The New American Bible: Is It Good for Catholics?

By Ben Douglass (Consultant to CAI)

I. Introduction
II. The Teaching of the Church of Ages
III. How Not to Read Your Bible
IV. Genesis
V. Matthew
VI. Daniel
VII. John (by Jacob Michael)
VIII. Exodus (by Jacob Michael)
IX. Acts
X. Endnotes

I. Introduction

My copy of the Saint Joseph Edition of the New American Bible (hereafter NAB) is, quite frankly, gorgeous. It is bound in leather, with gold lettering, and contains several beautiful paintings of biblical events. Between pages 276 and 277, Elijah ascends into heaven on a chariot of fire, Job is counseled by his friends, an angel touches the lips of the prophet Isaiah with a burning coal, and a hand writes a mysterious message on the wall of the palace of King Belshazzar. Also of note are the illustrations of the fourteen Stations of the Cross and the original fifteen mysteries of the rosary which are placed between the Testaments. Finally, there is even a quite amusing depiction of the Holy Trinity near the back.

This Bible also has an air of authority. A quick glance inside the cover reveals three imprimaturs, two nihil obstats, and an Apostolic Blessing from Pope Paul VI. In addition, although this fact is not announced in this particular copy, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has decreed that the NAB is the only translation which may be used in the lectionaries of Roman Catholic Churches in America. In short, a significant portion of the weight of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church (though not the whole thing, for it is metaphysically impossible for the ordinary and universal Magisterium to contradict either itself or the extraordinary Magisterium) is behind this Bible. This is the Bible that our bishops want us to read.

These circumstances greatly compounded my shock, horror, and dismay at encountering within the pages of this Bible, and I do not make this charge lightly, sustained, formal heterodoxy. I will state this as bluntly and forcibly as possible. The commentary in the NAB is spiritually dangerous to read. It is a near occasion for sin. Like Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, the only Catholics who should read the footnotes of the NAB are apologists who need something against which to polemicize. Like the Cathar's French translation, the NAB deserves to be on the Index of Forbidden books. But it is not. Rather, it lines the shelves of Catholic bookstores across the country. God help us all. St. Paul, pray for us. St. Jerome, pray for us. St. Pius X, pray for us. St. Joseph, pray for us.

For my fellow Catholics, who might be led by the NAB to deny the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church , for Protestants, who might read the footnotes out of curiosity as to how the Catholic Church interprets the Bible and subsequently walk away in disgust, and for inquiring Atheists, who might, after reading the NAB, ask the entirely logical question, "If the Bible is so full of contradictions and errors about history and morality, why should I trust it about anything? Why should I believe that certain parts of it qualify as revelation from a righteous and omniscient God"? I offer this study. Though it would be well nigh impossible to catalogue every error contained in the commentary, and even in the text, of the NAB (I would have to write a book almost as big as the Bible), I will endeavor herein to catalogue a significant portion. I will focus on the most egregious, scandalous, and jaw-dropping errors; the kind with the potential to destroy one's faith [1]. But let it be known that for every error which is mentioned in this study, there are ten more which are not.

I would like to begin by giving the reader some background on the Catholic Church's perennial teaching on inspiration and inerrancy. I will let the Popes and Councils speak for themselves.

Pope Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus, no. 20f: "It is absolutely wrong and forbidden either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Sacred Scripture or to admit that the sacred writer has erred... For all the books which the Church receives as Sacred and Canonical are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost; and so far is it from being possible that any error can coexist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the Supreme Truth, can utter that which is not True. This is the ancient and unchanging Faith of the Church... It follows that those who maintain that an error is possible in any genuine passage of the sacred writings, either pervert the Catholic notion of inspiration, or make God the author of such error."

Pope St. Pius X, Lamentabili Sane, no. 11, condemns the following proposition: "Divine inspiration does not extend to all of Sacred Scriptures so that it renders its parts, each and every one, free from every error."

Pope Benedict XV, Spiritus Paraclitus, no. 13: "[T]he immunity of Scripture from error or deception is necessarily bound up with its Divine inspiration and supreme authority."

Ibid., no. 19, condemns the following proposition: "[T]he effects of inspiration - namely, absolute truth and immunity from error - are to be restricted to that primary or religious element."

Ibid., no. 21: He also teaches that Divine inspiration extends to every part of the Bible without the slightest exception, and that no error can occur in the inspired text.

