Here are the answers to our little quiz entitled NABRE vs. NOAB in which you, the player, had to make an educated guess about which footnotes were from the New American Bible, Revised Edition and which were from the 1991 New Oxford Annotated Bible.
1. Genesis 16:7
“Here the angel of the Lord is not a heavenly being subordinate to God but the Lord (Yahweh) in earthly manifestation, as is clear from v. 13 (compare 21:17, 19; Exodus 14:19).”
This is the NOAB. The NABRE note for this verse is as follows:
“The Lord’s angel: a manifestation of God in human form; in v. 13 the messenger is identified with God. See note on Exodus 3:2.”
2. 1 Samuel 7:6
“Drew water and poured it out: this ritual act does not appear elsewhere in the Old Testament. Linked with fasting and admission of sin, it seems to function as a purification ritual that washes away the guilt incurred by worshiping the Canaanite Baal and his consort Astarte. Its effectiveness is immediately evident when the Lord thunders a response to Samuel’s offering.”
This is the NABRE. Already it looks like it would be a fair bet to guess that the format of any note where the Biblical text appears is followed by a colon and then the commentary is from that translation.
NOAB note: “Libations of water were unusual (wine was used generally), but to people with a desert background water would be sufficiently precious.”
3. Jeremiah 1:11
“There is wordplay between the Hebrew noun shaqed, “almond tree”, and the Hebrew verb shoqed, “watcher/watching”. Because the almond tree begins to bloom in late winter in Palestine, it is called “the watcher” for the coming of spring. God is also “watcher”, observing the fulfillment of the prophetic word.”
This is the NABRE. This is where I really feel the NABRE is at its best when I read material from the Old Testament. This background it hands on is the kind of thing that for me at least is good to know, but hard to remember. It seems I need the reminder every time I return to these books of the Bible, so I like to have such a note at my fingertips.
NOAB note: “Play on words (see notes a [Hebrew shaqed] and b [Hebrew shoqed]) to encourage the hesitant young prophet in the face of certain opposition.”
The NOAB here calls our eyes to the NRSV translation notes. I find these notes very helpful when I am using the NRSV to study a book of the Bible, especially in the Old Testament where they point out where the translation departs from the Masoretic text. I wish the NAB and NABRE went that route, but since 1970 they have decided to keep that material in a separate textual notes document that you can find online. (Note that while the NAB follows the published critical text of the Greek New Testament, there is no comparable Hebrew critical text. Self consciously Protestant translations like the ESV for reason of Luther’s appeal to the Hebrew against the Deuterocanon and their lionization of the pioneering 16th century translators simply translate from published volumes of the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible. (That being said, it is still my theory that the ESV Old Testament was likely not translated from anything, but rather just swapped footnoted readings from the Hebrew in from the RSV in preference to verses which followed the ancient versions.)
4. Luke 4:33
“See Mark 1:23 note. Demons were thought of in Jesus’ day as non-material existences of a personal sort, hostile to human welfare and rebellious against God. The gospels reflect widespread dread of demons and a general sense of helplessness before demonic activity. Jesus is portrayed here and elsewhere (compare 11:20-22) as one who can deliver from demonic oppression and from Satan himself, evil’s supreme embodiment (see Matthew 4:24 note; 12:22 note; Luke 7:33 note; 13:16 note).”
This is the NOAB.
As far as I know, Christians still think of demons as non-material existences of a personal sort, hostile to human welfare and rebellious against God. I know I do. To alter what Chesterton said about Original Sin in Orthodoxy, to me the existence of demons is one of the few Christian doctrines one can prove by turning on the news. The NABRE note for verse 34 is as follows:
“What have you to do with us?: see note on John 2:4. Have you come to destroy us?: the question reflects the current belief that before the day of the Lord control over humanity would be wrested from the evil spirits, evil destroyed, and God’s authority over humanity reestablished. The synoptic gospel tradition presents Jesus carrying out this task.”
