Oxford University Press is sponsoring an ambitious new study Bible focused on the early Church Fathers and their interpretation of Scripture (press release here). The Ancient Christian Study Bible (ACSB) will include a brand new translation of Sacred Scripture, focused on the source texts that are revered by Orthodox churches. The Old Testament will be translated from the Greek text preserved in the Codex Vaticanus manuscript (and there will be textual notes for variant readings in other biblical manuscripts) and the New Testament will be translated from the Patriarchal Text (which was published by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1904).
Three types of study notes will be included:
- Textual notes: listing notable textual variants from other Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Syriac editions of Sacred Scripture
- Exegetical notes: explaining the plain historical meaning of the text
- Patristic notes: scholarly summaries of dominant early Christian interpretations of the text
Approximately 80% of the notes are expected to be Patristic notes.
The notes will focus on biblical passages (known as “pericopes”), rather than individual verses.
A complete list of editors and translators has been assembled, and the collaborators are currently working on translating the Greek biblical text and writing the annotations. The group of editors and contributors is ecumenical, with Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants represented. The two Editors-in-Chief are Fr. Eugen J. Pentiuc (Dean of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, MA) and Dr. Paul M. Blowers (Professor of Church History at Emmanuel Christian Seminary, in Milligan University, TN). Fr. Pentiuc was previously a General Editor for the Orthodox Study Bible (published by Thomas Nelson in 2008).
The complete Bible is expected to be published by the end of 2027. There are more details in the press release from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology.
I must say, this is one of the most exciting Bible projects I’ve heard about in recent years. After reading the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation earlier this year (for which Dr. Paul Blowers was an editor), I’m very much looking forward to a complete Bible (including the deuterocanonical books) which summarizes the interpretations of the Church Fathers. I will be following this project with interest! Many thanks to the reader who sent me this news!
Well shoot, YouTuber R. Grant Jones just got his dream Bible project put into practice lol: a translation with a Byzantine NT and a Septuagint OT, with patristic footnotes. (Oh, and the Eastern Orthodox will be happy too.) Looks like the old independent “Eastern/Greek Orthodox Bible” will be very much supplanted by this effort, as will Newrome Press’s effort to combine the aforementioned EOB NT with the Lexham English Septuagint. And needless to say, Thomas Nelson’s Orthodox Study Bible (especially its defective OT translation) will be completely supplanted.
I don’t really care about the Byzantine NT, the differences between the Byzantine text and the criticial text are so small that unless you have a list you are unlikely to notice the difference, but a good translation of the Septuagint is badly needed.
Matthew 5:22 Critical text and NV: But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment
Matthew 5:22 Byzantine text: But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.
Matthew 6:13 Critical text and NV: And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Matthew 6:13 Byzantine text: And do not lead us into temptation, But deliver us from the evil one. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
Matthew 17:21 Critical text and NV: (blank – this verse is removed)
Matthew 17:21 Byzantine text: However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.
Matthew 20:22 Critical text and NV: But Jesus answered, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?” They said to him, “We are able.”
Matthew 20:22 Byzantine text: But Jesus answered and said, “You do not know what you ask. Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They said to Him, “We are able.”
Mark 9:29 Critical text and NV: And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”
Mark 9:29 Byzantine text: So He said to them, “This kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting.”
Mark 10:24 Critical text and NV: And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!”
Mark 10:24 Byzantine text: And the disciples were astonished at His words. But Jesus answered again and said to them, “Children, how hard it is for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of God!”
These are some of the most notable differences in Matthew and Mark. As one whose first experience of reading and studying the Bible came from the NKJV, which follows the Byzantine text type, I was confused and felt a little deceived when I found out that many of the verses I had come to know and quote and live out in my life, were not authentic. There are dozens of places where the Byzantine text adds extra words to match a parallel verse from another Gospel that is slightly different, and it will often add extra clarifying statements that were not present in the original. The same issue happened when I switched from the RSV-2CE to the NCB, after having used the RSV-2CE for over a decade. There were again numerous passages that were different, because the RSV-2CE uses many variants present in the Byzantine text. That said, it most likely won’t affect the majority of people in any substantial way.
I too grew up with the NKJV (which uses the Textus Receptus, not strictly the Byzantine text form, but very close). My dive into amateur textual scholarship came three years into being a Priest when I couldn’t find the verse where Jesus tells James and John that “You do not know what spirit you are of” when they ask about calling down fire from heaven. Of course, I found it in the footnotes, but not the main text. From then on, it was like following Morpheus down the rabbit hole…
The devotion of some to the so-called “Textus Receptus” mystifies me.