Pope Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu, no. 3: "It is absolutely wrong and forbidden either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Sacred Scripture or to admit that the sacred writer has erred."

Pius XII, Humani Generis, no. 22, condemns the following proposition: "[I]mmunity from error extends only to those parts of the Bible that treat of God or of moral and religious matters."

Vatican Council I, Sess. III, cap. ii, DE REV: "The Books of the Old and New Testament, whole and entire, with all their parts, as enumerated in the Decree of the same Council (Trent) and in the ancient Latin Vulgate, are to be received as Sacred and Canonical. And the Church holds them as Sacred and Canonical not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterwards approved by her Authority; nor only because they contain revelation without errors, but because, having been written under the Inspiration of the Holy Ghost, they have God for their Author."

So we see that the Catholic Church teaches that the Bible is completely immune from error. Now, some Catholics use the statement in Vatican II's Dei Verbum that the Bible "teaches without error that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation" as support for the position that the Bible is only immune from error within a certain limited domain. However, this phrase admits of two possible interpretations: (1) the Bible is immune from error in everything it says, and everything it says God wanted there for the sake of our salvation, and (2) The Bible is immune from error in so far as it teaches about salvation, but can err when it treats of other topics. Obviously, the former interpretation harmonizes Vatican II with the larger body of Catholic Tradition, whereas the latter sets the two in opposition. Thus all faithful Catholics should adopt the former. Finally, if even that is not enough to convince the die-hard fans of Fr. Raymond Brown, the Council Fathers let it be known how they intended this phrase to be interpreted by referencing in its footnote various writings of St. Augustine, all of which endorse the total inerrancy of Scripture.

This is the position which all Catholics are bound by the Magisterium to expound and defend. In its original manuscripts the Bible is free from error in absolutely every respect. It contains no contradictions, no historical inaccuracies, and no scientific errors. (Of course, the Bible is not a science textbook, and thus it quite often employs scientifically imprecise, phenomenological language (i.e. sunrise, sunset), however this is not tantamount to error. Even modern theoretical physicists speak of sunrise and sunset, and not too many of them are Tychonians; still fewer are Platonists.) In sum, to use the words of St. Irenaeus, the Scriptures are ceratinly perfect. [2]

I am not sure how many editions of the NAB contain this section, but right after Vatican II's Dei Verbum the St. Joseph edition has guide entitled, "How to Read your Bible." It is poison. In an effort to smooth over the alleged "atrocities" commanded by God in the Old Testament, it actually paints a picture of a God who is not worthy of worship.

4. Inspiration and Revelation
God Himself guided (inspired) the Hebrew genius in its searching out of the mysteries of the human condition... When this restless searching for truth and meaning culminates in unfolding one of God's mysteries, we speak of divine revelation... Sometimes inspired searching for meaning leads to conclusions which cannot be qualified as revelation from God. Think of the "holy wars" of total destruction, fought by the Hebrews when they invaded Palestine. The search for meaning in those wars centuries later was inspired, but the conclusions which attributed all those atrocities to the command of God were imperfect and provisional. See Judges 1:1-8. [3]

It is a sad day in the Church when bishops grant Imprimaturs to blatant modernism such as this. The commentators would have us believe that the wars which the Bible plainly states were commanded by God were not in fact commanded by God, but rather were crimes against humanity perpetrated by Hebrew murderers. Then, centuries later, their descendents attempted to justify the crimes of their forefathers by ascribing the wars to the command of a deity. "Oh, it was ok for our ancestors to kill all those people because God told them so." I'm sorry, but justifying murder by ascribing it to the command of a deity is a moral abomination, and I refuse to worship the god of these commentators, a god who apparently has no problem with inspiring people to write the moral equivalent of Nazi apologetics. No, God did not inspire people to ascribe unjust wars to His command. Logic and conscience leave us with only two options: (1) God exercised his prerogative as the just judge and giver and taker of life and actually commanded these wars, or (2) the Bible is a lie, a fabrication of the apologists for Hebrew war crimes. Either Leo XIII is right or the atheists are right; the position of these commentators is absolutely untenable.