This seems to me how one would say this if one presumed demons were real but was writing a note about then current views on the subject. If my interpretation is correct, this shows one place where the NABRE presupposes a Christian view of the cosmos that is not presumed in the NOAB.
5. Revelation 9:1
“A star: late Judaism represented fallen powers as stars (Isaiah 14:12-15; Luke 10:18; Jude 13), but a comparison with Revelation 1:20 and Revelation 20:1 suggests that here it means an angel. The passage to the abyss: referring to Sheol, the netherworld, where Satan and the fallen angels are kept for a thousand years, to be cast afterwards into the pool of fire; cf. Revelation 20:7-10. The abyss was conceived of as a vast subterranean cavern full of fire. Its only link with the earth was a kind of passage or mine shaft, which was kept locked.”
This is the NABRE. Did the word “netherworld” tip you off? I wonder if the new CAB will prefer “Hades” or “the grave” or other renderings instead of “netherworld”.
NOAB Note: “A star…fallen from heaven, one of the fallen angels, perhaps Satan himself (v. 11; Luke 10:18.)”
Except for its characteristic terseness to the point of being a subject without a predicate, I might have guessed the NOAB note was the NABRE note. Maybe this makes up for the note from Luke 4.
BONUS
Matthew 16:21-23
This is the justly hated footnote that has opened the NAB to all sorts of calumnies. If you have never seen it, let me warn you—it is more worthy of the Jesus Seminar than of Christ’s Church. You may want to sit down for this.
NABRE
“16:21–23 This first prediction of the passion follows Mk 8:31–33 in the main and serves as a corrective to an understanding of Jesus’ messiahship as solely one of glory and triumph. By his addition of from that time on (Mt 16:21) Matthew has emphasized that Jesus’ revelation of his coming suffering and death marks a new phase of the gospel. Neither this nor the two later passion predictions (Mt 17:22–23; 20:17–19) can be taken as sayings that, as they stand, go back to Jesus himself. However, it is probable that he foresaw that his mission would entail suffering and perhaps death, but was confident that he would ultimately be vindicated by God (see Mt 26:29).”
Are we all ok? This argument has been made many times, but it bears repeating that even if Jesus was not God, but merely an intelligent and perceptive man, he certainly would have seen his death at the hands of the religious or state authorities as a strong possibility, especially after the death of the Baptist. The thinking behind this note would not only deny in Christ an ability to know what was in man, but also the perception of the average fallen human in those tense times in Roman Judea. The infamous note was not present in the original 1970 NAB, but was one of the notes to the revised New Testament that was published in 1986. I have not read every note in the NABRE, but I cannot think of any others that are this bad. (Other notes seem to assume prophecy is only possible in a retroactive sense, but I think any of us who have used academic study materials have learned to politely ignore such notes.
I think that this note from Matthew 16 has for many people been all they need to know about the NABRE and has been a major cause of its mixed reputation. In a talk I quoted at length in the first NABRE Farewell Tour post, Mary Healy reports that such footnotes have been dispensed with as the 1986 New Testament has been edited for its release as part of the Catholic American Bible in 2027. Let us be thankful for that.
Let’s see what the NOAB has to say about the verse that caused the kerfuffle:
Nothing.
Just kidding—it sends us to the parallel in Mark 8:32
“The idea that the Son of Man (the Messiah) was to suffer was in complete contrast to Jewish expectation (see 2:10 note; 9:10 note; Matthew 16:22).”
If I knew nothing about the New American Bible, I would definitely pick that as the note from the Catholic Bible and the other note as that of a study Bible used in the secular academy. Were that the case, I seriously believe the Bible in a Year podcast would have been using the NABRE and not the RSV.
I once stumbled across a Muslim website that cited the introduction/footnote material in the New American Bible as an admission that the Christian Scriptures were not divinely inspired or free of error even in the opinion of Christian scholars. So, those footnotes have definitely had their effect.