They seem to think that it was assembled as a result of a precise method to find the best and most accurate manuscripts. This is far from the case, of course. Erasmus assembled it not from the manuscripts he deemed best, but from the manuscripts he just happened to have lying around at the moment, most of which were less than 200 years old. Hardly a reliable methodology. And he ignored the Greek manuscripts in several places in favor of translating the Vulgate into Greek because he liked the Vulgate reading better.
Those following Erasmus tended to ignore his errors in favor of a textual conservativsm that the text of Erasmus was “sacred” and “unalterable”, and even when they had better manuscripts than Erasmus, they ignored them because they disagreed with the text of Erasmus.
This is hardly a sound methodology.
Yeah, pretty much no one thinks the doxology of the Our Father is part of the text. It originated in the liturgy, later generations of scribes added it because they were so used to it that it seemed like it was missing. All of the earliest manuscripts omit it.
That is what is ironic: Catholics omit the doxology because it isn’t in the Bible, while Protestants include it because it is a tradition. Kind of weird how that works.
And we know many of those additions originated very late, some not until the Middle Ages.
Percentage-wise, the Byzantine Text and the Critical Text are more than 98% identical.
Its eye opening to see how many additions the Byzantine New Testament textforms have compared to the latest NA critical text when you learn how many extra words they have:
Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine textform: about 2,100 more words
Textus Receptus: about 2,500 more words
Since the average amount of words per verse in the New Testament is 22, that equals about 95 extra verses for R-P and 113 extra verses for the TR (I don’t have the numbers for the 1904 Patriarchal Edition).
BC,
It’s true that the devotion to the “Textus Receptus,” especially by outfits like the Trinitarian Bible Society, is quite strange. If someone prefers the Byzantine-textform to the Critical Text and believes it, and not the Critical Text, to best reflect the originals, then they should just go all the way and advocate for the Robinson-Pierpont text, which is the decidedly minority position, but not necessarily “fringe” per se. Just the minority.
And you’re right about later (chiefly Protestant) scholars of the 1500s being very wedded to Erasmus’s text even when they had manuscripts that were clearly older and/or more complete. It was much more common to see those scholars, like Beza, monkeying around with the Latin text they placed parallel to the Greek (and thus with the interpretation given to their Latin-knowing readers) than with the Greek itself, even when they clearly disagreed with the Greek they were using. One case that always comes to mind is Beza’s seeming insistence that the Evangelist in Luke 1:78 had misinterpreted the Hebrew “semah” (Branch) by following the LXX’s “anatolé” (Dawn) and so he decided to change the Vulgate’s “oriens ex alto” to “germen ex alto” in his Greek-Latin New Testament edition, but didn’t dare touch the Greek. For the record, the Nova Vulgata still reads “oriens” and no translation, not even Beza’s Protestant contemporaries, ever followed him here by using “Branch” in Luke 1:78, in light of the Hebrew in Zech 3:8, 6:12. I think the closest they came was the Geneva Bible putting Beza’s reading in the margin.
The doxology follows the embolism by the presider at a Catholic Mass. Our Father > embolism > doxology.
What do you think of the NETs translation?
I haven’t read the NETS translation of the Septuagint or the NET Bible, so I can’t speak on the translation itself. But I do like to reference their translation notes on Biblegateway. They provide extraordinary detail about the different variant manuscripts, and why they chose one variant over another or translated one way instead of another. If you look at pages from the NET text, you will see a small portion of Scripture in the top middle engulfed by footnotes. II’m not sure if its the same way for the NETS.
As an aside, both their translation and explanation of 1 Cor 6:9, which is a controversial passage that the NRSVue has been in hot water over, is the best I’ve seen. I hope the upcoming revised NABRE translates it like they did.
This Bible will be a delight first and foremost for the whole Catholic Church, Western and Eastern. The schism was after the patristic era. I have the baptist Ancient Faith Study Bible which avoids to give us a full portrait of the teaching of the Church Fathers on important doctrinal points, those commonly known as catholic doctrines, but that was better than nothing.
This sounds marvelous. I will eagerly snap this up.
Just go ahead and hook me up to an IV of that future study Bible.
Glory to God! This sounds wonderful.
Thanks for letting us know about this Marc! It will be really nice to have a one-volume complete Bible with patristic commentary. Just imagine how thick it will be. It might even give the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible a run for their money.