Also disturbing, the commentators seem to define inspiration as divine dabbling. Supposedly God guided the writers, let them make atrocious mistakes along the way, and revealed a bit of the truth to them every once in a while. This definition has absolutely no basis in Scripture or Tradition! The word that St. Paul used which is translated as "inspired by God" in English Bibles is theopneustos, literally, God-breathed. God may have used human instruments in writing Scripture, and may have worked with and through their individual styles and thoughts, but contrary to the novel and insidious teaching of the NAB, God's influence in the composition of Sacred Scripture was not limited to mere guidance; He wrote Sacred Scripture Himself. This is how the Catholic Church has understood inspiration for the past 2,000 years. [4]

As always, the Catholic teaching is rock solid truth; it safeguards the totality of revelation from those who would like to do away with its less than popular teachings. Contrariwise, the extraordinarily limited view of Biblical inspiration which these commentators espouse inevitably leads to the shopping-cart mentality, for if only parts of the Bible are the Word of God, and other parts are immoral human inventions, one is free to pick and choose, based on one's own personal preference, which parts to believe and which to discard. Hence, one may accept the part of the Bible where it says that God is love and the story where Jesus forgives the woman at the well, but reject the biblical teachings that sodomy and fornication are sins and that wives must be obedient to their husbands. I cannot begin to fathom the number of souls who have been lost because they have done exactly that.

6. Literary Genres or Forms
b) The Allegory: A figure story with a veiled meaning. Read Genesis 2, 3, 4:1-16, 6-8, 11, 19. For centuries these chapters have been misunderstood as inspired lessons in science. The Bible does not teach science; it teaches religious values. It uses these folktales to teach a lesson. Again, the point of the allegory (not the details) is God's message to you. [5]

This position has been repeatedly and explicitly condemned by the Sacred Magisterium, for as these scholars here admit, it is objectively opposed to the Tradition of the Church. First off, it is one thing to say, with Pope Leo XIII [6], that the Bible was not written for the purpose of teaching science; it is entirely another to say that when it touches on issues of science it positively errs, as they here imply, and as they declare with no shred of ambiguity in a picture placed between the pages of Genesis 1, which depicts cosmogony according to the Old Testament according to them (flat earth, roofed by a brick dome which rests on mountains). Obviously, the former position is acceptable but the latter is not [7]. But in any case, whether these chapters are inspired lessons in science is actually not the central issue here. Rather the central issue is whether these chapters are inspired lessons in history, and this is where the NAB falls directly under the anathema of God.

This anathema was delivered by the Council of Trent, in its infallible decrees on original sin. This dogma depends totally and completely on the substantial historicity of the story of the Garden of Eden, and it was in terms of this story that the dogma was defined.

If anyone does not confess that the first man, Adam, when he transgressed the commandment of God in paradise, immediately lost the holiness and justice in which he had been constituted, and through the offense of that prevarication incurred the wrath and indignation of god, and thus death with which God had previously threatened him, and, together with death, captivity under his power who thenceforth had the empire of death, that is to say, the devil, and that the entire Adam through that offense of prevarication was changed in body and soul for the worse, let him be anathema. [8]

The NAB scholars look down upon "fundamentalists" who believe that "Eve really ate from the apple." As seen above, they classify the story as an allegory, a fictional account created to teach the disastrous consequences of sin. Thus, they do not confess that "Adam... transgressed the commandment of God in paradise" and the anathema of the council of Trent applies directly to them.

This teaching regarding the historicity of the Garden of Eden has been twice reinforced just in this past century. First, in 1909 the Pontifical Biblical Commission, which at that time had the power to bind the conscience of Catholics, decreed that it could not be taught that the first three chapters of Genesis were not true in the literal historical sense. Moreover, the Commission emphasized especially that the literal historical sense could not be impugned regarding Adam's transgression of the divine commandment "through the devil's persuasion under the guise of a serpent," their motivation for doing so being to protect the integrity of the dogma of original sin. Second, in 1950 Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical entitled Humani Generis which denounces the ideas that Adam and Eve were not real, individual people, that there has ever existed any true human who was not descended from them, and that the first 11 chapters of Genesis are not history in a literal sense [9]. He also cited as one of his reasons for doing so the dogma of original sin. Hence, if anyone attempts to make an argument that the NAB does not contradict the Council of Trent, but simply interprets its references to Adam in a less than literal way, we have a response already prepared for ourselves: the Magisterium is the best interpreter of the Magisterium, and the Magisterium has solemnly decreed that when the Council of Trent says "Adam" it really means Adam, therefore this is the interpretation to which all Catholics are bound to adhere. Faithful Catholic exegetes have no such freedom as the NAB translators arrogate unto themselves.

