The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version

As someone who's had a keen interest in both matters of faith and history, this has been exactly what I wanted. I've already learned a lot and have new perspectives on what I'm reading, but it never feels like I'm being pushed or told what to believe by the annotations. They're very artful, beautiful and coherent. The historical information is also invaluable in understanding the Bible as a piece of literature created by humans, whether you believe in the divine inspiration aspect of it or not. It's all very readable and understandable, which is a huge boon because this book is very large. The size is no mystery though, there's so much packed into this. They even have the Apocrypha/Dueterocanonical books, which is a treat for me as I've wanted to dig into those for some time but they're harder to come across than you'd think. I bought the hardcover version, and if I had to gripe about anything, I only wish the cover and paper were a bit more solid. The sheer size and weight of this Bible makes me nervous about the binding, and the paper inside is the thin kind of paper that you've probably noticed in tons of other Bibles. It's appealing texturally, but I try to be really careful about turning pages so I don't tear anything. It'd break my heart to damage this, as it's truly the best Bible I've come across for me and I want to enjoy it for a long time to come at the very least.

So thankful to God for leading me to this bible. Wow 🤩 summarizes it all. This edition packs so much information in a clean esthetically minimal way. It removes the bells and whistles and concentrates on what’s important, the Word. Crisp pages and smooth very thin cover with a very luxurious touch and feel. I dug into it and didn’t want to put it down. I intend on purchasing a cover for it to preserve it since I intend on taking with me to bible study. I recommend it and will add it to my list of Christmas and birthdays’ gifts to give.

From what I have seen in my studies, this seems to be widely considered the current standard version for Biblical studies. It is, for example, the recommended version for Dale Martin’s New Testament class at Yale, although he does point out a translation error in his New Testament text for the Yale Open Studies. For people accustomed to the majestic text of the KJ V, reference to a “dome” in the Genesis creation story will be off-putting. But the presentation of the text is very good, and the up-to date notes on the next result in this version being almost twice as long as an unannotated Bible, making it a very good resource….

I bought this Study Bible because Dr. Elaine Pagels in one of her books says this is the Bible she recommends to her students at Princeton. I liked the book and since I wanted an annotated Bible I bought it. It is very good. I like the introductions to the books.

INCREDIBLE BIBLE!! I had been searching and researching a Bible version that I could study that would also give historical, linguistic, and cultural context for the text. This one does not disappoint! The translations are amazing, and the footnotes are very helpful. I even purchased some bible highlighters to help, and they don’t bleed through! I like the maps in the back section of the book too.

