The Bible: One for All at Last

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Protestants and Roman Catholics finally have a translation of a Bible that they can share. Last week Oxford University Press announced that Boston's uncommon ecumenist, Richard Cardinal Cushing, had given his imprimatur to its Oxford Annotated Bible, an edition of the Revised Standard Version that includes elaborate notes and commentary prepared by leading Protestant scholars. The Bible approved by Cushing contains a translation of the Apocrypha—the 15 Old Testament books found in the Greek Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Bible, twelve of them accepted by Catholics as canonical.

The Oxford Bible approved for Catholics leaves the RSV text and footnotes unchanged; instead, two Catholic scholars—Jesuit Biblicist W. Van Etten Casey of Holy Cross and Father Philip King of St. John's Seminary in Boston—merely made a few additions to the Oxford annotations that were approved by the Bible's Protestant editors. One note, for example, says that according to Catholic doctrine the "brothers" of Jesus mentioned in the Gospels were really other relatives and points out that in Semitic usage the word encompasses a wide variety of blood relations. Another addition explains that the last twelve verses in the Gospel according to Mark, which the RSV puts in a footnote since they are not found in the oldest known manuscripts, are regarded by the Roman Catholic Church as divinely inspired.

Cushing's imprimatur means that the Oxford Bible can be freely read by Catholics for prayer and study—and use of the RSV even in Catholic worship is not out of the question. Many Catholic ecumenists believe that this Protestant-sponsored translation, which preserves much of the King James Version's stately prose, is the best all-round Bible available today, and one that most Christians can agree upon as an acceptable rendering of God's word.