7. Conditioned Thought Patterns
The ancient Hebrews saw the earth as a large plate with a huge vault over it. Above the vault is God's place. This outlook conditioned Genesis 1. [10]

Here they go again: charging Scripture with another egregious error. According to them the Bible portrays the world as a flat disk which rests on columns, which in turn sit on a watery abyss. The earth is covered by a solid dome, below which are the celestial bodies and above which is a massive body of water and the throne of God. Such a view is, of course, absurd. It is patently false. But luckily, it is nowhere to be found in holy writ. Job 26:7 describes the earth as being suspended in empty space, not as resting on the abyss. As such, the abyss refers to water which is inside the world, not below it. Also, the NAB's conclusion that the Hebrew noun raqiya (traditionally translated as firmament) refers to a large solid dome is completely unwarranted. Raqiya is derived from a root verb meaning to beat out and spread out. It is equated with heaven in verse 8. Verse 17 says that the celestial bodies are located within the firmament (not underneath it, as the NAB portrays). As even a primitive Hebrew could look up in the sky and see that the celestial bodies move around, this implies that the author of Genesis 1 believed it to be possible to move around within the firmament. This reduces the credibility of the claim that the firmament is a solid dome. Finally, verse 20 says that birds fly around within the open firmament. Of course, birds cannot fly around within solid brick or stone. So we see that, whatever raqiya means, it is nothing at all like a brick dome in the sky. Perhaps it refers to open space in general. Or, as the etymology of the word suggests something hard, perhaps it refers to some sort of dense plenum which permeates the world.

But in any case, Catholic exegetes have no right even to make such a claim (i.e. that the Bible contains cosmological errors), for they have been bound by Leo XIII to follow St. Augustine's rule: "Whatever [scientists] can really demonstrate to be true of physical nature, we must show to be capable of reconciliation with our Scriptures; and whatever they assert in their treatises which is contrary to these Scriptures of ours, that is to Catholic faith, we must either prove it as well as we can to be entirely false, or at all events we must, without the smallest hesitation, believe it to be so." [11]

9. Poems in the Bible
[B]iblical poems in particular can easily be misunderstood. Read them as poems and not as scientific or historical reports, in which one tries to explain every detail as a revelation from God. See [the commentary on inspiration and revelation quoted above] and read Psalm 137: "Ballad of the Exiles," paying special attention to verses 8 and 9. The feeling, the thought, the total poem is inspired (guided) by God, though it is not necessarily revealed truth! Read some Psalms! [12]

As demonstrated above, this definition of inspiration is utterly devoid both of merit and foundation. The Catholic Church teaches that God is the author of Sacred Scripture such that each and every word in it is written primarily by Him. Everything in the Bible is a revelation from God, including commands to wipe out entire peoples for their sin.

12. Hebrew Philosophy
Like all peoples, the Hebrews had their sages or philosophers. In the Bible we find their thoughts mainly in the Wisdom Books. The ancient wisdom is a remarkable mixture of philosophy and poetry. Read it as an inspired search for meaning in life. Do not expect too many ready-made answers. See this literature more as a challenge to a faithful searching for meaning in your own human condition! [13]

This is relativism, plain and simple. According to the Catholic Church, truth is immutable and absolute, is revealed without error in the two sources of revelation, namely Sacred Tradition and holy writ, and has been entrusted to her to guard, to explicate, and to expound, without addition or deletion, till kingdom come, literally. According to the NAB, on the other hand, everyone has to "search for meaning" in their own "human condition." The Bible records the conclusions of those who did so in ages past, but they of course lived in a different "human condition" and thus they do not provide any definitive answers for us.

