The most common complaint about the New American Bible family has been its notes. If you have spent any time on the Catholic corner of the internet in the last 30 years, you probably do not need me to summarize the gripes. The notes are damaging to faith. The notes do not apply themselves to the life of the believer. The notes are poorly formatted. If you believe Trent Horn, some of them are even “cringe”.
Back in 2011, Mary Sperry confirmed on Catholic Bibles Blog that all editions of the NABRE needed to include the notes, with very limited exceptions like parallel Bibles. Early in this century, Oxford figured out one way around this problem by exiling the notes and cross references to the end of each book of the Bible, making the references useless but the notes harmless. Until the advent of the black spined, white covered Harper One NABRE in late 2012 (now printed by the Catholic Bible Press), those Oxford editions of various sizes had the best page layout the NAB and NABRE.
As I was comparing the Confraternity and NABRE translations of Genesis for the most recent entry of the NABRE Farewell Tour, I noted that the Confraternity’s annotations were written from a place of faith seeking understanding, rather than from a historical-critical stance. I thought to myself that if the entire Bible been annotated in this way, the NAB’s stock would be way higher among the opinion-havers of the Catholic internet, and probably with the regular folks too.
I bring up regular folks, because this stain on the NAB’s reputation is not just on the internet. I remember getting sneered at when I took a NABRE out of my bag at a parish event around 2017. “Oh, you brought a Jesuit Bible,” the man next to me said with a sneer to which italics do not do full justice. “If you really want to study the Bible,” more than one person has told me in an attempt to be helpful, “you will use the RSV.” Not everyone would agree, but I am of the opinion that since the release of NABRE there is no appreciable difference between the RSV and the NAB as a text for study. To go even further, since I have been writing weird little articles for this blog, I also know that in some places, the NABRE is more literal than the RSV. (Mary Healy agrees with me on this one.)
So why aren’t more people using the NABRE for study? The problem simply must be the notes. Or perhaps the issue is only a few notes which are egregiously bad and spoil the whole bunch. If only there was an edition of the NABRE with more faithful notes.
What if I told you the NABRE we were looking for was released in 2015, but nobody cared?
The Didache Bible
At the start of that year the Midwest Theological Forum had a hand in two editions of The Didache Bible. The project was subtitled “With Commentaries Based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church”, and as they say, it does what it says on the tin. In the foreword, the late Cardinal Francis George writes, “it is ideal for students and those participating in Scripture studies as well as those who seek to contemplate the Word of God in prayer.” One edition, released in collaboration with Ignatius Press, had this commentary keyed to the text of the RSV-2CE. The other, which I will be examining today, was published by the MTF themselves and had the NABRE text.
First off: How many of you were aware at the time that the Didache Bible even had a NABRE edition? Eleven years ago, I was in my late 20s and often went to young adult events put on at the Dominican order’s parish in Providence. I recall seeing the green hardcover around in 2015 and 2016, usually held in the arms of an earnest and bespectacled young man. I recall people saying the “Didache Bible”, sometimes even pronouncing it correctly, and always meaning the RSV-2CE edition.
I used to own a copy of that exact edition. I even reviewed it in an oblique manner more than four years ago on this very blog in a post where I used a number of different resources popular among the self-consciously orthodox crowd to examine the parable of the pounds in Luke’s Gospel, known in the NABRE as the parable of the ten gold coins. I left the experience of writing that article with a deep respect for the Didache Bible. I kept it for a while, but donated it to a religious education classroom a year or two ago.
I wish I still had it for the purposes of this article, though, because I would love to juxtapose that lithe forest green book with the chocolate brown monster on my desk. Note in the photo below that the ribbon markers are aftermarket. This book did not come with any ribbons, and I have recently discovered how cheap it is to get adequate ribbons that fit into most books for which I would want ribbon markers.
