholicism cannot be reduced to competing wings or sides of a spectrum like right and left. “Glory of God is a human being fully alive” and “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ” apply this to the Bible for us Catholics and you get the that we cannot fuss or break of in factions about a translation, we need a translation for the Church not for some weird need of a particular practice or some faction, it must conform to Vatican II Dei Verbum and other Church documents; distill that and you get the RNJB or NABRE.
One thing I’ve learned is not to trust unsourced dates, both pessimistic and optimistic ones. The Ignatius Study Bible pessimism got so extreme online that it turned into a joke, predicting it wouldn’t be finished for years and decades still and that perhaps even the relatively new CSV translation project would be finished before it! And then…..Ignatius Press turned around and announced the Bible was coming at the end of this year with a firm release date, specs, and photos.
As far as I’m concerned, there are two possible dates for the new NAB: 2025 and undetermined. The former is the last official word I heard and the latter is if it’s being delayed. Any speculation after 2025 is pure guessing, and I won’t bother with that. Until the USCCB says otherwise, I will assume it’s coming next year. And if it doesn’t come next year, then I’ll revert to assuming it’s coming “eventually.” Anything else is pointless, baseless speculation.
It’d be nice if the Catholic Biblical Association could at least have provided regular press releases on progress, instead of 13 years of silence . The breviary and lectionary are both held up indefinitely because of the wait for this.
If the NABRE(2nd Edition 2025) is in no hurry to be released does that give a green light for the NABRE to be the eternally preferred translation due to it’s continued use up until now?