13. The Gospels
A remarkable fact is that for a long time Christians misunderstood the literary genre of the four Gospels. Until recently they thought that the Gospel writers wanted to present us with a biography of Jesus. After much research, Bible scholars agree that the Gospel writers wanted to write catechisms or digests of Christian teaching concerning the risen Lord Jesus... The writers took [oral traditions] and frequently even remolded and refashioned them to bring out the lesson they wanted to teach... In the conflict stories of the Gospels it is usually Jesus who is in conflict with His opponents... Was Jesus involved in these conversations? Did He answer exactly as related in the Bible? It is not certain... Bible scholars tell us that a horoscope of the expected Messiah circulated during the time of Jesus' birth. Astrologers (wise men from the East) were watching the sky for the appearance of the Messiah's star. King Herod, superstitious and upset by these people, killing children of two years and under, is extremely probable... People leaving Bethlehem to escape the massacre, is equally probable. This would be the historical background to this tradition. The rest is interpretation... Since we do not possess a biography of Jesus, it is difficult to know whether the words or sayings attributed to him are written exactly as He spoke them. True, the Gospels are based on sound historical facts as related by eyewitnesses, but both deeds and words of Jesus are offered to us in the framework of theological interpretation... Can we discover at least some words of Jesus that have escaped such elaboration? Bible scholars point to the very short sayings of Jesus... Remember the golden rule: keep historical facts distinct from their theological interpretation. [14]

This section is so fraught with error that I hardly know where to begin. The only thing remarkable here is the overarching arrogance of these commentators who think that absolutely everyone was wrong about the Bible until them [15]. St. Jerome was a fundamentalist. St. Augustine was a fundamentalist [16]. Leo XIII did not know what he was talking about. In fact all the Fathers and Doctors of the Church were wrong and it was not until Bultmann, Barth, and Brown came along that the Gospels were truly understood. Hogwash. St. Luke explicitly states at the beginning of his Gospel (vv 1:1ff) that he intended to write history in the scientific sense; he investigated everything carefully and interviewed eyewitnesses with the intention of producing a an account of the life of Christ which teaches the exact truth of what happened, in chronological order to boot. If this is not a biography nothing is. Moreover, Christians have interpreted the Gospels as biography from time immemorial and unless someone can offer a compelling argument against such an interpretation I see no reason to change. The NAB makes a nebulous appeal to a consensus of Bible scholars, but the field of Biblical scholarship is far from monolithic. To appeal to what "Bible scholars" say is a sophism, at best, for Bible scholars span the entire theological spectrum and as such believe a myriad of diametrically opposed ideas. In sum, if the NAB wants Catholics everywhere to abandon an integral part of the holy faith of their fathers, namely a literal-historical reading of the Gospels, they are going to have to do a lot better than this. [17]

Again, it is just baffling that these scholars refuse to see St. Matthew's infancy narrative as history. They here explain that the story is entirely plausible, even likely. Yet they still refer to the Gospel narrative as "theological interpretation" which they repeatedly contrast with, and set in opposition to, historical fact. Why? What grounds have they for doing so? How does reason make untenable reading this passage in the literal and obvious sense? [18]

Finally, exactly how is one to distinguish theological interpretation from historical fact? According to the NAB the two are so weaved together, the evangelists having concocted a great deal of their material on their own, and having drawn on traditions and sources, the authors of which probably did the same, that they are almost impossible to pull apart. [19] According to them we cannot even know whether Jesus actually said the things that the Gospels say that He said! Thus any attempt to distinguish the two is an exercise in futility. 2000 years removed from the events, we just cannot know; at best we can only guess that some of the shorter sayings of Jesus which the Gospels attribute to Him are truly His. Of course, there is a perfect remedy for this sorry state of affairs: like Christians have always done, take the Gospels at face value. Reject the reprobated ideas of the modernists [20] and fully embrace the teachings of the eternal Church.

15. How Do You Know?
How does one know whether one deals with history or some form of figurative speech? To begin with, we should always be disposed to follow the teaching authority of the Church. We should also consult renowned Bible scholars who are experts in Hebrew literature. Sometimes, it is secular science which gives Christians the lead to reconsider their Bible understanding... Most scientists hold that the human species has developed somehow from lower kinds of life. This knowledge helped Christians to understand that Genesis 2 and 3 is not a lesson in Anthropology, but an allegory, teaching us that sin is the root of all evil... You may hear interpreters of the Bible who are literalists or fundamentalists. They explain the Bible according to the letter: Eve really ate from the apple and Jonah was miraculously kept alive in the belly of the whale. Then there are ultra-liberal scholars who qualify the whole Bible as another book of fairly tales. Catholic Bible scholars follow the sound middle of the road... The signature of a bishop in your Bible assures you that opinions, expressed in footnotes and introductions, reflect what is generally accepted as sound doctrine in the Catholic tradition. [21]

Incredible. These scholars actually have the chutzpah to claim that they are faithful to the teachings of the Catholic Church while they directly dissent from Providentissimus Deus, Lamentabili Sane, Spiritus Paraclitus, Divino Afflante Spiritu, Humani Generis, Vatican I, and the decrees of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1906 and 1909. They are like little children who need to be reminded of their boundaries every day. A few years pass without a papal injunction in their activities and they take that as license to ignore all the previous. A few years pass without a papal reiteration of the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church on biblical inerrancy and they take that to mean that the perennial teaching has been rescinded. They seem to think that if the current Pope does not condemn their positions as heresy, that mitigates the fact that previous Popes, as recently as 50 years ago, have. And in no uncertain terms [22]. The eternal Church truly is a fickle institution in their eyes!