(This is about the kindle version!) ... Of course, the contents are, in general, excellent and substantial. This review is not about that. It's about how this e-book does not take much advantage of the possibilities offered by the electronic format. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The main thing to get this for is the introductions, essays, notes (annotations), and the complete NRSV w/ apocrypha. But it can be very hard to use the kindle version as a true study Bible because citations and cross-references in the notes are not hyperlinked -- meaning that you would have to manually find the verses being cited or given as cross references, and finding a specific verse is time consuming because there are no chapter links within individual books. Etc. However, the introductions and notes are good. RAMBLING, FULL-LENGTH VERSION: Navigability should be improved. Links should be added for all verse citations/cross references. A real table of contents with links for each book and book chapters should be added. Once you navigate to a book, there should at that point be a (hyperlinked) list of the book's chapters, so you can touch (for example) "Chapter 12" and go straight to Chapter 12 (instead of having to manually go one page at a time to get there). This e-book, I think, really should be updated to take advantage of the electronic medium. As it is now, it's nicely formatted, but it only very minimally takes advantage of the possibilities of the electronic format - the main issue is navigability. The annotations are somewhat inconsistently implemented. Some verses you touch the verse number and a pane comes up in the bottom 1/3 of the screen with the commentary/note. Other verses, you touch the verse number, and then are taken to a page (like end notes). Some verse citations (all of them within the footnotes) are not hyperlinked. It would be extremely time consuming read through a book's chapter, read the notes for that chapter, and then manually find the verses/cross references cited in the notes, and then go back to where you started reading from -- because of the lack of hyperlinks. But that kind of intense study reading, and going back and forth and following the cross-references, etc., is exactly what a study Bible like this is supposed to be for - if you want to do that, you may be happier getting the paper version of this. Again - in the commentary/notes, cross-references and citations to other verses are NOT hyperlinked! (You would have to manually search for them.) OUP really should update this so that all verse citations and cross-references are hyperlinked! (Note: the kindle of the NABRE translation (ASIN: B0054SLCOQ) has this feature (all it's notes/cross-references ARE hyperlinked - each and every one! the kindle version of that Bible really takes advantage of the electronic medium. It's the best kindle Bible I've found. For $5.99 it's a great deal. It's a Catholic Bible, so includes most of the "apocrypha" and the notes/commentary are extensive and detailed.) Anyway, the NOAB 5th Ed could really use an update to make it a really functional electronic book: namely, all verse citations should be hyperlinked and the annotations should be implemented in a more uniform way. I was actually pretty surprised about these two issues: (1) that verse references and cross references within the annotations do NOT have ANY hyperlinks, and (2) - not really as important - the inconsistent way in which verse annotations are implemented (some appear as a pane in bottom half of screen, others as end notes, others (infrequently) seem not to work, and for some verses you touch the verse number and it takes you to the endnotes and, somewhat confusingly, there is not always a specific note for that verse there. Anyway, it's still very nice to have this in a portable (kindle) format, but it takes some time to get used to how the annotations can be accessed, and navigation could be VERY much improved (e.g., add a real table of contents with links, add chapter links, add links for verse citations and cross-references in the notes). Re lack of chapter links: As the book is now, if you want to read, for example, John 3:16, you would have to find John in the list of books at the front, and then manually keep tapping to reach "John" in that list (going all the way from Genesis), and then once at the start of John (there is no chapter list there), so you would have to manually go one page at a time until you get to the 3rd chapter. This isn't always so bad, especially in shorter books, but what if you're trying to get to the 48th Chapter in Isaiah? Find Isaiah in the list of books, then touch that, then manually go one page at a time until you reach chapter 48?! I can't believe OUP didn't provide better navigation - at least for chapters. As it is now, this is - for me - a little arduous to navigate through sometimes. In a way, that has a certain charm: this kindle e-book will not surrender forth all of its riches without some effort on the reader's part! But - this is an e-book. It is SUPPOSED TO BE easy to navigate! OUP really should be updated to take advantage of and utilize the possibilities, presently mostly latent, offered by the electronic format. Perhaps the 6th Edition will fix these problems or OUP will make an update to this (5th) Edition? Again, I would love to see an update of this with all verse references/cross-references hyperlinked, like in the NABRE noted above, and with improved navigation, with a real table of contents including links for individual chapters within books. Also the verse citations in the introductions/essays should also be hyperlinked. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. Would be nice to see an update to this kindle volume. (Again, re the NABRE: It stands for New American Bible Revised Edition - it's the Bible used for liturgy in the Roman Catholic Church in the US (you can take a look at the text and notes for free on the USCCB web site, to see what it's like) - it contains most of the "apocrypha" you would find in this 5th Ed. NOAB, plus, in my opinion, useful notes and commentary, from a mainstream Catholic viewpoint, and very useful (and ALWAYS hyperlinked) citations and cross-references to really help you see how various parts of the Bible are related (and quickly jump around by pressing the links and then the back (<-) button), it's especially useful to see/understand connections between the Old Testament and New Testament. I think anyone interested in a kindle Bible should get a copy of it - see ASIN: B0054SLCOQ.) ALSO -- If you don't really need the annotations in this 5th Ed. NOAB, another NRSV with all the same apocrypha is available from HarperOne (ASIN: B003YUCE98). It is a very nicely done kindle book, with excellent navigation, links where you would expect them, fully functional table of contents, chapter links at the start of books, etc. And it also has the nice feature of chapter/section headings (descriptive titles of what follows, e.g., "The Parable of the Sower" at the start of Mark, ch. 4), unlike - it seems - all Bibles produced by OUP.

The book is large, and uses quality paper. Significant information is provided for study purposes. I am pleased that I bought it and use it daily.

This is a required Bible for a theology class I had. I was very thankful for their insight in the notes. I’ve used it many times since then in reference it often.