For us to compare the Ignatius and NABRE editions, data will have to do. Their covers have the same dimensions: 9.25 inches tall and 6.25 inches wide. But while the Ignatius edition is 1.75 inches thick according to the internet, I measure the NABRE edition at 2.5 inches; more than 40% thicker. According to Amazon, the RSV-2CE edition is 3.2 pounds, while the NABRE edition is 4.43 pounds. When I worked construction for a summer after college, one fact I learned that has stuck with me is that ordinary bricks weigh 4 to 5 pounds each. This thing is a brick in at least two ways of speaking!
As you probably have already deduced, the notes and introductions to the NABRE weigh just short of one and a quarter pounds. They are all here. Every last one of them. Even the one that makes you mad is here.
Here is what I found when looking at the Ignatius edition four years ago in my study of that parable from Luke 19:
The Parable of the Pounds emphasizes that the Kingdom of God, being spiritual, dwells in the human heart. Its foundation and expansion rests on generosity and the faith-filled response to his gratuitous infusion of grace received at Baptism. This grace is intended to grow through deeds of charity, and, as it grows, the love of Christ flows into the hearts of others. Although God-given gifts and opportunities are not distributed equally among all people, each of us is required to use and develop our talents and opportunities well in the service of God and neighbor. Ultimately, the Lord will ask us for an accounting of our deeds and our growth in holiness initiated by our baptismal grace. (CCC 1879-1880, 1936-1938, 2402)
In the NABRE edition, this note is exactly the same. In its substance it obviously would be, but its choice to retain the name of the parable as the Parable of the Pounds is one I find interesting. This is not the Parable of the Prodigal Son we are talking about here—this is a parable without a fixed name in the public consciousness. Having done an internet search with the terms parable Luke 19, I saw names like The Parable of the Ten Minas or the Parable of the Ten Coins or the Parable of the Ten Gold Coins (as the NABRE renders it). The King James lineage from the Authorized Version all the way down to the NRSVue has it as the Parable of the Pounds, but the name has not stuck in the culture. (I do recall four years ago that the use of “pounds” was one of the renderings that made me feel the RSV seemed a bit old-fashioned compared to its cousin the ESV.)
From having spent a week or so with this Didache Bible in its NABRE edition, I can report that I found nothing different whatsoever in the Didache introductions, nor did I find any difference in the 106 full page apologetical explanations that are peppered throughout the text. The only differences in the notes are small ones: thankfully, direct references to the text were keyed to the NABRE in this edition. In the parable discussed above, there is a note that the Greek behind the term “gold coins” was a particular coin called the minas. In the RSV-2CE edition, they mentioned that “ten pounds” was literally “ten minas”. (I cannot help but feel that the RSV using “pounds” here is yet another example of translations getting a free pass to be as loose as they want, as long as they are loose in the way the KJV was. Just imagine how we would howl if an American translation used “dollars” for minas. Perhaps Eugene Peterson already has done this.)
That being said, within the note itself, the parable is referred to as The Parable of the Pounds. This reinforces my suspicion that the Ignatius edition of the Didache Bible was considered the normative version and the NABRE edition was an afterthought. Whether or not this is true, I wonder why the Midwest Theological Forum thought they needed two editions of this. What other Catholic study resource is available in two translations? Not the Great Adventure Bible, not the Catholic Study Bible, or the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, or the Navarre Bible; not Paulist Press’ Catholic Prayer Bible, nor The Word on Fire Bible. It is a mystery to me why this was necessary, unless the MTF wanted to give NABRE readers some notes more applicable to the life of the believer. If this is so, I thank them for this service.
If you are unfamiliar with the either edition of the Didache Bible, here are some photos of some distinctive features. Here, take in the tone of an apologetical explanation:
…and now a page with some notes. Notice how the NABRE notes and cross references are present alongside the Didache notes…
…and a book introduction:
Appraisal of the Didache Bible’s Study Materials
I chose the Book of Daniel’s introduction not only because I am reading that book currently, but because it had been a long while since I had given my full attention to a Didache Bible introduction and I wanted to see if there would a marked difference in the dating of the book between this introduction and the NABRE one. I found a difference, though not a large one. The Didache introduction notes that the background of the book’s first six chapters is the circumstances of Jews in the Egyptian diaspora from the 5th to 3rd century BC while the apocalyptic visions which begin in chapter 7 were addressed to the Jews of the homeland in the 3rd and early 2nd century BC. The NABRE introduction does not make a distinction between the backgrounds of the two major units within the book and limit their theorized context to the persecution of Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the 160s BC.
