New Study Bible’s creation was one of (almost) biblical proportions

Courtesy use of Carmel Communications

Curtis Mitch: What makes it a study Bible, as something different from just a Bible, is that it's published along with all kinds of study helps that go along with it. These study helps come in the form of a number of introductory essays that help readers orient themselves to Sacred Scripture. It addresses questions like, “What does the Church actually teach about Scripture?” “Why is it so important to make Scripture a part of your own personal and spiritual life?” “How did the Church arrive at a canon of 73 biblical books?” “What is the grand story of salvation, the story that the Bible tells?” It's kind of good to get an essay up front there, sort of a snapshot of the big picture of the story that Scripture is telling. 

And then for each one of the 73 books of Scripture, each one has its own introduction, where we address some background issues about, “Well, where did this book come from?" "When was it written, and why?" "What was the situation on the ground that the biblical author and the Holy Spirit through the biblical author were trying to address?" "What are the points that they're trying to make?” 

So we have a little bit of orientation at the beginning, and then, as you're reading through scripture, chapter by chapter and verse by verse, the bottom of the page is filled with explanatory notes that help to fill in the background of what the sacred authors are saying -- a little bit about the historical context, a little bit about the cultural context, the linguistic context. 

And then the other thing that makes the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible unique is the fact that we're really trying to bring in some of the riches of the Church’s 2,000 years of sacred tradition, 2,000 years of reading the Bible, and put some of that in the explanatory notes, like making reference to how the Fathers of the Church understood this or that passage, or making reference to how this passage was used in a particular Church council, one of the 21 general or Ecumenical Councils of the Church, what the Fathers have to say, the doctors have to say, the saints have to say, to help people read the Bible with understanding, but also read it according to the mind of the Church. We want to let the Church be our guide to digging into the meaning of Scripture, the message of Scripture, and how it applies to our life.

Other things we have are topical essays where we take a particular biblical teaching and just linger over it for a few minutes and unpack its meaning. "What does this mean in the context of the whole Bible?" 

Another feature that you'll find in the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible are word studies, where we try to identify some of the difficult or unfamiliar vocabulary that appears in Scripture, and just give a little box of information where people can go and get more of a sense of understanding.

Mitch: I think Scott Hahn and Fr. [Joseph] Fessio, who kind of worked out the vision for this back in the late 1990s, basically saw a couple of things. One is that if you look at the world of Protestant Christianity, especially in America, we see how influential study Bibles have actually been. Then I think it was in the 1980s that the New International Version, the NIV Study Bible, came out, and it was all the rage in certain Protestant circles. It became a tool to educate the Christian faithful. We realized that there really isn't an equivalent Catholic tool, a tool that is unmistakably, unapologetically Catholic in its denominational confession and its viewpoint on Sacred Scripture. If we could produce an edition of Scripture outfitted fully with annotations and explanations from beginning to end, this could really help to recatechize an English-speaking Catholic faithful.

Mitch: Well, I hope that it would change that relationship for the most part, by creating it, if it doesn't exist and deepening it if it already does. The thing about a study Bible is it's kind of designed to create those "light bulb moments" where you start to make connections. And when you begin to make discoveries in Sacred Scripture, it's the thing that keeps you coming back for more. All of the study helps, the essays, the introductions, the annotations -- they're not designed to replace Scripture; they're designed to get you into Scripture and to keep you there, as a place where discoveries are being made and you feel like your Catholic spiritual life is truly being nourished by the Word of God. It's not challenging your faith, it's deepening your faith.

Mitch: Well, Ignatius Press had already gotten itself behind the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (RSVCE) of the Old and New Testaments in publishing the Ignatius Bible, well before the work on the study Bible even began. But that was a good choice already to begin with, because I really do think that the RSVCE is certainly one of the finest English translations. It stands within the tradition of the King James Version. It's a much modified descendant of the KJV. But in the 1960s in England, they were allowed to make certain adjustments to the text in a Catholic direction, or to make it a more Catholic-friendly version of Sacred Scripture. So that was already embraced by Ignatius Press.

But Fr. Fessio decided that the only the real issue with the RSV is that it was beginning to age. And so it was the real number of archaisms that some people really like, but other people find off-putting. So what Ignatius did was they actually farmed out the RSVCE and created an updated version of it that tries to take at least some of the archaisms out of it and kind of put more contemporary English into it.

If you look at the Book of Psalms, for example, instead of Thee and Thou, it's now You, etc. You have updated language there that's just a little easier for a modern speaker to understand.

Mitch: I think that the main reason is because, not only is it an edition of Sacred Scripture in a beautiful translation -- that's a good thing to have by itself -- but what we try to do is pack a small library of resources into it: features that you would get in books that normally stand alongside Scripture, let's say a Bible Atlas, or a commentary by the early Church Fathers or one of the Doctors of the Church, or a book on the cultural background of Sacred Scripture. We wanted to bring out some of the best of the features of these additional resources and put them all together with the Bible under one cover.

So in a certain sense, when you're purchasing the Study Bible, you're almost purchasing a small library of Bible study resources that are written from a Catholic perspective. They're all together in one book. We tried to make it as much of a one-stop shop as you could make it without breaking the bank or without creating a book so big you need a wheelbarrow to carry it around. We really tried to get as many snippets from the tradition and from contemporary resources as we could, and cobble together this library of Scripture study resources that will be helpful to people, and that will also help them, beyond understanding Scripture, also give them the ability to apply it to their lives, because ultimately, that's the end game. We want to understand, but we then have to live it. We have to apply it. We have to embody it in our own lives.

Read also :Want to deepen your friendships? Try studying the Bible together

Read also :How the Bible shaped (and shapes) Western culture