I’ve often thought that, if I believed what our biblical scholars believe, I wouldn’t be a Catholic; I wouldn’t have reason enough.
I would love to know exactly who is responsible for that footnote at Mt. 16:21-23. It’s amazing to me that he or she could get away with it and not be held responsible. And since it will thankfully be scrubbed from the CAB, we’re reminded of the fact that – yes – errors appear in the supplementary materials in our approved Catholic Bibles. Some have firmly denied this possibility.
I often defend the NABRE notes, and my biggest reason for doing so is this:
The way many online commentators criticize the notes casts doubt on the teaching authority of the bishops. So many times, I’ve read comments saying that the notes are “heretical” or that the notes are an indictment of the American bishops. To me, this is not a good spirit for engaging with the teaching authority of the Church. Before I go on, let me clarify what I am *not* saying:
I am not saying that approval of a translation or footnotes is incapable of error. These are not infallible acts. And furthermore, I recognize that bishops’ conferences are in an odd position when it comes to magisterial authority. However, the conferences do have the proper canonical authority to approve biblical translations (and presumably their accompanying notes).
What I *am* saying is: a faithful response to the teaching of the bishops does not assume the worst without investigation or a sincere attempt to understand where they are coming from. Almost every single time I see comments trashing the NABRE notes as “heretical,” I see no sincere attempt to understand why the bishops did not judge them to be heretical. Usually, the bishops’ reasoning or motivation is simply waved away as “liberal.” This is a form of name-calling, not a genuine attempt to understand.
Since people rarely explain why the note on Matthew 16:21-23 gained approval, let me offer a bit of background for the benefit of readers who aren’t familiar with this (I suspect many of the frequent readers of this blog already know this, but some may not).
The Church has accepted, in principle, a three-stage process for the composition of the gospels:
1. The actual words and deeds of Jesus
2. The preaching and teaching of the Apostles
3. The authorship of the gospel writers
Both Dei Verbum 19 and the 1964 instruction from the Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC) “
On the Historical Truth of the Gospels
” have accepted this three-stage process. The PBC document (translated from Latin by Google Translate) states:
“After Jesus rose from the dead and his divinity was clearly seen, faith, far from erasing the memory of what had happened, strengthened it, because faith was based on what Jesus had done and taught. Nor was he transformed into a “mythical” person because of the worship with which the disciples from then on venerated Jesus as Lord and Son of God, and his teaching was distorted. There is no reason to deny that the apostles handed on to their hearers what the Lord had actually said and done with that fuller understanding which they themselves, instructed by the glorious events of Christ and instructed by the light of the Spirit of truth, enjoyed. Hence it is that just as Jesus Himself, after His resurrection, “interpreted to them” both the Old Testament and His own words, so too they interpreted His words and deeds, as the needs of their hearers demanded. “Devote themselves to the ministry of the word,” they preached, using various modes of speaking, in keeping with their own purpose and the minds of their hearers; for they were debtors “to Greeks and to Barbarians, to wise and to foolish.” These modes of speaking with which the preachers announced Christ must be distinguished and evaluated: catechesis, narratives, testimonies, hymns, doxologies, prayers, and other literary forms of that kind commonly used in Sacred Scripture and by the people of that time.”
The NABRE note on Matthew 16:21-23 appears to me to be acceptable within the scope mapped out by the PBC document above. It stakes out a moderate position in the scholarly debate — affirming that Matthew’s words could well reflect Jesus’s genuine anticipation of his coming suffering while also pointing out that they may be reported with greater clarity in hindsight than the apostles would have understood it when they lived and traveled with Jesus.