And sadly, bishops have approved their work. To the dismay of all the angels and saints, this Bible that embraces dozens of anathematized and reprobated positions, that destroys the faith of the young, and that causes potential converts to flee the Catholic Church, actually boasts the seals of bishops: Imprimatur, let it be printed. On the contrary, let it be placed on the revived Index of Forbidden books. The bishops of today are about as reliable as the bishops of the Arian heresy, that is, not at all.

One need not delve deeply into the NAB proper to discover teachings which are contrary to the Tradition of the Church, for in the introduction to the first book of the Bible, Genesis, the translators unequivocally endorse the documentary hypothesis. This is the theory of Julius Wellhausen, a 19th century liberal German Protestant, which holds that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, are the product of redaction and editing and did not take their final form until the sixth century B.C. As opposed to the traditional teaching, confirmed by the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1906, that Moses wrote the Pentateuch (save his obituary which is appended to Deuteronomy), the documentary hypothesis maintains that four principal sources (Yahwist, Elohist, Priestly, and Deuteronomic), the earliest of which was composed around the time of King David, were weaved together to produce the document which has come down to us today. According to those who hold this theory, the various sources (termed J, E, D, and P (Yahweh starts with a J in German)) are contradictory, and the redactor left many of these contradictions in the text. Thus, the Biblical scholar has no need to treat the Bible with the reverence of St. Augustine [23]; if something looks like a contradiction at first glance that is because it is a contradiction. Moreover, when the Bible narrates that "the LORD says to Moses," it does not actually mean that the LORD said to Moses whatever follows.

This theory, so inimical to Christian Orthodoxy, is the main guiding force behind the hermeneutic and methodology of the scholars who created the NAB. Time after time they charge the text with error and contradiction, ascribing this to discrepancies between the various sources. Time after time they claim that bits and pieces of text have been moved around, and that verse 20 really belongs after verse 24, etc. In fact, these scholars have so little reverence for the Sacred Scriptures, they even go so far as to reverse what they believe to be the machinations of their sixth century redactor, inserting contradictions into the text which they believe the redactor to have edited out. That this book which directly contradicts defined Catholic dogma boasts imprimaturs and nihil obstats is truly sad. It is a testament to the massive apostasy which characterizes a goodly portion of the Church's hierarchy today.

Well, I've made a great deal of extraordinary claims; it is about time to get down to the nitty gritty and substantiate my assertions. I will now document how the translators' embrace of the documentary hypothesis plays itself out in their translation and in their commentary, leading them to promote ideas contrary to the Catholic faith.

Due to the copyright protections on the footnotes of the NAB I am unable to reproduce them here. However, they are online on the USCCB website, so I will provide links throughout this study in order that readers who do not own their own copies of the NAB may be able to follow along.

As you can see, the bad fruits of the documentary hypothesis show themselves with striking rapidity. The translators cannot even get through the first two chapters of Genesis without charging the Holy Scriptures with error. Allow me to explain why.

According to the JEDP theory, Genesis 1:1-2:4a belongs to the priestly source, and was created by Jews around the time of the Babylonian exile in attempts to convince themselves of the greatness of their God. Genesis 2:4b-25 is an entirely unrelated story, from a different tradition and a different age, which represents a different perspective in the Hebrew's quest for truth. Thus, the documentarians have no problem in charging the two narratives with a contradiction, namely that they present opposite orders of creation. In Gen 1, man is the last creature to be created, and in Gen 2 he is the first.

However, the two narratives are actually quite easy to reconcile. Regarding the allegation that the "second" story has the creation of plants after the creation of man: the context of the statement "no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted" makes it clear that it is referring not to all plants, but solely to cultivated plants i.e. crops. Look what it says immediately afterward: "for there was no man to cultivate the ground." If the "shrubs and plants of the field" of verse 5 referred to all plants (grass, bushes, trees, etc) this would make absolutely no sense. Such plants do not need men to cultivate them! Thus the two accounts are harmonized. As Genesis 1 records, plants existed before man; as Genesis 2 records, cultivated plants did not.

