Greetings I am Doug Beaumont. Today I want to talk to you about something that I'm very excited about, and that is the English Standard Version Bible - but not just any ESV . . . a CATHOLIC ESV! Welcome to my channel that is all about Christian apologetics, theology, and philosophy. If you're into that kind of stuff you should subscribe to the channel and click that Bell notification so that you'll know every time a video drops. As I was making my way into the Catholic Church from the Evangelical tradition, one of the difficulties that I had was picking out a new Bible. I wanted one that contained all of the books, but I also wanted one that was very faithful to the original writings. Now on my website douglasbeaumont.com I go into a lot more detail on this aspect of coming into the Church - but for now I just want to explain that as I was coming out of Evangelicalism, I was starting to discover the English Standard Version of the Bible which is actually a modern revision of the Revised Standard Version. Now what's interesting is that the Revised Standard Version (or the RSV) is kind of the academic standard among a lot of writers and it is also the translation used by most Catholic scholars. It's a fairly literal word-for-word type translation, but it is about 70 years old and thus it is in need of a little bit of revision. Enter the English Standard Version. Now, no Bible translation is perfect - but the ESV for me represented kind of the best amalgam of the literary beauty of the King James with the more updated, better researched manuscript tradition of the Revised Standard Version put out in the kind of English that makes more sense today than it did 70 years ago. And I lamented the fact that there was just basically no such thing as a Catholic ESV. Now, Oxford University Press did put out an English Standard Version with the "Apocrypha," but it was a wildly expensive book, it was big and heavy - it was just not the sort of thing that I would be using day-to-day. What I really wanted was something I could just carry around and read. Well it turns out I didn't have long to wait because in late 2019 just a few months ago the Augustine Institute published the Augustine Bible - an English Standard Version (an ESV) with all of the books in it for Catholics with a Nihil Obstat imprimatur from the bishops of India under whose supervision the original was made. So I recently got my hands on one. This is what it looks like. (Again for a full review go to DouglasBeaumont.com) You can see links to all the things I mentioned as well as close-up pictures of this book. But I just want to show you to you right now first of all it comes in a nice hard cardboard slipcover so keeping it in here is gonna keep it safer than in a book bag or just banging around normal day-to-day use. When you pull it out it has a fold over cardboard soft cover so it is a soft cover but it's not a wimpy soft cover. And on the inside it is almost all scriptural text. There are almost no notes included in this Bible, and the ones that are there are out of the way and they typically have to do with important subjects related to translation. This is not a Bible that's going to tell you what to think about what the Scripture says. Rather, it's just going to show you what the scripture says and leave it to you to do the hard work sometimes of figuring it out and that includes some difficult passages where the translation is kind of rough. It doesn't maybe sound normal to our English ears, but they did it anyway. Instead of paraphrasing or telling you what they think the Scripture meant, they tell you what was said - what was written - in as close to English as they can. Now, of course they don't always do a perfect job of that. No translation will ever be a perfect example of that. But the translation strategy of the ESV is extremely good. For example, when it comes to gendered pronouns it's kind of the politically correct thing now to change pronouns like "he" into the plural "they." Or maybe to change "father" into "parent" or "wife" into "spouse." Now, the purported reason for this is to make sure that when people read something about a father or a brother or a man that they don't think that the meaning of the text is necessarily limited to males or male spouses or male siblings. But the problem is that it is really easy to take that too far and just start including all of the genders in every single statement and distorting the meaning of the text. So the ESV translates the words the way they were originally written. It is up to the reader to figure out if these are general statements that apply to more than just the properly gendered term or if they are limited to it. But that's just part of biblical interpretation and most of the time it's pretty obvious. One thing for Catholics to be aware of is that that means that the word "adelphoi" which means "brothers" is translated "brothers." So this Bible will say Jesus had brothers. Now the word "adelphoi" in Greek can mean a lot more than male siblings, so whether Jesus had brothers, half-brothers, stepbrothers, cousins, or just "brethren," (you know people that were related to him because of the faith and not by blood) that is something for the interpreters to figure out. That is not something that the translators should mess with. One change that I think all Christians but especially Catholics can be happy about is that Isaiah 7:14 translates the Hebrew word "alma" as "virgin" and not just "young woman." Now, the word can mean both, but it is kind of confusing to be reading along in the Gospel of Matthew that indicates that Isaiah said a virgin would give birth and then turn back to Isaiah 7:14 and you can't find the word in there. Since "alma" can mean both, the translators pick the one that matches the New Testament referent and they do that in a number of places. Another thing readers will notice is that the ESV does not include the doxology at the end of the "Lord's Prayer" or the "Our Father." In a lot of Protestant Bibles they ironically include a Catholic doxology - part of the liturgy - in the Bible translation. "For thine is the power and the kingdom and the glory forever" after "deliver us from evil" - that is not actually in the original manuscripts. That was something that was added later. It's part of what people