The Catholic Teen Bible

When Our Sunday Visitor (OSV) kindly sent me review copies of their recently published editions of the newly revised New American Bible (NAB), I picked up The Catholic Teen Bible, intending to leaf through quickly until I had more time to study each of the books. However, the pages opened to one of the many colorful inserts, generously supplied throughout the edition, and I was hooked.

Here’s what I read:

Who is Jesus?
Son of God. Savior. Messiah. Lord. Master

These are all ways to describe Jesus. But what do they mean? And why does Jesus matter?

Obviously, important questions, right? When you have important questions, it’s vital that you go to the right place to get your answers. When we’re talking about Jesus, the place to start isn’t in movies, television specials, or novels.

The place to start is in the gospels. That’s right. If you’re really serious about wanting to know more about Jesus, don’t waste your time anywhere else. Read a gospel – or two! – from beginning to end. Reflect, think, and pray.

That example gives you a glimpse of the honest, down-to-earth tone and practical, teen-friendly wisdom from the author and high school teacher of religion, Amy Welborn. For another example, I'll again use the OSV format with teen appeal:

What is prayer?

Prayer is talking to God, but it’s more than that. It’s even more than listening to God.

Prayer is being tuned in to God and responding to his presence in your life.

That can mean talking, listening, or just being. It can mean singing, drawing, or writing. It can happen alone or with others. It can be joyful, grateful, hopeful, and even angry.

The spiritual insights in these inserts will help Christians from any denomination, but you’ll find “Catholic specific” information too. A good example comes with a turn of the page as the above insert goes on to explain something people in general often wonder:

Why pray to saints?

Catholics believe that death is just the beginning – it’s the beginning of new life with God. So that means that the people who have died and gone to heaven are still around – they are part of the Church, or the Communion of Saints.

So Catholic prayer to saints is absolutely no different than asking your next-door neighbor to pray for you. When we pray to saints, we don’t worship them. The word “prayer,” in its origins, just means “ask.” If you actually read the prayers to saints that Catholics pray, you will see that’s what they’re all about – asking these holy men and women to pray for us, just as we ask our friends on earth to pray for us as well.

In the next few weeks, Lord willing, we’ll discuss the other review copies OSV sent, but giving them a quick peek now, I see that a clearer font and nice quality white paper has been used for the other editions, whereas The Catholic Teen Bible has pages similar to newsprint. However, the price for this book is much less than for the others, so I suspect OSV wanted to provide a very affordable Bible for teens who will be grown up before we know it. With this Bible, they’ll be growing spiritually too.

©2013, Mary Sayler


The Catholic Teen Bible, paperback



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Unusual e-book edition of the KJV

The Choice Study Bible published on Kindle as an e-book by Robert P. Holland opens with the editor’s personal witness of faith then tells how he began to color-code scripture. Seeing four basic categories or biblical themes in his studies, the now-retired minister used color-coding to highlight contrasts between the categories of Wisdom and Foolishness, Promise and Curse.

Besides this unique feature found in the review copy I received, Rev. Holland provides a helpful clarification of covenant-making. As he explains in the opening section: “The Bible is a composition of several covenants which the Lord initiated with Adam, Noah, Abraham , Moses (Old Covenant), David, and Christians (New Covenant). Each of the covenants contains the choices of life and death, righteousness and sin, wisdom and foolishness, and blessing and cursing. A covenant contains both wisdom and the Lord’s promises.” Obedience becomes the responsibility of God’s people, of course, but the "promises are never earned by fulfilling the responsibilities. The promises are grace— gifts to the people in covenant with the Lord.”

In this unusual presentation of the King James Version of the Bible (KJV), the e-book also includes a Table of Contents with hotlinks to each book and chapter to help you find the passages you want.

©2013, Mary Sayler


The Choice Study Bible, Kindle e-book



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Common English Bible (CEB) with Apocrypha

The more I get to know the CEB Study Bible, which I recently reviewed, the more I appreciate the fresh footnotes and study helps, but I’m also grateful for a new review copy of a reader edition of the Common English Bible (CEB) that includes the Apocrypha.

With or without study aids, the contemporary text and ecumenical input of scholars from most of the major denominations make this Bible ideal for easy reading alone or aloud in church worship.

