Catholic Reader's Bible: The Four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, and: Catholic Reader's Bible: The Epistles and Revelation (review)

This delightful, durable, finely printed edition of the New Testament offers readers something they almost never experience: the ability to read the Scriptures more or less the way they were written. For perhaps the chapter-and-verse arrangement has become so deeply ingrained in the minds of many that we forget that John did not write the number "16" before he wrote "for God so loved the world." That is to say, these little volumes do not have chapter and verse numbers embedded in the text; instead, the text is arranged in sentences and paragraphs, in the classic and reliable Confraternity translation. Readers can, thereby, encounter Scripture as a living document, rather than something that has been stultified; the difference, for those who will appreciate it, is like that between a living frog versus one diagramed on the board for a high-school biology class. For ease of cross-referencing with a Bible that has the numerical annotations we have come to expect, the top margin contains the chapter-and-verse range of the text on each page. I first became aware of the Bible being presented this way through the magnificent little volume It is Paul Who Writes, where the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of Paul are printed without chapter-and-verse annotation, side-by-side with a commentary.³ The encounter with the text as such did a great deal to enflame my love of Scripture, as I had thus encountered it in a whole new way.

Not only does this present a unique opportunity for the pious reader who perhaps finds it hard to read through a New Testament book because of the meticulous division of the text into verses; it also presents an opportunity for more careful readers to discern the structure and the deeper message of the text. For the original copies—writing at the time being an expensive operation, and space on the page being at a premium—were without punctuation and even without paragraph breaks. And yet, if John Breck's conclusions are correct, the authors of ancient texts accomplished the same effect as modern punctuation and paragraph breaks by means of verbal cues, chief among which were inclusio and chiasm.⁴ Hence, in answer to the question how to break the epistles of Paul down into modern paragraphs, one looks to the text itself.

Happily—to this reader of God's holy word—the paragraph choices seem to have been made with this in mind. While more learned readers might be able to quibble with some if not many of the choices (I leave this for them to do), I was able to derive great profit from them. Take, as one brief example, Romans 6:1–11 (Epistles and Revelation, 16–17). A careful reading will recognize both an inclusio and indeed a full chiasm at work, thus framing the paragraph precisely the way the original hearers of the epistle-homily would have heard it. A book review is not the place to show the work leading to such a conclusion; it is enough to note that the resultant chiasmus, if recognized, allows one to easily understand the notoriously difficult verse 7 (ὁ γὰρ ἀποθανὼν δεδικαίωται ἀπὸ τῆς ἁμαρτίας, translated "for he who is dead is acquitted of sin"), which is near the heart of the chiasm. This verse is shown to be part two of a parallelism, part one of which is the beginning of verse 6 (τοῦτο γινώσκοντες, ὅτι ὁ παλαιὸς ἡμῶν ἄνθρωπος συνεσταυρώθη, translated "for we know that our old self has been crucified with him"). Hence, according to Breck's exposition of biblical language, and especially what he terms the "what's more" principle of parallelism, verse 7 is a heightened repetition of those words from verse 6: "he who is dead" thus seems to...