The traditional view that Daniel himself wrote the book bearing his name in the 6th century BC has not held up to a linguistic study of the Hebrew and Aramaic text, and is almost extinct among scholars. Still, I had reason to wonder if the Didache Bible might give some credence to the older view: In the ample introductory matter to this Bible, which boasts of a short guide on reading the Bible and a list of scriptural passages for meditation, there is an Old Testament chronology which places the events of Genesis in the 18th-17th Century BC. That isn’t so controversial, except that the chronology lists a number of events as happening in that span of time, beginning with the creation of Adam and Eve. This puts their creation sometime just over 3,800 years ago. Even Ussher put their creation in the 40th century BC! And two centuries is far too short a time to cover the primeval history to the death of Joseph. Even if you just count Jacob’s meager 147 years on this earth, it would only leave 53 years—not enough for Isaac, never mind Methuselah! It would have been far better for the Didache Bible to begin the general dating of events as many other Bibles do, when history as such begins with the calling of Abraham.
I do not want to dwell on this misstep. I think that the historical information I see in the book introductions is generally centrist when it comes to good Catholic scholarship and intellectually honest.
It gives a one sentence summary of why scholars doubt direct Pauline authorship of the Pastoral Epistles with little in the way of counterargument and sides with the later date (around 95 AD) for the Book of Revelation, which bucks a trend among more theologically orthodox study materials, which betray a strong desire to assign the earliest possible date to the New Testament books. I can understand this desire, and have long felt that the synoptics could very well be pre-70 documents. (With the destruction of Solomon’s Temple looming so large in the tragic imagination of the Jews of that period, I see nothing too on-the-nose specific to make me think of the prophecies of the Olivet discourses to be literary creations.) Still, this does not preclude them from being post-70 documents that accurately report Jesus’ words. Speaking only for myself, I feel quite comfortable that the mainstream scholarly consensus even among secular scholars is that when we open the New Testament, we are seeing all first century documents.
If you follow the traditional understanding that Matthew the Apostle, John Mark, Luke, the companion of Paul, and John the son of Zebedee physically wrote out their works by hand in the exact chronological order that they appear in the New Testament, there will be nothing in the Didache introductions to jostle you out of your convictions. You may, however, be confused by the differences between this material and the NABRE introductions! It would be understatement to describe the NAB introductions to the synoptic gospels as presuming the Two Source hypothesis.
Thinking ahead to the Catholic American Bible’s revised New Testament and notes, I wonder what direction the introductions will go when it comes to date and authorship. Sometimes it seems to me that the trend in faithful and orthodox Biblical scholarship in the English speaking world has been to let apologetics be the horse and scholarship be the cart. I am as tired as anyone over a historical-critical monomania, but I cannot help but think that we have thrown away the insights of scholars like Donald Senior, Daniel Harrington, Joseph Fitzmyer, Lawrence Boadt, Richard Clifford, Robert Karris, and, yes, even Raymond Brown like they were so many felt banners. I see a lot of popular biblical scholarship using the tools and techniques of higher and lower criticism when it suits their argument, but leaning on tradition when the scholarship contradicts a sort of conservative view of Church history. Now, I am not against examining modern biblical scholarship with a critical eye. David Laird Dungan’s A History of the Synoptic Problem was a watershed book in my intellectual development and I suggest anyone with an interest in how scholarship and faith interact pick up a copy of that wonderful book. I await the CAB with eagerness.
