Catholic Truth Society UK
I’ve
been meaning to post this for quite a while but am just getting around to it,
finally spurred to do so when checking to see if it were available on
Amazon.com found that while it has a page [LINK],
it shows as currently unavailable and there is virtually no information on it,
not even a customer review. I remedied that immediately and decided to also
post my thoughts here….
This is my daily reading Bible. A bit of background: I
am a convert to Catholicism, back in the 1980s, and my first Catholic Bible was
the Jerusalem Bible. Since then I have always loved the high literary quality
of the translation (the fact that J. R. R. Tolkien was part of the team producing
it back in the 1960s helped in that respect!), except for one thing that I found increasingly irksome
– its use of the Divine Name Yahweh against thousands of years of tradition,
both Jewish and Christian, rendering it as "The Lord." The Jerusalem
Bible may not be the most slavishly literal translation (for that, go to the
Douay-Rheims), but I do find it the most readable. Nevertheless, the
"Yahweh issue" eventually drove me to other translations, most
commonly the Revised Standard Version-Catholic Edition, as a good balance of
readability and literal accuracy. Anyway, last year while on the Pilgrimage to
Italy [LINK],
I went into a little bookstore in St. Peter's Square where I found a red Compact
Edition of this Bible (not this edition) as one of the few English editions
available. Seeing that it was from the Catholic Truth Society, “Publishers to
the Holy See,” I picked it up, and a quick perusal of the introduction revealed
that I had finally found my dream reading Bible – a Jerusalem Bible with the
Divine Name rendered as "Lord," with an extra attraction as well: The
Psalms are printed in the Grail translation, which has become intimately
familiar to me from years of reciting the Breviary. The only reason I did not
immediately purchase that Bible on the spot was its compact size and tiny print,
which I knew was too small for daily reading with my middle-aged eyes. But
immediately upon arriving back in the States I was on the Internet seeking out
a larger copy, settling on this one, the Standard Edition, basically the next
size up, which I purchased directly from the CTS in the UK (The Internet is a
Wonderful Thing!). And I have used it daily ever since, because it came with
other features I didn't even know about at the time, but which further enhance
its utility as a daily reading Bible.