The review copy of CEB I recently received from Church Publishing would make an excellent Christmas gift for teens and young adults but also an inexpensive pew Bible for church members who might want to present a memorable gift to their congregation or parish. I’ll include an Amazon ad below, as I do with each review for readers who might want to order. Thanks to the online help of Bible Gateway, the following excerpts from the CEB may be helpful, too, in giving you a feel for the reader-friendly text:

From the NT book, James 5:13-16

If any of you are suffering, they should pray. If any of you are happy, they should sing. If any of you are sick, they should call for the elders of the church, and the elders should pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. Prayer that comes from faith will heal the sick, for the Lord will restore them to health. And if they have sinned, they will be forgiven. For this reason, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous person is powerful in what it can achieve.

From the apocryphal book, Judith 15:13-14

I will sing to my God a new song.
Lord, you are great and glorious, marvelous in strength
never to be outdone.
May all of your creation serve you;
you spoke,
and they came into being.
You sent forth your spirit
and it shaped them;
there is no one
who can resist your voice.

From the apocryphal book, Sirach 2:1-6

My child, if you come to serve the Lord,
prepare yourself for testing.
Set your heart straight, be steadfast,
and don’t act hastily in a time of distress.
Hold fast to God
and don’t keep your distance from him,
so that you may find strength
at your end.
Accept whatever happens to you,
and be patient
when you suffer humiliation,
because gold is tested with fire,
and acceptable people are tested
in the furnace of humiliation.
Trust him, and he will help you;
make your ways straight,
and hope in him.

Amen.

©2013, Mary Harwell Sayler


Common English Bible with Apocrypha, paperback




Common English Bible – Pew Bible with Apocrypha, hardback



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The Baker Illustrated Guide to Everyday Life in Bible Times

While waiting for review copies of new editions and study Bibles to arrive, I received an A to Z (or, rather A to Y) resource book from Baker entitled Everyday Life in Bible Times. Since I don’t make a habit of reading reference guides cover to cover, I picked up the book, intending to look through enough pages to get an idea of the quality and thoroughness of content, but that’s not what happened.

Before I’d gotten beyond the “Preface,” the warm, informal style and interesting questions intrigued me. For example, “What did an armor-bearer do?” or “How did people hunt?” Then the first entry “Anoint” hooked my interest immediately in a discussion of olive oil, which rates highest on my list as a healthful cooking oil and skin softener too. Mixed with other oils in a specific biblical recipe “At God’s direction, the special oil was poured on the head of a person to mark him or her for special service, whether as a member of Israel’s clergy, as a political leader, or as a prophet.”

We probably knew that, but the book goes on to say, “Those anointed in this way had their lives change in three important ways. First, the one ‘anointed by the Lord’ stood out from the general population as a leader…. Second, the anointed one was not autonomous but was always subject to the will and desires of a superior. The ‘Lord’s anointed’ was a middle manager answering to a divine CEO. Third, anointing meant special protection was extended to these special leaders – protection that was unmitigated by circumstances. For example, David considered it unthinkable to harm Saul, the Lord’s anointed….”

The next entry, “Armor-Bearer,” didn’t sound as interesting to me, but it was! For example, the future King David could not trust King Saul to stop trying to kill him, and yet Saul totally trusted his life to David. Later, when severely wounded in battle, King Saul asked his current armor-bearer to finish him off – the very opposite of what the job entailed.

Throughout the book, color photographs give visual appeal to each slick page, silken to the touch, drawing me from page to page with the pleasure of leafing through a high-quality picture book for adults. I thought I’d just read the photo captions as I went along, but the content of the text proved too enticing to ignore. Not only does the author, John A. Beck, present interesting information, he shows its relevance to scripture, explaining the significance of metaphors, biblical images, and connotations of words we might otherwise miss.

For example, the childhood story most of us heard of David’s bringing down the giant Goliath often gave the impression of a little boy with a slingshot, rather than a young man with a sling that “added distance and power to the throw because centrifugal force was added to arm strength.” Because a slung stone could go a far greater distance than a spear, David actually had a physical advantage, but, more importantly, he had behind him the spiritual power of God.

As this beautifully done book continued to draw me, I read every entry, including the one for “Stiff-Necked,” which most likely began, not as an indictment against God’s people, but as a reference to draft animals who just would not do what was needed to get their master’s job done. “Strong neck muscles allow animals such as the camel, donkey, and ox to resist the guidance of their handlers,” who described those stubborn creatures as stiff-necked.