Now, one could immediately object that the note still implicitly treats Jesus as merely a human being and not God, who knows all things. To this, I will quote from Fr. Raymond Brown’s paper “‘And the Lord Said’? Biblical Reflections on Scripture as the Word of God”:
“If I may return to the Christological comparison with which I began, Jesus as “fully divine and fully human” has been rejected not only consciously by nonbelievers but also unconsciously by believers. The nonbeliever regards the fully divine as incompatible with the human; the believer often regards the fully human as incompatible with the divine. To the biblical exception to the full humanity of Jesus (“without sinning” in Heb 4:15) are sometimes added “without ignorance,” “without temptation,” and “without limitation of world view.” Consequently, if another Christian, who believes in the divinity of Jesus, insists that Jesus did not know all things, did not foresee the distant future, and was tempted, having to learn obedience, Christological fundamentalists will accuse that person of denying that Jesus is the Son of God. Small wonder that if a believer in revelation and inspiration insists that the biblical word is human, time-conditioned, and subject to limitation and error, biblical fundamentalists will accuse that person of denying that the Bible is the word of God.”
I say all this to sketch out a possible explanation for why the NABRE’s note on Matthew 16:21-23 could be judged acceptable by the bishops. Now, it’s legitimate in my book to decide that the underlying reasoning is not convincing or to reason that it is too difficult to reconcile the note with other essential parts of the faith. And I’m very sympathetic to the view that academic notes like this are probably too technical to be included in every single edition of of the NABRE, even for beginners who are just encountering Scripture for the first time. My only beef is with the easy accusations thrown at the bishops without any acknowledgment or engagement with the substantive reasons for why the bishops might have approved the notes.
And when the Catholic American Bible is finally released and we can all see that the infamous footnote has been replaced with another one, or none at all, what will that imply about the soundness of the footnote? It’s not for nothing that the footnote has generated so much heat. It’s all the proof we need that it was a reckless decision to include it and that those of us who spoke out about it…perhaps…were ultimately heard.
Please, always remember the story of the Dutch Catechism – a dreadful catechism fully approved by a body of bishops which triggered many courageous lay people to denounce it. And who finally agreed with the laity but the pope?
Be a faithful Catholic but don’t be a yes-man for every bishop.
For the sake of comparison, the footnote for Mt. 16:21 in the New Catholic Bible says,
“The apostles now know that Jesus was the Messiah, but their idea of it was inexact. They thought of a political Messiah, the glorious dominator of peoples. Jesus offers a triple prediction that spells out the last stages of his ministry. He thus prepares them for the scandal of the cross (see Mt. 17:22f; 20:17f) and enlightens them concerning the true Messianism, which is spiritual, humble, and suffering.”
This, in my opinion, is how footnotes should work. They do not propose trendy critical theories about a text but instead expound the text in light of the faith. They support the faithful in believing and aid the preacher and teacher in preparing their homilies and classes. They build up the Church, rather than confuse it.
From what I’ve read about the background of the NCB, I think it’s safe to say that its translators had before them the 1986 NAB New Testament and its notorious footnote for this passage. Their excellent footnote suggests the times are improving, thanks be to God. But the recent past still needs to be exposed for what it was.
That note from the NCB is quite good. It does a good job of explaining the meaning and significance of the text without diving into the scholarly weeds. Sometimes it feels like the NABRE notes were written by scholars for scholars, assuming that general readers want to dive into the minutiae of scholarly debates.
I totally agree.
I agree that the NCB often has solid notes like that. I was reading Malachi the other day and came across this note for Malachi 1:11:
“The Hebrew verbs are in the present tense, which, in the prophetic style, stands for the future. It is part of Christian tradition, confirmed by the Council of Trent (Session XXII), that this pure sacrifice foretells the bloodless sacrifice of the Mass. This passage is echoed today in the Third Eucharistic Prayer: “You never cease to gather a people to yourself, so that from the rising of the sun to its setting a pure sacrifice may be offered to your name.”
The NABRE, by contrast, begins thier note by giving a lot of good historical-critical information on Mal 1:10-11, and then wraps up with this:
“In a Christian interpretation of Mal 1:10-11, the “pure offering” of Mal 1:11 is seen as a reference to sacrifice in the Messianic Age. The Council of Trent endorsed this interpretation (DS 1724).”