Too bad it won’t be released for a few more years, but fortunately there is a multi-volume patristic commentary series currently underway called The Church’s Bible. There are only 6 volumes released so far (Matthew, John, Romans, 1 Cor, Song of Songs, and Isaiah), but it is Catholic and the commentaries are exclusively from the Fathers of the Church. Here is a link to the Verbum edition for those interested:
https://verbum.com/product/205195/the-churchs-bible-cb?queryId=4595e9685ec68c8744caa26beb8b8ae3
You wrote about “The Church´s Bible” and add “but it is Catholic”, yes and God decided to give us the 27 Books canon of the NT through catholic bishops and councils in the second half of the IV century. I have the Ancient Faith Study Bible which is a baptistic selection of what the Church Fathers said, the baptist editors tried to hide what the Church Fathers taught on important doctrinal topics, they were not protestants at all.
The name of the commentary series is “The Church’s Bible”, and unlike this new Ancient Christian Study Bible, the General Editor is a devout Roman Catholic (and former Lutheran Minister): historian Dr. Robert Louis Wilken. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, which is a conservative Catholic organization founded by Scott Hahn. Hope that clarifies what I meant there.
Is it still being produced? The release schedule seems to be erratic—2003, 2005, 2007, 2012, 2018—thus it is hard to say whether this series will be finished.
I’ve noticed some commenters taking issue with the English Septuagint translations currently available. I’d be interested in knowing more about the shortcomings of the English translations that we have now (Brenton, Lexham, Orthodox Study Bible, NETS, Fr. King’s version, etc.). I’m asking this as a layman who has no ability in Greek; I’ve only read from Brenton’s LXX and a bit from NETS because they’re available for free online.
I’m not meaning to imply that there isn’t a need for another English translation of the LXX. I’m just trying to understand what shortcomings the current ones have and how they stack up against each other.
Also, can anyone recommend a good English translation of the Syriac Peshitta?
For academic purposes, the NETS is the standard, though it has a woodenness due to its frequent transliteration of Greek names. It’s also a reworked NRSV text, so it’s not exactly a “fresh” translation of the Greek, but rather a tweaking of an English translation of Hebrew to correspond to the Greek. However, it is the only LXX translation of the current critical LXX Greek editions, hence it being the scholarly standard. The Lexham is the next best option; though it sometimes fails in its mission, and has some weird readings from time to time, it is a very nice (and objectively more readable) alternative to the NETS, and a decent companion to it. Unlike the NETS, the Lexham is not translated from the critical edition of the LXX, but instead from Henry Swete’s “diplomatic” edition of the Septuagint, i.e., Codex Vaticanus with the gaps filled in by Codex Alexandrinus. The Orthodox Study Bible OT is bad and should be avoided, because it’s half-baked and frequently is just retaining the NKJV’s translation of the Hebrew rather than being edited to correspond to the Greek. And Fr. King’s translation, I’m less familiar with, though I recall generally negative feelings about his edition, though I can’t recall if the issue was with the translation, primarily, or with the layout and physical construction of the book itself, or both.
For an English translation of the Syriac Peshitta, consider the “Peshitta English New Testament: The Antioch Bible English Translation” by Gorgias Press. There’s also an edition that includes the Syriac text itself on facing pages.
Thanks to everyone who responded to my questions. I’m glad that the Septuagint is getting some more love these days.
Fr. King’s version has many errors, even to the point of omitting several verses. He has said that is aware of the errors and will fix them in a future edition. Perhaps that will happen one day, but to my knowledge it has not done so yet.
It should be noted that simply referring to the “Byzantine Text” is a bit misleading. This Ancient Christian Study Bible is translating from the 1904 Patriarchal Text for its NT, which doesn’t match either the so-called “Majority Text” or the “Textus Receptus” that underlies the KJV and NKJV exactly. If I remember correctly, the Patriarchal Text mostly follows the Majority Text against the Textus Receptus when variants exist, though it occasionally does the opposite, such as by including Acts 8:37 and the Comma Johanneum that are lacking in the Majority Text.
And the crazy thing is, we know that neither Acts 8:37 nor the Comma Johanneum were ever in the Greek text before the 14th century. They were both Medieval additions to the Vulgate that somehow found their way into a handful of late Medieval Greek manuscripts.
And since the Patriarchal Text is specifically a *liturgical* textform, based primarily on late medieval Byzantine lectionaries, it shows that those verses didn’t just enter the Eastern NTs, but the Eastern lectionaries too. Though, to be fair, while the Comma Johanneum is “included” in the Patriarchal Text, it’s done in smaller characters and with implicit knowledge that it’s a later interpolation. Similar to how the Comma Johanneum is still read in the TLM, and if Catholics made a Bible based solely on post-Trent, pre-1962 lectionaries (i.e., the Clementine Vulgate), you’d get the Comma Johanneum in 1 John 5.