My, how this grizzled old atheist's heart did leap when he checked - for the umpteenth time - to see if that useless "print replica" version of the New Oxford Annotated Bible (NOAB) had been superseded by one that has actually been formatted for Kindle. There's no way I was going to waste money on a purported Kindle version that serves the need to constantly zap back and forth between text and commentary less well than the massive print version does. And finally - here it is! Warning: if you're buying a Kindle version, DO NOT get the "Print replica" one that, as I speak, costs about £5 more for the privilege of getting next to zero functionality. Amazon should really take that one off and just leave the this Kindle version and the print one. I note K's review on Amazon.com to the effect that this Kindle version's navigability could be improved. I'm sure they're right - in the excellent series of concluding essays, for example, and the in-book annotations, the referenced Bible passages aren't linked. It's also clunky to navigate your way to a particular verse, chapter or passage within a book. You just have to scroll. But hey ho - what's on offer is light years in advance of the previous PDF masquerading as a "Kindle" version. It'll do me for now, and if a new, even better, Kindle version is produced, I expect it'll be automatically updated on my Kindle in Amazon's usual helpful fashion. I've been discovering far more about the Bible since I became an atheist than I ever did when I was a fundamentalist Christian. I'm sick at heart when my former fundie peers pervert reason and their own minds "reconciling" the Bible's obviously irreconcilable contradictions in ways that would be laughed out of court if they were applied to any other corpus of literature, or produce grotesque readings of passages whose meanings are often plain enough but that contradict what they want to believe, claiming the "inspiration of the Holy Spirit" as if it provided access to some kind of interpretive Holy of Holies rather than failing to constitute even the most patently miserable of excuses for their blatantly warped interpretations. And atheist Bible-bashing can sometimes be not much more helpful. Yes, I know the Genesis creation and flood accounts are absurdly at odds with Buddha knows how many well-established branches of knowledge, that the Exodus myth is... well, a myth, and that the divinely mandated genocide of the Hebrew Bible and the condemnation of most of earth's population to everlasting hellfire of the Christian one is no less than sick and deranged, although in their defence this bashing is made necessary by literalist nonsense.the soundness of whose empirical and logical basis is in inverse proportion to the frequency of its repetition. The Bible, along with every other "sacred" tome ever written, as well as all notions of the "divine" themselves, is a product of the individual and corporate human mind, and it would be great to have an edition of the most influential of these writings that treated it as such. It's in that respect that this massive tome is such a powerful tool. It proceeds on the assumption that humans wrote this collection from human motives. This is a "reasonable" approach. It's the same one we use to treat Homer's "Iliad" and the works of Shakespeare. or for that matter any work of fiction or non-fiction. "Goddidit" provides no more explanation for what the Bible says than it does for any secular literature. It's worse than irrelevant: it's profoundly damaging to a quest for any kind of truth or knowledge. It's not the beginning of investigation - it's the end of it. After that comes the mere black hole of "faith", one of the most heinous conceptions our diseased imaginations have ever produced. As part of its assumption, the NOAB as near as neutrally summarises the present state of scholarship, religious and secular, on all things biblical. The series of essays in which it does so consists of introductions to sections of the Bible and to individual books, as well as a raft of concluding essays on all aspects of the Bible generically (Hebrew and Christian, separately and together). These essays are both substantial enough in themselves and of sufficient quantity to warrant separate publication in their own right as a collection. At last I can find out what the relevant experts are saying - or NOT saying - on a particular topic, and thus to find out what we know and (just as importantly) don't know about such things as the process by which the canon now known as the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh was composed, compiled, edited and redacted - i.e. how the text grew out of the societies that produced it. The essays are written for the general reader, not for specialists, and as such they make available to anyone who's interested not only the most recent scholarship but (again, just as importantly) the methods scholars have used and use to arrive at their conclusions. The supplementary tables, charts, diagrams and maps are extremely helpful, although the latter, being in colour, don't come across well on a Kindle. There's also a really helpful bibliography of some of the editions of, and the most basic literature on, the various topics discussed. This humanist approach also applies to the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), the text used by the NOAB. Praise be to Allah that all the blather in so many "Christian" English editions, in which the translators express the hope that the results of their labours might convince the reader to believe what they believe, is absent. (I suspect that such material usually means that some ideologically-driven mistranslation is going on, which is what the New International Version has been criticised for.) No, the introduction ("To the Reader") to the NRSV simply outlines the process by which it was carried out and the principles used, as if it were a translation of The Song of Roland. How refreshing. At last I feel the scales lifting from my eyes and the light of reason and common sense dawning. And a couple of the NOAB's essays aren't afraid to call out errors in the NRSV translation, either. Then, of course, there are the annotations to the actual texts themselves. All those in the NRSV have been preserved, with the Oxford edition ones being presented separately from them, the former being accessed by clicking on the superscript letters, the latter by clicking on the verse numbers. I haven't started exploring these yet, but from a quick perusal I expect the more fulsome Oxford ones to amount to separate essays in themselves for each book. A final note: the ecumenical NRSV, and consequently the NOAB, includes ALL the apocrypha used by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox (i.e. Greek and Slavonic) churches. You will therefore find such works as 3 and 4 Maccabees and Psalm 151 as well as the apocrypha accepted only by the Roman Catholics that you sometimes find in Bibles "with Apocrypha".

Además de ser una buena versión de la Biblia, tiene innumerables anotaciones muy útiles para una mejor comprensión.

Excellent product for New Testament scholars or just enthusiasts

Really nice

これはアメリカの大学の教養課程の参考文献として紹介されたものらしい。アメリカの教養教育に関心があったので購入してみました。