The Orthodox Study Bible (Thomas Nelson)
Thomas Nelson. 2008. "The Orthodox Study Bible". Thomas Nelson.
| Cover | Metadata |
|---|---|
| Title: The Orthodox Study Bible Author: Thomas Nelson Content Type: book Publisher: Thomas Nelson Date Published: 2008 Pages: 1877 ISBN 10: 1418576360 ISBN 13: 9781418576363 |
Description
Orthodox Christianity is the face of ancient Christianity to the modern world and embraces the second largest body of Christians in the world. In this first of its kind study Bible, the Bible is presented with commentary from the ancient Christian perspective that speaks to those Christians who seek a deeper experience of the roots of their faith.
Features Include:
- Old Testament newly translated from the Greek text of the Septuagint, including the Deuterocanon
- New Testament from the New King James Version
- Commentary drawn from the early Church Christians
- Easy to Locate liturgical readings
- Book Introductions and Outlines
- Subject Index
- Full color Icons
- Full color Maps
- 9.5 point type size
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Criticism
From orthodoxwiki.org:
Despite positive endorsements by such prominent bishops as Metropolitan Maximos of Pittsburgh (a general editor) and Metropolitan Philip of New York (Chairman of the Board of Directors), most scholars and commentators have criticized both the translation (not so much a LXX translation as a Masoretic / LXX hybrid) and quality of the study notes of the OSB.
Representative of most reviews are the following excerpts:
"If my comments seem harsh it is because the OSB could have been better, and should have been better. As I've mentioned before, if the OSB had managed to package an Orthodox approach to Scripture within the limits of a Protestant-style study bible, I'd be much more gentle in my criticism. That the OSB should prove to be so deeply foreign not only to the ethos of Orthodox Christianity, but to its doctrine and teaching as well is simply unforgivable."[1]
"The notes to the New Testament are on the whole straightforward and some readers will find them a help in understanding many of the words and ideas in the text. Most of them though are dull and many of them jejune in the extreme. As a friend put it to me, they remind one of the notes to some school editions of Shakespeare. ‘King Lear plans to divide his kingdom between his daughters’, or ‘Hamlet wonders if it would be a good idea to commit suicide.’ In this book we find similar notes all too often, such as that on Luke 16:11: ‘True riches signify spiritual treasures’, or that on Luke 16:25 ‘This conversation is not between God and the rich man, but between Abraham and the rich man.’ The level is that of a not very bright Sunday School class. Critical questions are avoided by simply not being discussed at all. This is unsatisfactory, since many readers will be seeking help on just these questions. What should have been provided is an article setting out clearly how an Orthodox reader of the Bible should approach these problems. The solution adopted here is a further instance of what I call the attitude of the double-headed Byzantine ostrich."[2]
"The tragedy of the OSB is that, as Kevin Edgecomb once put it privately to me, it should have been better, and in fact was once better. Kevin has recently sent me a number of early drafts of the OSB that were once available online for all to see; these show that the OSB was once an honest-to-goodness translation of the Septuagint, and a rather satisfactory one, at that. However, somewhere along the line (and in all likelihood on account of Thomas Nelson's–the same company headed by an Orthodox deacon, I might add–overriding pressure to market the NKJV by making this an 'Orthodox NKJV' or some such beast), the project became the dubious, embarrassing 'translation' that we all have seen. One only need ask Father Patrick Reardon what happened to his translation of the Psalms; other contributors have simple become too jaded by it all and prefer not to speak of the subject. I think your observation that the people responsible for the OSB have simply ignored most of the criticism of the OSB is very important. One only needs to re-read Fr Ephrem's review to realize that nearly nothing that he rightly criticized in the earlier volume has changed in that later one. This inability to take constructive criticism, which smacks of the hubris of the Americanist brand of convertitis, is surely a major cause that the OSB isn't better that it is."[3]