I’ve recently come across two news items related to NRSVue study Bibles:
Improved Ghosting in the SBL Study Bible
When the SBL Study Bible was first released, multiple protestant Bible review channels on YouTube criticized it for horrible ghosting and unacceptably translucent paper. Recently, members of the Fans of the NRSV Bible Facebook group have reported much better paper on new hardcover editions. An Amazon reviewer has also reported the same improvement. This is an academic study bible with purely scholarly annotations, so it is not a Catholic or even an explicitly Christian Bible.
New Oxford Annotated Bible 6th Edition Publication Date
Oxford has been working to update their New Oxford Annotated Bible (NOAB) to make use of the NRSVue. They have now announced an expected publication date for the upcoming 6th edition: May 26th, 2026. A product page is now available on the Oxford website here.
I have the digital version of the SBL study bible, and until I see the improvement and an apology I refuse to acknolodge the hardcover edition even exists. I was *extremely* offended by the lackluster quality and I hope this is the first step in fixing that bible’s problems.
I don’t like the integration with bible oddessy, since it seems they outsourced the notes to a digital platform even if that’s not exatcly true. The digital version is also really poor on phones, but more tolerable on computers.
I have SBL Study Bible hardback and it sure is something. There is a side bar titled “LGBTQIA+ Interpretations” which has a shortened version of an essay written by the same person on bibleodyssey.org, which is the public outreach branch of the Society for Biblical Literature (SBL). The sidebar says, in part:
“Early LGBTQIA+ interpretation challenged popular readings of so-called clobber texts, passages translated in ways that specifically condemn same-gender sex. These interpretations emphasized that “homosexuality” is a modem idea, since gender was not the only consideration in ancient ideas about culturally appropriate sex. Other early LGBTQIA+ interpretations focused on reading figures such as David and Jonathan (1 Sam 18,1-4; 2, Sam 1.26) or Ruth and Naomi (Ruth 1,16-17) as examples of queer or nonheterosexual relationships and families.”
The full essay at bibleodyssey.com takes it up a notch. It says:
“Perhaps Mary is not as perplexed as Luke claims and her question, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?,” isn’t naïve. Maybe Mary is relieved to be giving birth without having had sex with a man or without having had sex at all. Jesus’s birth could be an affirmation of Mary’s queerness and/or asexuality.”
There is also a sidebar on the Bread of Life discourse in John 6, in which it argues that Jesus was just talking metaphorically and not about the Eucharist. There is a very strange sidebar called “Judith and Wonder Woman” which I don’t even know how to summarize; I will leave it for you to read. I have included a link below to both the bibleodyssey essay and a page that has pictures from my SBL Study Bible of the 3 sidebars mentioned.
And one last note. As you will see in the link, the ghosting is as bad as it gets.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRCQKmKdhTdWuBq-gP1ETBtx6Xr4CQF23UsR1H5ASs10BXWW-NoTWIMZT_Yk9FGnqBfGY8p0z91t8D6/pub
https://www.bibleodyssey.org/articles/lgbtq-biblical-interpretation/
That ghosting looks horrible, Cory. I never purchased a copy of this Bible because of the ghosting complaints. The first photo you shared from John 6 is almost unreadable. When did you purchase your copy? I’m thinking it may be from the early print run which used worse paper.
Thanks for giving some examples of the type of commentary in this Bible. I’m surprised to see the type of commentary you showed (approaching the text from either a modern feminist or gender theory perspective), because I had the impression that this Bible was primarily focused on scholarly annotations from a historical-critical perspective, not on life application or theology.
Marc, you’re right about its primary focus. I have a copy. It’s basically an updated Harper Collins Study Bible. Valuable resource, imo.
Marc, I bought my copy about 9 months ago. I only bought it to have a secular academic perspective to reference, but so far I have not found the commentaries to offer anything new or insightful. Maybe I should have seen it coming, but I was shocked to see the inclusion of feminist and LGBT material in the sidebars. There is clearly an agenda to challenge traditional views on marriage, gender, and sexuality. Even if they improved the ghosting, the other issues remain.
Nothing surprises me about SBL. The academic institutions have largely been captured by critical theory. I wonder if any of this thinking will make its way into the forthcoming 6th edition of the New Oxford Annotated Bible. And don’t get me started on the Jerome Biblical Commentary for the Twenty-First Century!