Thank you for letting me think through all of this in public, but back to the task at hand. I like the Didache Bible a lot, though you might not know it from my essay so far. I certainly did not get this for the historical interpretation in the book introductions. I got it for the notes. And they are excellent for what they are.
Here are some of the Didache notes from the Sermon on the Mount:
5:3 The kingdom belongs to the poor in spirit, who receive the Word of God with humility—the poor and lowly—with whom Christ identifies. St. Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394) equated poverty in spirit with humility. This phrase was applied to those Israelites, who, living righteously, sought the Kingdom of God amid their many trials and tribulations. Though the Beatitudes point to eternal happiness, those who live them will find happiness amid suffering on earth as well because they know they are on the path to eternity and, comforted by that knowledge, can offer up their suffering to God. (CCC 544, 1716, 2546)
5:4 They who mourn include those who suffer out of love for others afflicted by the reality of sin and its consequent alienation from God. (CCC 1716)
5:5 The meek are those who seek to imitate Christ (cf. Matthew 11:29; 21:5) by showing kindness and gentleness toward their neighbors. (CCC 716, 1716)
Now, if I was a not particularly savvy reader with a particularly literal mind, I might read the last note and think, “ok, the meek are those who seek to imitate Christ” as if the two were synonymous. A verse of scripture’s meaning cannot be exhausted of meaning so simply, but neither can a study Bible preface every single note with the words “one way of thinking of this verse is…”
For those of you who have been following the series, don’t those seem like notes from the Confraternity New Testament, albeit longer and more frequent? And they are frequent! The heaping double-serving of notes can often create a comical ratio of Biblical text to notes. As I compose this post I have the volume open to Matthew 16 and 17 and on the facing pages the ratios are 10:49 and 15:43. If you open to page 540, though, which has the end of chapter 11 and the start of chapter 12 of 1 Chronicles, you will find no notes of either sort. These pages with fewer than five lines of annotation are incredibly rare, though, even in Chronicles. (Why check Chronicles? I have taken to checking those books in every study Bible I put my hands on. I feel like many deserve a sticker that reads “we haven’t read Chronicles either!” This is not one of those Bibles.)
Physical Construction, Paper, and Binding
I am not savvy enough about book construction to tell you much about the binding. Some glue is visible when I look at the head and tail band, but I know that this does not automatically mean it is a “glued binding”. It feels very solid, actually, much more solid than the similarly huge Little Rock Study Bible. There are ample color maps in the back, but rather simple ones of the sort in Ignatius Bibles. It feels quite like the Ignatius edition of the Didache Bible, even with its extra weight and girth. The pages, though, do have a sort of splotchy sheen to it when opened in indirect light.
Conclusion
This is a Bible I will definitely keep on the shelf and reference on occasion. I like what its notes offer. I don’t quite have anything like it. I will have it on my shelf next to the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, a resource I think that this complements well. Would this be my only study Bible? No, I do not think so. I think the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible has to take that crown now.
If you are familiar with the Didache Bible, I am curious what you think of the apologetical explanations. For me, they are a bit of an intrusion. I feel like they could have been an appendix if they simply had to be there. I do not mind the annotations at the bottom of the page, even here in the Didache Bible where they are as common as sand on the beach, but I dislike when a page of supplementary matter interrupts a Biblical book. Also, while I understand that the folks at MTF want to answer the most common dismissals of Catholicism, some apologetical pages seem to be on secondary topics rather than central ones. I am thinking especially of the page explaining the scriptural basis of the Rosary which appears in Revelation. Even if they had not included this apologetic for this most Latin of devotions, this is a study Bible which is Roman Catholic through and through.
If someone wanted a Catholic Bible and didn’t know much about the faith, I might hand them a Didache Bible—but probably the Ignatius edition. With its parallel sets of study helps, the NABRE edition might be too accurate an image of the divisions in the Church. It doesn’t bother me, though. I still hope to bridge this gap in my own piety and Bible study, to look at all four senses of the Scriptures, and live out the Catholic both/and in a way that will serve my prayer life.