Fireside School and Church Edition - Burgundy

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful Bible!!!
Review: This Bible has been great! It has taken a lot of use for the last few years and held up nicely. Dictionary in the back is very helpful as well as the three year cycle of readings. You'll be happy with this Bible.

Rating:
Summary: Good Translation, Great Notes
Review: This modern American Catholic translation is very readable and somewhat literal, which is admittedly to my preference. (Even as a Roman Catholic, one of my favorite translations in English is the NASB.) At times, however, the translators in order to keep this from the stiffness found in academic study translations seemed to slip into near colloquialisms. Somewhere in this translation I read "ignoramus." It was a little distracting. And in I Cor. 9:26 just the other day I was similarly distracted by Paul's "I do not fight as if I were shadowboxing" where a less comical image in the RSV is of Paul futilely "beating the air." I would personally prefer a retention of some of the archaic speech where the modern speech upsets the cadence of the Scripture. But the purpose of this translation seems to have been an attempt to strike a balance between accessibility and literalness. Generally, I believe the translators met that goal.

The notes. Ahhhhh. The notes. Of interest especially for the Roman Catholic, and also for the general Catholic and high Protestant are the wonderful notes. Many fundamentalists who don't accept the Elohist/Yahwist schools of Old Testament study, and the "Q" Gospel source theory will be upset by the copious, legible notations, text breaks and subject headings, and expository book introductions. For me, they make the Sacred Scripture come to life by breathing context into the writings.

It is this particular translation of the Sacred Scripture with its notes and study aids that finally allowed me to make my first productive reading of Leviticus and Numbers. Where before I had dutifully plowed just to plow, this time I came away learning and cross-referencing and stopping to ponder the mercies of a God who gave us a fantastic type of His Son in Moses, the great "Legislator" (as Josephus would title him).