The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version

As someone who's had a keen interest in both matters of faith and history, this has been exactly what I wanted. I've already learned a lot and have new perspectives on what I'm reading, but it never feels like I'm being pushed or told what to believe by the annotations. They're very artful, beautiful and coherent. The historical information is also invaluable in understanding the Bible as a piece of literature created by humans, whether you believe in the divine inspiration aspect of it or not. It's all very readable and understandable, which is a huge boon because this book is very large. The size is no mystery though, there's so much packed into this. They even have the Apocrypha/Dueterocanonical books, which is a treat for me as I've wanted to dig into those for some time but they're harder to come across than you'd think. I bought the hardcover version, and if I had to gripe about anything, I only wish the cover and paper were a bit more solid. The sheer size and weight of this Bible makes me nervous about the binding, and the paper inside is the thin kind of paper that you've probably noticed in tons of other Bibles. It's appealing texturally, but I try to be really careful about turning pages so I don't tear anything. It'd break my heart to damage this, as it's truly the best Bible I've come across for me and I want to enjoy it for a long time to come at the very least.

So thankful to God for leading me to this bible. Wow 🤩 summarizes it all. This edition packs so much information in a clean esthetically minimal way. It removes the bells and whistles and concentrates on what’s important, the Word. Crisp pages and smooth very thin cover with a very luxurious touch and feel. I dug into it and didn’t want to put it down. I intend on purchasing a cover for it to preserve it since I intend on taking with me to bible study. I recommend it and will add it to my list of Christmas and birthdays’ gifts to give.

I bought this Study Bible because Dr. Elaine Pagels in one of her books says this is the Bible she recommends to her students at Princeton. I liked the book and since I wanted an annotated Bible I bought it. It is very good. I like the introductions to the books.

INCREDIBLE BIBLE!! I had been searching and researching a Bible version that I could study that would also give historical, linguistic, and cultural context for the text. This one does not disappoint! The translations are amazing, and the footnotes are very helpful. I even purchased some bible highlighters to help, and they don’t bleed through! I like the maps in the back section of the book too.

This text, NRSV Oxford Annotated, is a brilliant rendering and translation of the Biblical text. Very readable, simple and understandable. Also has articles and (in my view too little) notes on Biblical scholarship e.g., the documentary hypothesis and synoptic problem. It's unsurprising why it's the gold standard in Biblical translation among mainstream Biblical scholars. Though, conservative scholars have historically stayed away from the RSV family of translations due to their (often times, exaggerated) "liberalism" any prospective conservative religious buyer will be happy to know that the chairman of the NRSV translation committee was the world renowned conservative Bible scholar Dr. Bruce Metzger. Most importantly, the text contains the often ignored Apocryphal (also known as Deuterocanonical) works that are omitted in most printed Bibles, e.g., Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach etc. I wouldn't be too far off in claiming that the number of printed Bibles which contain this set of books probably doesn't number into the double digits, which I find disappointing. I'm very happy with this edition, except I wish I received a hardback or leather (or imitation leather, whatever) rather than paperback. If I have any qualms with this version, it would be the lack of notes and certain mistranslations in the text, for example Psalm 2:12, the Masoretic, Vulgate and Septuagint texts reading something like "maintain purity" and unfortunately, most printed editions of the Bible including the KJV and even the NRSV, render the text as "kiss the Son" or something like it. That's due to a Christian corruption of the text, not a literal rendering. However, since I'm not religious in any way, nor do I adhere to inerrancy of the Bible, nor do I, even if I were the aforementioned, would rely on a translation to convey the true meaning of the text, it's not a significant issue for me. Even so, I own the printed version of the Hebrew Bible (Biblia Hebraica Suttgartensia) so I have the necessary vorlage to check on the translation for it's accuracy if necessary. I bought this edition, as well as the King James Version with Apocrypha, also published by Oxford University Press, to read the Bible as literature, and that's what I intend to do with it.