would say at church but it was probably not what was originally written. In the ESV the prayer stops where the best manuscripts say it should: at "deliver us from evil." In Matthew 19:9, gone is the horrible New American Bible rendering of "pornea" as "unlawful marriage." That is not what the word means. "Pornea" means "sexual immorality," and that is the way you'll find it in the ESV. Now, when it comes to manuscript traditions, 99% of all Bible translations pretty much include the same material - but there are two places in the New Testament where a significant portion of Scripture is under investigation. It's at question. One of those is in John chapter 7:53 through the beginning of John 8 with the story of the woman caught in adultery. The other one is what's called the longer ending of the Gospel of Mark. Now, because there are legitimate arguments on both sides as to whether or not these were in the originals, some Bibles take them out and maybe put them in a footnote. Other Bibles leave them in with a footnote saying that others leave them out. The ESV has gone the latter way which I think is the better. Another positive about the ESV is that it tries to be very consistent with its translation. And what I mean by that is that as much as possible - unless the context demands it - they typically try to give the same translation for the same Greek word all the time. Now of course that is not something that you want to be 100% because words have a range of meaning and you can't always compare the two exactly with a single term. However some translations take advantage of that fact to try to sneak their theology in and it ends up in a situation where you could be easily misled. So for example the New International Version - pretty much the most popular of Protestant translations on the market next to the King James Version - has a difficulty with the word "paradosis." Now in Greek "paradosis" means "to hand on." It means "tradition" basically - and that is the way the NIV translates the word every time somebody says something bad about tradition. There were times where Jesus kind of lambasted people for their reliance on human tradition. However, not everything the New Testament has to say about tradition is negative. For example 2 Thessalonians 2:15 says, "Therefore brothers, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught either by an oral statement or by a letter." Now that's a very important balance that we find in the New Testament. Not all traditions are bad. Just the "traditions of men" - but not the traditions of the Church. Unfortunately any time the Bible says something positive about traditions (about the word "paradosis"), the NIV changes the English from "tradition" to "teaching." So now all of a sudden if you do a word search on "tradition" in the NIV, all you see is apparently how much Jesus doesn't like it. You don't see all of the verses (and there are several) that talk about following tradition as a requirement for a faithful Christian. The ESV tries to avoid that kind of thing. Now, again, no translation is perfect and there are some things that I wish the ESV had done in a better way. One of them comes in Genesis 3:16. As God is explaining the fall to Eve, he says, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth in pain you will bring forth children yet your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you." Now that is the way I have heard it all my life. That's the way every translation pretty much that I have says it. But for some reason the ESV says this: "your desire shall be contrary to your husband and he shall rule over you." Now that is the complete opposite of the message. The point of Genesis 3:16 seems to be that the woman is going to desire something from her husband and yet he's going to rule over her. Now what that means - that's up to the interpreter. Now one of the more bizarre textual variants comes at Matthew 17:21. The New American Bible has it this way: "but this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting." Here's what it says in the ESV . . . Yup, that's it. The verse is literally missing. I used to have a lot of fun messing with my seminary students by saying, "Okay everyone turn to Matthew 17:21," knowing full well that the NIV skipped verse 21. So it's quite bizarre. You're reading along Matthew 17:19, 17:20, 17:22 . . . 21 is missing. So because it is a textual variant, and because the manuscripts that most modern Bibles are based on don't include that verse, many Bibles will skip over it. Unfortunately with the ESV the verse kind of just disappears the way it does with the NIV. I would have appreciated it more if they had really called it out maybe put a 17 in there with an asterisk or something so that people don't think that the Bible translators just forgot that verse. Another potential negative for Catholics comes at Luke 1:28. And this is the Annunciation to Mary. The ESV has this: "And he came to her and said, 'Greetings O favored one, the Lord is with you.'" Hold up - whatever happened to "Hail Mary full of grace"? Is this some kind of Protestant plot to make the Rosary sound unfamiliar or foreign? Probably not. The reason I know that is that almost no Bible Catholic or Protestant translates Luke 1:28 that way. The New American Bible says "favored one." This is probably the Bible that's in your pew. The ESV says "favored one." As far as I know the Douay-Rheims is the only Bible out there that translates it "Hail full of grace the Lord is with thee." So far I've only found one verse that really bugs me and that is 1 Timothy 3:15. Now you need a little bit of background on this verse to understand why it's a problem. 