“Perhaps Mary is not as perplexed as Luke claims, and her question, ‘How can this be, since I am a virgin?, isn’t naïve. Maybe Mary is relieved to be giving birth without having had sex with a man or without having had sex at all. Jesus’s birth could be an affirmation of Mary’s queerness and/or asexuality.”
Wow, that’s outrageous blasphemy. By the way, this is a bad translation. Mary’s question would be more accurately translated as, “How can this be since I know not a man?” Another wording would be “How can this be given my vow of celibacy?” Mary and Joseph were not “engaged”, they were already married, no married woman is ever going to ask how she could possibly get pregnant unless she knew the marriage would never be consumated or she was just ignorant of where babies come from.
Good Lord, and not just about the ghosting
Here are two more problematic sidebars in the SBL Study Bible. The first entitled “Did Isaiah Predict a Virgin Birth” seeks to discredit both Matthew and the prophecy of Isaiah:
“Isa 7:14 is not about a virgin birth except through mistranslation. Matthew almost certainly knew that the two texts matched only in Greek, but he did not care. His focus was on what Isaiah could be made to mean in a new context, not whit it meant in its original context.”
There are a lot of things that bother me about this sidebar and the longer version on bibleodyssey.org, but I am going to focus on how hypocritical it is. Since when did the NRSVue ever consider the Masoretic Text (MT) to be the authoritative text for Old Testament variants? By my count, they make 128 corrections to the MT in Isaiah alone! 58 of those times the NRSVue went with the Greek in favor of the MT. But now when it comes to Isaiah 7:14, all of a sudden they know for sure the MT is correct, not the Septuagint. It’s the opposite of what the ESV and NASB do, which is to consider the MT to be the authoritative text for variants except when they need the text to be more Christologic, like Isaiah 7:14. To me this inconsistency hurts their credibility.
The other sidebar entitled “The Gender of God” discusses various references to God as male, female, or ambiguous, and concludes that “this sets the deity outside of conventional gender constructions.” While it is true that God is neither male or female, the sidebar makes no mention of the fact that: 1) Jesus was male; 2) Jesus calls God “Father”; 3) God is metaphorically referred to as a bridegroom in the Prophets and the New Testament; 4) the vast majority of the parables and analogies about God in the Bible depict him as male; 5) the Bible uses the pronouns “he/him” for God. How can you write an essay about the gender of God and not at least mention those points? To me it feels like deception by omission.
“Isa 7:14 is not about a virgin birth except through mistranslation. Matthew almost certainly knew that the two texts matched only in Greek, but he did not care. His focus was on what Isaiah could be made to mean in a new context, not what it meant in its original context.”
“Isa 7:14 is not about a virgin birth except through mistranslation. Matthew almost certainly knew that the two texts matched only in Greek, but he did not care. His focus was on what Isaiah could be made to mean in a new context, not what it meant in its original context.”
That is not an accrate statement. The Hebrew word “almah” is frequently said to mean only “a young woman”, this is, at best, misleading. The meaning is far more broad than that, it means something like “a young unmarried woman who can reasonanly be assumed to be a virgin”. It is true that it does not mean simply “virgin”, but it is wrong to deny that virginity is clearly being implied. The Jerusalem Bible is surely correct here in translating the word as “maiden”, an old fashioned word which means essentially the same thing, a young unmarried woman who can be assumed to be a virgin.
The fact that almah has a broader meaning that “virgin” does not mean that it does not imply virgin at all, it clearly does. Since there is no Greek word equivalent to almah, the translators of the Septuagint seized on what they thought was the main point of the passage and translated it as simply virgin, it is a bit of a loose translation, that doesn’t make it wrong.
They likely don’t accept that Jesus was/is God. Everything is seen through contemporary critical theory lenses. This, ultimately, is where historical criticism – on its own – takes us.