Regarding the allegation that the "second" story has the creation of animals and birds after the creation of man: again, the solution is fairly simple. It is not too hard to imagine that God simply created more animals and birds on the sixth day (the day of the creation of man, to which Genesis 2:19 refers) over and above those which He created on the fourth and fifth, and that the "every" in v. 2:19 means that He created one of every type of beast and bird on that day, not that He created every beast and bird which had ever existed. As Genesis 1 records, that had already been accomplished. So the image which is presented is that of God creating one of every type of animal and bird, running each of them past Adam in turn so that he could give them names.

Modern readers like to see everything in chronological order, and thus are tempted to see 2 different stories in narratives such as Genesis 1-2, which do not fit into our literary paradigm. However, this type of writing is fairly common in ancient near-eastern literature. Quite often such narratives start out with a broad overview of events (Genesis 1) and then take a step chronologically backward, and fill in the details (Genesis 2). The two chapters stand as a unified whole.

So, in essence, they are telling us that Genesis 3:15 is not really a messianic prophecy, and that Christians read messianic themes into the text that simply are not there. Genesis 3:15 was not originally about mankind's redemption. Moreover, it was only later theology which regarded the serpent as the devil. This footnote is disturbing for several reasons. Obviously, it is an extraordinary and unwarranted concession to Atheists and Jews. Also, this footnote seemingly embraces postmodern relativism, for it claims that there is validity and truth to perceptions which do not correspond to ontological reality. According to the commentators, because Christians see redemption in this passage, it can properly be understood as such, even though in reality (in their opinion) it is not. Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas are turning over in their graves.

But let us get back to the issue of translation. The pronoun in question is the Hebrew hu, a singular pronoun which is quite ambiguous and can mean either he, she, or it. So, in order to determine the correct rendering we must examine the preceding sentence or clause to find the antecedent to which the pronoun refers. In this particular context, there are only two nouns that might be the antecedent to hu, namely the woman (ha-isha) and the offspring (zar'ah). Incidentally, the NAB translators make a good point in noting that the pronoun "he" would have no antecedent in the passage, as zar'ah is a collective noun which is implicitly plural (cf. Gen 16:10, 22:17, 24:60). Thus "he" is most definitely not an appropriate rendering. However, instead of opting to translate it as "they" instead, why do they not translate it as she? Hebrew does not normally have collective nouns perform as antecedents for singular pronouns, so zar'ah cannot be the antecedent to hu either. "They" is excluded as an appropriate translation for hu by the very fact that it is a plural pronoun whereas hu is singular! So we see that the antecedent can only be the woman, and thus that the only appropriate translation for Genesis 3:15 is "she." Our Lady, defeater of heresies, Who crushes the serpent's head, pray for us and for the translators of the NAB.

Once again the documentary hypothesis bears its rotten fruit. The translators charge Scripture with another contradiction. In one tradition, Cain is a nomad, and in another, a man of civilization. Presumably they do so due to v 17's statement that Cain became the founder of a city. But is it really so hard to imagine a nomad founding a city and then moving on? Has this not happened many times in recorded history? Blessed Junipero Serra anyone? The scholars who created this Bible are simply never willing to give Scripture the benefit of the doubt.

They do the exact same thing here. The alleged contradiction could easily be harmonized by simply positing that the name YHWH fell out of use between the time of Enosh and Moses, and that it was at the burning bush that the use of God's personal Name was restored. Sadly, in the NAB, historical criticism trumps faith every time.

The Fathers and Doctors of the Church are unanimous in reading Genesis as history yet to these scholars it is nothing more than myth. Their understanding of Scripture is nearly divorced from the Tradition of the Church (orthodox Catholic scholars have theorized that the sons of God mentioned here were either descendents of Seth or fallen angels).

Or maybe, just maybe, this is one story, and Noah punished Ham vicariously by cursing his son Canaan. This would make perfect sense in the context. Ham, the youngest son, had dishonored his father Noah, so Noah decreed that Ham's youngest son would dishonor him.

Also note that the commentators accuse Scripture of a moral error in this footnote. They claim that Hebrew apologists made up this story to justify enslaving the Canaanite people.

