The New Jerusalem Bible: Standard edition

The Seller was prompt and exacting in the delivering and description. Thank you, the Bible is all that you said it would be--------

This Bible is popularly known as the best translation but the hardest to find in stores. I finally found it on Amazon, for a good price.It's a birthday gift. I will know exactly how good it truly is when the person who reads it raves about its immaculate interpretation of the Scriptures next to my ear.

I bought this bible through the mail but I wish I had gone to the bible book store and did a little more research by reading it a little more thoroughly. I feel that I've wasted my money because of what I feel are errors in translation.

Example 1: Gen 1-2 "And the earth was formless and void..." The word "was" is also translated as "became". I find that the word `became' is very important because it hints of Satan as destroying God's creation. This leads God to creating man in His image and likeness. Creating man in His image and likeness is a spiritual mater and not a physical one, and God has now given man the spiritual power and ability to rule all of His creation and to keep it in line - which means Satan too. We know from archaeology that man has been around much longer than Adam, but man never had the ability to rule all of God's creation up until the time that Adam was made. Psalm 8 backs up this claim that man was made in order to rule all of God's creation - in a sense God made man to be His manager and to subdue it.

The NJB it doesn't even give a reference for the word "was".

Example 2:
NJB Gen: 1-2 ....there was darkness over the deep, with a `divine wind' sweeping over the waters.
NASB Gen: 1-2 ...and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.

If you look up the meaning of the word deep it doesn't imply the same thing as the Spirit of God moving over the surface of the waters. They are two different things. The deep is classified as the pit, not necessarily deep waters, but could imply the bowels of Hell, which leads God to the wonderful act of separating light from darkness, or Himself from Satan - forever. The light was good, and God separated it from the darkness.

When the NJB calls the Spirit of God a `divine wind', without any capitalization, it can only lead to misinterpreting of what God was doing. It actually is correct that it is a wind, but it leads to misinterpretation of what God was actually doing in this instance, and that it was His Spirit that was over the surface of the waters not just a `wind'.

A study of archaeology also reveals that the earth has gone through not one, but a couple of total disasters that wiped out everything on the planet - not including the flood. So I find that these couple of versus are very important, but the NJB in interpreting these and many other versus, leads one down a different path. If I use this bible I've got a feeling that I'll be spending more time trying to find the actual meaning of words and being disappointed in their interpretation.

The current bible that I use is the NASB - Key Word Bible Study published by AMG. I like this version, but am still looking for a more in-depth bible. Having found these discrepancies and others right away with the NJB, I wish I'd saved my money and spent it elsewhere on a good lexicon.

I bought this translation hoping it would be like the Jeruasalem Bible. While it is poetic I find it almost unuseable because of the inclusive language. I'm getting rid of this translation in favor of St Ignatius RSV 2nd Edition.

The provider must be new in the book selling business. The wrap for the book was a cut-up shopping bag from a grocery store, with lots of scotch tape as a closure method.