2 Timothy 3:16 is one of the Protestants' favorite verses to argue for Sola Scriptura (the idea that the Bible alone is the ultimate authority for Christian faith and practice). Now 2 Timothy 3:16 does not actually say that, nor does it teach it, but to the unsuspecting it can kind of be made to sound like it does. Now one favorite Catholic rejoinder to 2 Timothy 3:16 is to go to 1 Timothy 3:15. (See it's simple: you just take 1 from 2 and 1 from 16 and there you are!) In all the English Bibles I read, the church is called "the pillar of the truth," but in the English Standard Version it becomes just "a" pillar. Now to be fair the definite article (what English translates as "the") is not in the verse before "church." It just says "church." It doesn't say "the" church. However what's important to note is that there is no indefinite article in Greek. They simply leave the definite article off. So it is always a translation decision to put the word "a" in front of a word in order to show that it is just one of many, or that it is indefinite. So it's not technically wrong to not put the definite article in front of "church." However the definite article only appears in the entire verse one time. And that's in front of "truth." So had they been consistent, the verse would have read like this: "a household of a church of a living God a pillar and base [or foundation] of the truth." Now of course the ESV isn't gonna do that because if you put an "a" in front of the word "God" it sounds like God is just one of many. This by the way is the same argument that Jehovah's Witnesses use in John 1:1 to say that the word "Jesus" was "a" God. So the ESV is simply being extremely inconsistent here. They have decided that one of those terms is indefinite even though all the rest of them are not. Even though the Greek construction is the same. That really smacks of theological bias to me. And finally there are some times that the ESV doesn't quite pull off the literal excellence that it claims to. Sometimes being super literal is not terribly helpful. So for example Psalm 94:9 comes out, "He who planted the ear does he not hear?" (Of course the word "planted" here means more like "formed"). Proverbs 30:26 says, "ants are a people not strong." Ants are people??? Amos 4:6 says that God gave the people "cleanness of teeth." Well that means "hunger." I'm not sure if anyone's gonna get that from that rendering. Mark 1:2 says, "Behold I send my messenger before your face." I mean that kind of sounds like they're right there, right? But actually what that means is "ahead of you." Galatians 5:14 says, "the whole law is fulfilled in one word you shall love your neighbor as yourself." Well that's a lot more than one word isn't it? Of course here "logos" probably means something like "message." However, for the most part the ESV translators make very good decisions on the text. They try to be consistent, they try to be literal, they try to be word-for-word. Sometimes that doesn't always work out but in my mind for a study Bible especially, it is far better to have a difficult passage that you have to investigate a little bit than to have somebody kind of figure it out for you - narrow down the interpretive options for you - without you knowing it by turning a translation into an interpretation. Okay now as far as the Bible itself goes, it's about 16x9" and it's about 1 1/8" thick. So this is just a medium sized Bible easily carried in one hand. The text on this is fairly small. The text is not huge. The pages are fairly thin not terribly so and so there is a little bit of text ghosting, but it's not unreasonable. One thing I like to do to test out page thickness is to highlight a line somewhere in a collection of white text and then see how it bleeds through. After a couple of weeks that is all it has done. Not too bad. It's good to know that the deuterocanonical books (the books that were taken out of the Protestant Bible in the late 19th century) are not only in this Bible but they are in good canonical order. That is they are not collected together as seven books and called "the Apocrypha" or something but they're placed in the Bible in genre order where they belong. When it comes to deuterocanonical material that is in a proto-canonical book such as Esther or Daniel, the text is set off in italics so that it's obvious where you go from the different languages from the Hebrew into the Greek back to the Hebrew Aramaic or whatever it is. And these verses because they typically follow a different versification depending on their source the ESV typically gives both in the numbering system so that you can follow along with anybody that is reading those passages in a Bible that isn't numbered the way yours is. In the back you just have a blank notes page, a couple maps showing Israel and St. Paul's missionary journeys including his fourth one to Spain, and finally a very cool three-dimensional image of Jerusalem and that is basically it. This is a very stripped down - I would say minimalist - Bible. There's not a lot of room in the margins, there's almost no notes, and the ones that are there are really translational, and there's not a lot of extra matter in the back. There's no index, there's no concordance, nothing like that. So what is my assessment of the Augustine Bible? Right now it's running about thirty dollars and for that price this is an excellent resource. It's a good reader. This is not a Bible that I would get as a study Bible if I was looking to make a lot of notes and highlights and markup because there's really no room for notes and the highlighting is going to show through unless you use something pretty light. There also are no study notes to help you along. So if you're looking for something like the Didcahe Bible or something like the Ignatius Study Bible New Testament or Old Testament, you're gonna want to stick with those and not this. However, I would strongly recommend picking one of these up. I honestly believe every Catholic should have one of these because this translation is a game-changer. It was a game-changer in the Protestant world, it's a game-changer for us Catholics. And the fact that for the first time we have an accessible, complete, Bible in the English Standard Version translation is fantastic. Thank you bishops of India for pushing for a modern English translation of the scripture that is faithful. Thank You Agustine Press for making it available. I hope this video has been helpful to you. If it has, would you mind giving it a LIKE and again if you're into Christian apologetics, theology, philosophy, click that red SUBSCRIBE button and also click the BELL so that you'll be notified the next time videos drop. For more details on a lot of this information, go to my website DouglasBeaumont.com. You can sign up for a newsletter, you can for email notifications, all kinds of good stuff. That's really kind of the hub of my whole ministry. Until next time, God bless.