The New Jerusalem Bible: Standard edition Review

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(More customer reviews)There is not an English Bible that will bring you closer to the full historical, literary, and religious meaning of the Bible than this one--and I've looked at all the competition up close. The format of the full edition is great, and for most people, this is the only Bible you'll ever need. The translation (made not from French, as some persist in saying, but from the Hebrew and Greek) is faithful without being awkward or obscure, and fluent without being fuzzy (NEB/REB, anyone?) or inaccurate. The scholarly apparatus (especially the footnotes, also the marginal parallel passages, introductions, and indices in the back to places, persons, and major footnotes) is outstanding. Only the Oxford Annotated can compete, and, again and again, I have found that the Oxford editors are guilty of tedious plot summary, while the NJB actually gives historical, cultural, and textual information that deepens your understanding of the text! I am a scholar, not a Roman Catholic, and moments where I think "Catholic" reading a note are EXTREMELY rare. This is not a Catholic Bible, this is a Bible for whoever wants the most objective, historically sound, and readable presentation of the original texts. The way I think, if you're going to read books that are millennia old, you need HELP. It's all here, the perfect marriage of readability (much better on this score than NRSV) and accuracy (arguably the best here too, though of course preferences in this domain are controversial).
Don't be misled by the half-truth that this literarily distinguished translation is somehow "looser" than, say, the NRSV (which, in the New Oxford Annotated Bible, is probably the NJB's only real competition). The NRSV, in the tradition of the KJV, still tilts towards word-for-word translations even when they don't give a clear and accurate sense of what the original text means. Not only is this not ideal for general readers, who will blame themselves for not understanding what the hyper-literal rendition has obscured, but it is not very helpful for more scholarly readers who too often will only see the impenetrability of the original reproduced in English. The fact is, that centuries of scholarship have given us a good understanding of most of these difficult passages. The NJB does the favor of bringing out these accurate understandings in translation; and when it really IS obscure, it explains the difficulty in a note! I have often had the experience of reading the translation of a passage I've studied closely, and thinking "Aha! of COURSE that's the correct nuance that didn't come through in my own clunky 'literal' attempt to read the original correctly."
In all fairness, some criticisms/clarifications. Some have expressed concern that this translation's intention to be "inclusive" has led to departures from the original texts' true meaning. In general, this is not a problem with the NJB. For example, in reading 1300 pp. of the Hebrew Bible, I found the translators' choices to be guided by accuracy and fidelity. (Non-philologists often don't realize that the ancient languages have loads of ways of making gender-non-specific constructions; the problem has often been to get it into modern English!) But there was one howler. In the decalogue, we read "set your heart on your neighbor's spouse." This is a bit of a stretch from the Hebrew "your neighbor's woman [wife]." I think the great fame of the Ten Commandments as "universal" principles clouded the translators' judgments here. A more frequent but minor irritation is that the translators have violated good English usage in writing "the wise" to mean "the wise one" (singular). They thought it was less awkward (and they are right to avoid the inaccurate "man"), but they judged wrong--it's just not good English to use "the wise" with a singular verb. One more complaint. As other reviewers have said, the superior notes (for which you have to buy the full edition, ISBN 0385142641) are one of the biggest reasons to use the NJB. But if you are reading whole books of the Bible at once, you will probably feel some annoyance that the explanatory notes are mixed in with the textual notes. In other words, when you see that a verse has a footnote, you don't know (without reading it) whether it has to do with a minor and uninteresting textual variation in one of the traditions, or whether it is one of the NJB's fantastic notes that contextualize the passage, give a thought-provoking reference to elsewhere, etc. In this regard, the design of Oxford study Bibles (where the two kinds of notes are segregated, though there's no marker in the text that there is an explanatory note, as there is in NJB) is probably superior. In most books, it doesn't matter, but there are some where the textual tradition is so messy that you really get tired of looking at the bottom of the page, and it disrupts the reading experience even for a reader who enjoys a complicated and scholarly view of the Bible.
To me, it speaks volumes that the problems I've mentioned (one howler + occasional infelicity + design error of the notes) don't change the fact that this is the most accurate, fluent, and useful-for-study-purposes Bible in existence!

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