The last entry, however, reminds readers of how a yoke can link “two entities together in a close relationship – the kind Jesus calls us to have when He asks us to “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

©2013, Mary Harwell Sayler


Everyday Life in Bible Times, hardback

Chronological Life Application Study Bible, NLT

What a Bible for Bible lovers! If you’re looking for a Christmas gift for your pastor, Bible teacher, biblical writer, or a Bible student who already has a study Bible or readers’ edition, the Chronological Life Application Study Bible in the New Living Translation (NLT) from Tyndale House Publishers makes an excellent choice. Having another Bible first matters only because the books in this edition have been arranged chronologically, rather than by traditional groupings, so if you want to look up a passage quickly, say, during a discussion in your study group, you’d need to know the book of Job most likely occurred before the time of Moses in order to find its placement. The easier way, though, is to look up the scripture you want in the “Canonical Table of Contents” in the opening pages, where you might find Haggai and Zechariah interacting with the book of Ezra and the Gospel stories intermingled.

Despite the confusion some have when flipping pages can't be done efficiently, the chronological arrangement clearly shows how books in the same time period relate to one another. For example, after fleeing from King Saul (I Samuel 22), David wrote Psalm 57, which places those passages together in this edition.

As portions of scripture weave together in time, the introductions and overviews of each book needed to be gathered in one section entitled “The Bible, Book-by-Book.” Also, in the back pages, you’ll find a “Master Index,” concordance, and maps, along with other features you might expect in any good study edition.

Throughout this edition, you’ll find the type of footnotes and “Personality Profiles” that made the Life Application Study Bible a popular choice, but the unique features of the Chronological Life Application Study Bible come as a clock or calendar.

For example, the article “A Chronological Study of the Bible” in the opening pages provides a brief but helpful overview of biblical history from creation to the first century church. However, the feature I especially love is the “Complete Biblical Timeline” that lets me know the Egyptians built the pyramids not very long after the flood, which makes me wonder if the design occurred as an attempt to get above water level!

Also, in Egypt, papyrus and ink were invented for writing and horses domesticated long before the birth of Abraham. About the time his grandsons, Jacob and Esau, were born, Stonehenge appeared in England, and within a couple years of the birth of Jacob’s son, Joseph, someone invented the wheel.

In Babylon, Hammurabi wrote his code of law around 300 years before the laws came through Moses. About 50 years after Moses’ death, King Tut entered his famous tomb, and, about ten years before a whale swallowed Jonah, Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. Such interesting information continues for several pages, and then a brief timeline tops each page of scripture, keeping us connected to the world context in which the Bible lives on and on as the living Word of God.

©2013, Mary Harwell Sayler, all rights reserved.


Chronological Life Application Study Bible, hardback



Chronological Life Application Study Bible, Kindle, e-book



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The CEB Study Bible

Four hundred years after scholars poetically translated the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) into English in 1611, a team of 120 biblical scholars from 20 faith communities studied a wide range of sources to translate the Bible with accuracy, clarity, and easy comprehension for contemporary readers. Having met those goals in the Common English Bible, the CEB provides a good choice for new Christians of all ages, readers who speak English as a second language, and children ready to read the Bible rather than relying on Bible storybooks. In addition, the CEB provides an ecumenically-minded choice for churches ready to update or order pew Bibles since this translation has been approved for public reading during worship services in most church denominations.

As occurs with the original KJV, the CEB and The CEB Study Bible come with or without the Apocrypha. Although not secret or mythical as the word implies, the apocryphal books provide insights into biblical times such as the years between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (NT.) However, these books, which may or may not be included in the first testament, often confuse Bible buyers about which books are part of canonical scripture and which are not.

Since the answer depends on one’s denominational perspective or understanding of the biblical canon, The CEB Study Bible includes a section entitled “The Canons of Scripture” with five tables listing the books accepted by the Jewish canon, Protestant OT, Roman Catholic OT canon, Orthodox OT, and Anglican Apocrypha. All Christian denominations, however, accept the entire NT canon.