That is true. But I’m thinking that even if they don’t accept that Jesus is God, the text they are commenting on says he is. At Jesus’ baptism and at the Transfiguration, God speaks and says “this is my beloved Son.” Jesus is called the Son of God throughout the Gospels. At the visitation, Elizabeth says: “And why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” Jesus says that he and the Father are one, and that he who sees him sees the Father. Thomas says of Jesus in the upper room: “my Lord and my God”. And we are instructed to baptize others in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Despite the secular nature of the study Bible and any potential disbelief by the author of the sidebar, they are commenting on what the Bible has to say about the gender of God. Whether done intentionally or not, they have left out a mountain of evidence pointing at how God has primarily revealed himself as masculine.
The reason this bothers me is I feel it is an affront to the truth of the Scriptures and of our Catholic Faith. Whether it’s our belief in a male-only Priesthood, or our Trinitarian formula, or our belief in the Church as the Bride of Christ, or our view of marriage and family, these things are all bound up with our view of masculinity and God.
Well, the problem that I have with that kind of commentary is that the denial of historic doctrines and proposing radical new interpretations based on feminism, “Queer theory,” or whatever, is not what the historical critical method is supposed to be about.
The historical critical method is supposed to be about giving you the historical background of the text, not to take modern ideologies that originated in our own time and pretend they existed in the ancient world.
Yes, but the historical critical method is an ideology as much as it is an interpretive framework. History is a contested field. I’m sure proponents of critical theory understand what they are doing as developments within the historical critical method. Ironically, what they’re doing is taking contemporary concepts such as “queerness” – concepts in history and therefore impermanent – and imposing then on ancient texts as absolutes, which is a wholly ahistorical turn. It’s essentialism masquerading as historicism.
I’m not arguing that we should reject wholesale the historical critical method but, rather, deploy it alongside other ways of reading that are consistent with our faith and tradition.
In light of the sidebars mentioned above, it sounds like this book would make for great kindling.
Oof this is really bad.
The way forward that has worked for me was to embrace the old four senses of scripture. Historical critical work has been very useful in discerning the literal meaning of many passages. I am unbothered by a note that the original setting for Isaiah 7 was the prediction of a child for Ahaz or Isaiah or someone else. In context it is plain that to its orginal hearers the prophecy is basically “imagine a child born 9 months from now. By the time he is capable of decision making, the Assyrian threat will have passed in a permanant way through the action of God”.
To the Christian, however, the Assyrian threat is a type of sin, judgment, and a rightful and quite permanant death, and the prophecy has a deeper meaning as God protects us from this deeper threat.
Exile is not just exile. Egypt is not just Egypt. Zion is not just Zion.
Some Catholic Bibles have notes in all four senses (Ignatius) or just the literal (NAB, Jerusalem bible family).
Those sidebars are not even the literal sense!
In the third and final volume of his “Jesus of Nazareth” series, on the Infancy Narratives, Pope Benedict XVI considers the interpretation of Isaiah 7:14 and the identity of the child in question. He explains why the prophecy cannot refer to either a child of Ahaz or of Isaiah, because neither of those children has ever been called “Emanuel” or “God With Us,” and that it is difficult to make an argument that the name “Emanuel” is some kind of elaborate non-literal symbolism, unless one is going to go through fairly extraordinary verbal gymnastics with the text. This is why, from the earliest times, it was resolved as messianic, a prophecy to be fulfilled in an indefinite period of time in the future.
I have to say that I agree with that analysis.
Yes that is the ultimate meaning of the prophecy. Many prophecies seem to have that partially or superficially fulfilled element to them.
But I do not think that Pope Benedict could have being saying that this prophecy was univocally about the Virgin Birth, with absolutely no prophetic content applied to the contemporary situation.
He says pretty much exactly that, that there was no contemporary fulfillment, and that the traditional Jewish interpretation (even by many today) is that the passage is entirely mesianic. No one except the messiah would ever be called “God with Us”. He denies that it could refer to either the son of Isiah himself or the son of Ahaz, neither of whom is a big deal historically speaking.
He further says that chapter 7 is the first of a trilogy of messianic chapters about the birth of the messiah. The prophecy continues in chapter 9 (“Unto us, a son is given” etc) and concludes with chapter 11 (“A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse”)
Unrelated update, Newrome Press sent out an email with specs for their forthcoming Holy Bible: Reader’s Edition Lexham English Septuagint and EOB New Testament. They also published a short promo video.
https://youtu.be/g-JkL8JXtC8?si=x0YZgdx9QjeMwVCr