Solid scholarship

My, how this grizzled old atheist's heart did leap when he checked - for the umpteenth time - to see if that useless "print replica" version of the New Oxford Annotated Bible (NOAB) had been superseded by one that has actually been formatted for Kindle. There's no way I was going to waste money on a purported Kindle version that serves the need to constantly zap back and forth between text and commentary less well than the massive print version does. And finally - here it is! Warning: if you're buying a Kindle version, DO NOT get the "Print replica" one that, as I speak, costs about £5 more for the privilege of getting next to zero functionality. Amazon should really take that one off and just leave the this Kindle version and the print one. I note K's review on Amazon.com to the effect that this Kindle version's navigability could be improved. I'm sure they're right - in the excellent series of concluding essays, for example, and the in-book annotations, the referenced Bible passages aren't linked. It's also clunky to navigate your way to a particular verse, chapter or passage within a book. You just have to scroll. But hey ho - what's on offer is light years in advance of the previous PDF masquerading as a "Kindle" version. It'll do me for now, and if a new, even better, Kindle version is produced, I expect it'll be automatically updated on my Kindle in Amazon's usual helpful fashion. I've been discovering far more about the Bible since I became an atheist than I ever did when I was a fundamentalist Christian. I'm sick at heart when my former fundie peers pervert reason and their own minds "reconciling" the Bible's obviously irreconcilable contradictions in ways that would be laughed out of court if they were applied to any other corpus of literature, or produce grotesque readings of passages whose meanings are often plain enough but that contradict what they want to believe, claiming the "inspiration of the Holy Spirit" as if it provided access to some kind of interpretive Holy of Holies rather than failing to constitute even the most patently miserable of excuses for their blatantly warped interpretations. And atheist Bible-bashing can sometimes be not much more helpful. Yes, I know the Genesis creation and flood accounts are absurdly at odds with Buddha knows how many well-established branches of knowledge, that the Exodus myth is... well, a myth, and that the divinely mandated genocide of the Hebrew Bible and the condemnation of most of earth's population to everlasting hellfire of the Christian one is no less than sick and deranged, although in their defence this bashing is made necessary by literalist nonsense.the soundness of whose empirical and logical basis is in inverse proportion to the frequency of its repetition. The Bible, along with every other "sacred" tome ever written, as well as all notions of the "divine" themselves, is a product of the individual and corporate human mind, and it would be great to have an edition of the most influential of these writings that treated it as such. It's in that respect that this massive tome is such a powerful tool. It proceeds on the assumption that humans wrote this collection from human motives. This is a "reasonable" approach. It's the same one we use to treat Homer's "Iliad" and the works of Shakespeare. or for that matter any work of fiction or non-fiction. "Goddidit" provides no more explanation for what the Bible says than it does for any secular literature. It's worse than irrelevant: it's profoundly damaging to a quest for any kind of truth or knowledge. It's not the beginning of investigation - it's the end of it. After that comes the mere black hole of "faith", one of the most heinous conceptions our diseased imaginations have ever produced. As part of its assumption, the NOAB as near as neutrally summarises the present state of scholarship, religious and secular, on all things biblical. The series of essays in which it does so consists of introductions to sections of the Bible and to individual books, as well as a raft of concluding essays on all aspects of the Bible generically (Hebrew and Christian, separately and together). These essays are both substantial enough in themselves and of sufficient quantity to warrant separate publication in their own right as a collection. At last I can find out what the relevant experts are saying - or NOT saying - on a particular topic, and thus to find out what we know and (just as importantly) don't know about such things as the process by which the canon now known as the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh was composed, compiled, edited and redacted - i.e. how the text grew out of the societies that produced it. The essays are written for the general reader, not for specialists, and as such they make available to anyone who's interested not only the most recent scholarship but (again, just as importantly) the methods scholars have used and use to arrive at their conclusions. The supplementary tables, charts, diagrams and maps are extremely helpful, although the latter, being in colour, don't come across well on a Kindle. There's also a really helpful bibliography of some of the editions of, and the most basic literature on, the various topics discussed. This humanist approach also applies to the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), the text used by the NOAB. Praise be to Allah that all the blather in so many "Christian" English editions, in which the translators express the hope that the results of their labours might convince the reader to believe what they believe, is absent. (I suspect that such material usually means that some ideologically-driven mistranslation is going on, which is what the New International Version has been criticised for.) No, the introduction ("To the Reader") to the NRSV simply outlines the process by which it was carried out and the principles used, as if it were a translation of The Song of Roland. How refreshing. At last I feel the scales lifting from my eyes and the light of reason and common sense dawning. And a couple of the NOAB's essays aren't afraid to call out errors in the NRSV translation, either. Then, of course, there are the annotations to the actual texts themselves. All those in the NRSV have been preserved, with the Oxford edition ones being presented separately from them, the former being accessed by clicking on the superscript letters, the latter by clicking on the verse numbers. I haven't started exploring these yet, but from a quick perusal I expect the more fulsome Oxford ones to amount to separate essays in themselves for each book. A final note: the ecumenical NRSV, and consequently the NOAB, includes ALL the apocrypha used by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox (i.e. Greek and Slavonic) churches. You will therefore find such works as 3 and 4 Maccabees and Psalm 151 as well as the apocrypha accepted only by the Roman Catholics that you sometimes find in Bibles "with Apocrypha".

Además de ser una buena versión de la Biblia, tiene innumerables anotaciones muy útiles para una mejor comprensión.

Excellent product for New Testament scholars or just enthusiasts

Really nice