Those extra details in the NCB, such as mentioning the “Mass” and the Third Eucharistic Prayer, add a lot to the practical spiritual value of the note.
Somewhat off-topic, but I emailed Catholic Book Publishing Co. to ask if they would be publishing the CAB next year, and they said they would be but didn’t yet have a release date. So those of us (like me) who have a nostalgic fondness for their bibles, rest assured.
“If I knew nothing about the New American Bible, I would definitely pick that as the note from the Catholic Bible and the other note as that of a study Bible used in the secular academy. Were that the case, I seriously believe the Bible in a Year podcast would have been using the NABRE and not the RSV.”
The Bible in a Year Podcast uses the Great Adventure Bible, which is published by Ascension Press, which is the sponsor of the podcast.
This is the same reason the Catechism in a Year uses the Acension Press edition of the catechism
My comment is speculation about the relationship between the NAB and presses like Ascension. The NAB hasn’t just been printed by one company. Even TAN (well, St Benedict Press) has an edition. I suspect that presses like Ignatius and Ascension may have had an NAB edition of their own in an alternate universe where there was no very loud, very mad minority united in hatred of the NAB, which has been a serviceable translation for the Church, and I think sounds way better read aloud than the RSV, ESV, or NRSV, even if it is not as good as a study text.
Call me a sentimentalist, but I’ll kind of miss cycling back around every summer to King David taking a “siesta” (1970 NAB) when the new Liturgy of the Hours is published.
I’m looking forward to never again hearing, “Whoever has ears ought to hear” (Mt. 11:15). That’s silly beyond belief, and another textual sacrifice to the god of inclusive language. It’s if Christ were saying, “Hey, you people have ears on the sides of your head, so it seems to me you should be able to hear me. Testing, testing, one, two, three.”
The New Catholic Bible rendering: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Beautiful.
That cannot possibly be the explanation, because the RSV has long had a negative reputation as a “liberal Bible.”, which is why, despite its initial massive success at its first publication in 1952, sales quickly collapsed and they needed a Catholic Edition to give it a shot in the arm 10 years later- a shot in the arm that didn’t last because the Catholic Edition wasn’t very popular either. Certainly, the fact that the Jerusalem Bible and the NAB quickly eclised the RSV CE didn’t help, but I don’t think that is the reason the sales weren’t great.
In fact, the RSV quickly fell into obscurity and became practically unavailable for decades before Ignatius Press revived it in the mid-to-late 90s, and even then it remained an obscurity until the “Bible in a Year Podcast” made it mainstream in 2021. Nobody even noticed the publication of a second Catholic Edition in 2006.
The same thing happened with the NRSV, which was widely available in the early 90s but quickly fell into obscurity until it was revived around 2009 through the publication of a number of high-quality Catholic Editions.
If anything, the RSV and NRSV are even more widely disliked than the NAB, and over a longer period of time, so that can’t be the reason why Catholic books such as the Catechism in 1994 have long used the RSV.
Even if the NAB is unpopular, it doesn’t explain the use of the RSV. Until approximately the last 10 years, most English-speaking countries used the Jerusalem Bible in their liturgy. So if anything, the Catechism and other Catholic books should have been using the widely popular and well-respected Jerusalem Bible. Instead, they chose the relatively obscure RSV.
This phenomenon doesn’t make sense unless the licensing fees and terms of the RSV and significantly cheaper and better than those of either the NAB or the Jerusalem Bible.
I don’t think it’s right to say the NRSV had fallen into obscurity prior to 2009. It was the standard bible amongst mainline Protestants around me well before then.
But good luck finding a copy anywhere but Amazon or a college bookstore. Now it is everywhere you look, including places like Walmart and Target; it wasn’t that way for at least 10 years.
It is important to understand that the copyrights to the RSV and NRSV are owned by the National Council of Churches, an organization which is dying and which is being sustained almost entirely by the revenue generated by these two Bibles.