So yes, the Ancient Christian Study Bible will include the Comma Johanneum and other Patriarchal Text quirks, but let’s not pretend there won’t be brackets and such utilized. The use of the Patriarchal Text over the R-P Majority Text is just further assurance that this is intended as a Greek Orthodox Church Bible, and so is suited to their needs. Catholics and assorted Septuagint/Byzantine fans are simply enjoying the fruits of the project without technically being the “target” audience.
And we know almost exactly when, where, and why the Johannine Comma entered the Vulgate Text. It appears to have happened in the 11th century. Someone wrote it as a commentary in the margins of a manuscript, and a later scribe copying the text thought it was part of the letter.
Acys 8:37 is a little more mysterious, but it seems likely that it originated because the text was read during the baptism liturgy, and it was added to adhere to the liturgy in which baptism is preceded by a confession of faith. It was probably only a liturgical edit, but a scribe copying a text added it because he was so used to hearing it during the liturgy that he thought it must be part of the text.
Something in the press release struck me in a new way. Oxford’s description of it as:
‘a new authoritative study Bible, which will stand alongside the other three others already published by OUP:
The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NOAB) edited by Michael D. Coogan
The Catholic Study Bible (CSB) edited by John J. Collins, et al.
The Jewish Study Bible (JSB) edited by Marc Zvi Brettler, et al.
And now the fourth study Bible to be published by OUP: The Ancient Christian Study Bible: The Bible of the First Millennium AD.”
Though I’ve always preferred Oxford study Bibles (Oxford Annotated in college and seminary, Catholic Study Bible at times after conversion), I never really registered it as a “line” of study Bibles before.
Presenting it that way suggests a line pitched at different market segments: perhaps Protestant academic (Oxford Annotated), American Catholic, and interfaith Jewish?
If so, what is the market segments targeted by this new study Bible? Orthodox (it’s not really leaning into that angle in its marketing, though the content and editors fit)? Evangelical academic perhaps (notice the focus on “First Century Church)?
Let’s hope there isn’t any fundamental anti-Catholic bias in the notes. Sponsorship by OUP is reassuring but Orthodox and Catholic ecclesiology are sometimes at odds. Perhaps my worries are unfounded but I’m struck by the number of Catholics – not among regular contributors to this blog and its comments sections – who appear to draw on Protestant resources without exercising caution. So it’s two – rather than three – cheers from me for this project. Even so, I’m looking forward to seeing the final product.
“Perhaps my worries are unfounded but I’m struck by the number of Catholics – not among regular contributors to this blog and its comments sections – who appear to draw on Protestant resources without exercising caution.”
I agree. I regularly draw on *certain* Protestant resources, but usually ones “vetted” by nature of their authors (or the specific works themselves) being cited and utilized by respected Catholic scholars, like Scott Hahn, John Bergsma, Brant Pitre, etc. Even then, though, you need to be rooted enough in your Catholic faith to detect when something starts to smell funny. To give an example, today I was reading one of the books from the IVP “Lost World” series by John H. Walton and Tremper Longman III, and their early positive reference to “the Reformers” and soon after “Martin Luther,” as well as mentions of the “perspicuity of Scripture,” primed me to take Walton and Longman’s words and interpretations with a pinch of salt (despite the fact that both Walton and Longman’s works are repeatedly cited in Bergsma and Pitre’s “A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: The Old Testament”). While much of this “Lost World” book seems perfectly acceptable to a Catholic reader, I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t preparing to get defensive of John 6 the moment I saw them about to an give example of “figurative or metaphorical language” where a literal reading would be “simply wrong.” Fortunately, they didn’t go there (instead, they used Psalm 23 and the fact that the Psalmist isn’t literally a sheep). But I don’t think my defensiveness was unfounded.
I’m excited hearing this news. Having a diversity of translations adds variety to my reading.
Some of us, in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, are hoping for the best. We don’t want this to be a translation in the vein of the NRSV. The RSV remains the official English translation of the Scriptures we use, and the NKJV for the Psalms. If this is a modernist translation, I could see the liberal ideologues trying to foist this new translation on the entire GOA. This is a fear for some of us in the trenches. At least with RSV 2 CE and the ESV, translations are not made with gender ideology in mind. They are both excellent translations.