Finding areas of agreement aid an ecumenical scope. In The CEB Study Bible, for instance, study articles on “The Bible’s Unity” help us to see our unity too, whereas “How We Got The Bible” removes mystery and confusion by matter-of-factly explaining how and why the various canons came to the conclusions that they did. This is not for the purpose of argument, of course, nor to sway readers from one opinion to another but to help us to understand diverse perspectives among the peoples of God.

The CEB Study Bible contains additional articles, a concordance, and maps of key biblical locations, but a more distinctive feature is the use of sidebars throughout the text. To help readers find these brief but interesting discussions right away, the front matter of this edition includes a list of sidebar articles, grouped first by book and then alphabetically.

For example, the heading for “Exodus” lists the titles for each of the sidebars in that book with “The Reed Sea or the Red Sea?” found on page 99. Having heard it both ways, I turned to that discussion and read, “The Hebrew phrase yam sup means ‘Reed Sea’ and may best be understood as a general term for a body of water full of reeds or rushes rather than as a name for a specific lake or sea.” That phrase occurs 20 times in the Hebrew Bible, but that said, a Red Sea also exists further to the south.

For a NT example, the heading for Revelation shows a sidebar on “Symbolic Colors,” which depicts white as representing a victory, red as symbolizing bloodshed, pale green as signifying death, and purple as indicating royalty.

In addition to these sidebars, The CEB Study Bible occasionally includes photographs such as “The island called Patmos” at the introduction to Revelation. Each book begins similarly with an introductory page or two and continues the goal of clarification by adding explanatory footnotes to the bottom of almost every page.

©2013, Mary Harwell Sayler, all rights reserved.

The CEB Study Bible, hardcover



The CEB Study Bible with Apocrypha, hardcover



After posting this review, my husband gave me a CEB Study Bible in bonded leather - nice!



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What is Biblical Theology?

Waiting for new study editions of the Bible to arrive, I received a review copy of the newly released book, What Is Biblical Theology? published by Crossway. Author James M. Hamilton, Jr. teaches on this topic at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, but I encourage Christians from every church background to pick up this slender volume and read it straight through.

As our denominational preferences connect to one another in the Body of Christ, the stories in the Bible connect to one another, too, coming together in one body of stories about the same story – The Story – of God’s redemptive love.

Often, though, we view Bible stories from our own 21st century perspective, which means we might miss what the original writers intended to convey. Dr. Hamilton addresses this throughout the book, explaining, for example, in Part I, “If we can see what the biblical authors assumed about story, symbol, and church, we will glimpse the world as they saw it.”

That glimpse is what this book enables us to see. Divided into “Part I. The Bible’s Big Story,” “Part 2. The Bible’s Symbolic Universe,” and “Part 3. The Bible’s Love Story,” the book shows us how to “adopt the perspective of the biblical authors” so we can “read the world from the Bible’s perspective, rather than reading the Bible from the world’s.”

As part of the “Big Story,” the chapter entitled “The Narrative” discusses the setting, characterization, and plot found in any well-written story, which shows us, for example, that “the Bible’s plot can be summarized in four words: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration,” culminating in the return of Jesus. Meanwhile, an understanding of biblical conflicts, episodes, and themes helps us to recognize the overall plot of this ongoing story of our relationship with God.

In Part 2, we see how symbols, imagery, and patterns use the known to help us envision the unknown. From the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden to the tree in Revelation whose leaves will be for the healing of the nations, we get an image of the well-rooted, fruitful life God intends us to have. As Dr. Hamilton explains: “These symbols are given to us to shape our understanding of ourselves. They show us who we are. They give us our identity. They tell the story of our lives in the real world.”

In community and in our common union, that story continues in Part 3 where we see the identify, setting, plot tension, and resolution of the church, biblically and metaphorically drawn as the “Sheep of the Shepherd,” “Bride of Christ,” “Body of Christ,” “The Adopted Family of God,” and “The Temple of the Holy Spirit” – images that cause us to reflect on such questions as: “What part does the church play in the Bible story? Who is she? What is her setting? What creates the tension in her part of the plot as the wider narrative develops? How is that tension resolved?”

With the Bible as the primary resource for such crucial questions, Dr. Hamilton helps readers to see that “Biblical theology is not just an interesting topic. It informs who we are and how we live.”

©2013, Mary Harwell Sayler, all rights reserved.

What Is Biblical Theology? paperback



What Is Biblical Theology? e-book



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