In fact, the mainline Protestant churches are dying; they have lost something like 25% of their membership just this century, and around 50% of their membership in the last 50 years.
Sure, all churches are losing members, with dwindling attendance, but there is a difference between that and the mainlines, where every year they have more funerals than baptisms.
What I am getting at is that the support of the mainlines isn’t enough to keep either the NRSV or RSV in print. They need the revenue from the Catholic Editions.
I think the existence of the ESV is a case in point. The ESV is a licensed revision of the 1971 RSV. The fact that Crossway got permission to revise the RSV is more than a little shocking.
After the publication of the RSV Catholic Edition in 1966, a group of evangelical scholars approached, asking for a more conservative “Evangelical Edition”; they said “no” and continued to say “no” for 30 years, until finally saying “yes” in 1999.
What changed between 1966 and 1999? Other than the financial situation of the NCC making them desperate for a little extra money, apparently nothing.
Until the adoption of the ESV for the lectionary in Britain, both the JB and the RSV were approved for reading at Mass. Apparently the JB won out in parishes because the publisher, Geoffrey Chapman, was quick off the mark in bringing out a 3 volume JB lectionary. Most parishes had adopted the JB before an RSV lectionary was published. A small number of parishes used the RSV lectionary, which was published in a one volume edition. Catholic academic institutions in the UK mostly used the RSV for higher education programmes, before moving to the NRSV, rather than the JB or its successors.
The RSV is a bit of a mystery. Protestants consider it liberal and Catholics consider it conservative. At least, the Second Catholic Edition seems fairly reliable. It’s been the version used in some fairly traditional publications, such as the three Navarre editions and the Didache Bible. And I believe Fr. William Most spoke highly of it. I’ve used it a lot but never really took to it. It strikes me as neither this nor that, as lacking a distinct character. I think that happens after a version has gone through several revisions; at the end of it all, its distinct color and personality have been lost. It may be corrected and refined, but its literary quality is now rather generic.
I haven’t had the first Catholic edition of the RSV for quite a few years, but I remember it had in the back an index of the changes made to its text by Catholic scholars. It seems as if this might had upgraded the RSV from “liberal” to “orthodox.”
Might “have,” not “had”!
The RSV has elegant, elevated language, and it is quite literary. I suppose your opinion depends on what you think of the King James. The KJV and Shakespeare together defined 90% of what we today would call “standard English”, with John Donne and John Milton a distant third. The language of the KJV is of great literary quality and quite beautiful.
The RSV is basically an updated KJV, made with greater knowledge of the original languages to fix translation errors, and a critical text of the NT, which is better and more accurate than the manuscripts behind the KJV. It preserves much of the language of the KJV.
KJV defenders like to claim that the KJV because it is easier to memorize. I don’t really think memorization is all that important; indeed, I tend to be against it because it encourages quoting out of context. Nevertheless, you only need to hear a passage quoted a couple of times before the wording is set to memory. In the same way, when I quote a phrase from the Bible in casual conversation, which I will do when relevant to the conversation, “it is the blind leading the blind” or whatnot, it is the wording of the RSV that I am quoting, not even intentionally, but because the words just stick in your mind, much like the KJV.
And when reading the ESV, which is something like 95% RSV, and a phrase seems a little odd or clunky, looking it up, it is almost always one of the places where they changed from the text of the the RSV
To my knowledge the Navarre Bible uses the original RSV-CE.
Midwest Theological Forum is now advertising a forthcoming Smyth-sewn synthetic leather edition of their Didache Bible using the CAB text.
https://theologicalforum.org/books/the-didache-bible-cab-flex-cover/
Midwest Theological Forum is now advertising a forthcoming Smyth-sewn synthetic leather edition and a hardcover edition of their Didache Bible using the CAB text:
https://theologicalforum.org/books/the-didache-bible-cab-flex-cover/