I'm delighted to introduce to you the new English Standard Version Catholic Edition, published by the Augustan Institute. I'm so happy that this has finally come to pass. When I was a first-year master's student at the Augustan Institute back in 2005, my professor told me when I asked about Bible translations that he really liked the new English Standard Version, which was a Protestant Bible that was originally published in about 2002 in the United States.
So I bought a copy, and since then I've been using it very frequently to study scripture and to teach. Even though I've learned the biblical languages, I always go back to the ESV, and it's been very helpful to me in my own study. Just about a year ago, the bishops in India reached an agreement with Crossway Publishers in the United States to publish the English Standard Version Catholic Edition for the first time. So this originally Protestant translation was reviewed by a team of Catholic biblical scholars and theologians in India, and then it was approved by the Indian Bishops' Conference. in 2018. So the Augustan Institute now has the privilege of offering the English Standard Version Catholic Edition to the market in the United States and we're so delighted to be able to bring this great translation to you.
The ESV is known for its fidelity to the original languages, for its great attention to detail for its preservation of English biblical style. So when you think of, well, English standard version, what's the standard version? The original standard version was the King James Version, the King James Bible, which was then revised, became the Revised Standard Version, the RSV. And the ESV is really an update.
of the RSV with about 60,000 changes from the RSV to the ESV. This Bible preserves fidelity to the original Greek and Hebrew. It preserves the theological terminology that we find in biblical English. And it provides us as Catholic readers with another option.
We have a very small handful of biblical translations, and the ESV Catholic edition is a new and really good option for us to study scripture well, and to come to know it more fully, and perhaps use that as a springboard to learn Greek and Hebrew, and get even deeper into scripture. So I'm so happy that we're able to bring the English Standard Version Catholic Edition to you here in the United States, and I'm delighted to be part of it here at the Augustan Institute.