The documentary hypothesis rears its ugly head once again. The translators see two names repeated within a few chapters, and they immediately think contradiction. According to the Priestly source, Sheba and Havilah are descendents of Ham, but according to the Yahwist, they are descendents of Shem. But is it really that unlikely that there were two people named Sheba and two people named Havilah? For Christ's sake, there's another Ben in the architectural engineering program here at Penn State. If someone were to write a genealogy of the class of 2007 would any reasonable person think that it was two conflicting genealogies which were shoddily combined together at a later date? The NAB is second only to the Skeptic's Annotated Bible in its relentless search for contradictions which are simply not there.

The incredulity of these commentators at the Biblical genealogies is odd, to say the least. They believe that God became incarnate in the womb of an Immaculate Virgin but they will not entertain the notion that a man could live 500 years. They are not being logically consistent. If one is willing to grant that miracles are possible, and that there is a transcendent God with the power to work them, one has no logical basis for discounting anything of this sort as simply too extraordinary to believe.

Well, biblical scholarship really has advanced in recent years. In fact, so confident are these scholars that they believe they understand Scripture better than Scripture! I would expect as much from someone who did not recognize the Bible as the word of God, but from these scholars, who are ostensibly believing Christians, it is simply arrogance of gargantuan proportions.

The NAB has once again come under the condemnation of every pre-Vatican II Pope; they have accused Holy Scripture of error.

It is interesting to note how these scholars understand the terms sacred and profane history. Profane history is what actually happened, and sacred history is myth. This is opposed, of course, to how Catholic Tradition understands the term sacred history, namely that part of actual history which is recorded by the Bible.

This is quite simply amazing. According to these commentators Melchizedek worshipped a false God. Recall that this is the man whose most excellent priesthood, according to the book of Hebrews, prefigured the priesthood of Christ, and whose sacrifice of bread and wine prefigured the sacrifice of the Mass! [24] Yet apparently he offered this sacrifice to a god named el-elyon, who is to be distinguished from the true God YHWH. This is blasphemy. The only interpretation available to one who accepts the book of Hebrews as canonical is that Melchizedek worshipped the one true God but simply called Him by a different name.

So, in other words, the translators changed the meaning of the text in order to reinforce their perceived contradiction. They see two conflicting stories here, one in which Ishmael is a baby and one in which he is a teenager, and they are willing to rewrite Scripture to make sure we that see it too. Is there any rational justification for doing so? Any textual variants among the different manuscripts? Any discrepancies between the Hebrew and the Greek or Syraic traditions? No, absolutely none. Their editing here is pure conjecture. This has to be one of the more incredible things I have seen in my young life. Bear in mind that the NAB is the U.S. Catholic Church's official translation of the Bible, and that it is the only translation which Roman Catholics may use in their lectionaries (thank God for the Byzantine Rite and for Fr. Oravetz who made me a member). In effect, our bishops are forcing this translation upon us. That our bishops have so little reverence for Scripture that they would force a translation which inserts contradictions into the biblical narratives upon the faithful is a testament to the massive apostasy which characterizes the hierarchy of today. Not since the Arian heresy has the Catholic Church been in this sad of shape.

It seems to be an entrenched dogma of those who adhere to the JEDP theory that whenever the Bible contains two similar stories, they must really be two different versions of the same story, written by different authors and combined together at a later date. They claim the same thing about the two stories of the wells at Beer-Sheba. Does history never repeat itself?

It is my medical opinion that the NAB commentators have been infected with chronic nonprimafaciosis, a vehement and absolute refusal to accept anything Scripture says at face value.

Not necessarily. Pharaoh ruled over the sons of Israel many years before Saul ever came to power, and he was a king. There is nothing about this passage which is inconsistent with Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch.

Once again the scholars who created this Bible have changed the text of Scripture in order to reinforce their perceived contradiction. This time, however, they are a little more subtle and do not announce that they are doing so. This will take a while to explain. Essentially, they see two conflicting stories weaved together in Genesis 39. In the Yahwist story, Judah convinces his brothers to sell Joseph to some Ishmaelite traders instead of killing him. In the Elohist story, Reuben convinces his brothers to simply throw Joseph into a cistern. Reuben intends to return to the cistern at a later time and rescue him, however before he can do so he is kidnapped by Midianites.

The first part of the allegation of contradiction, namely that in the "two" stories it is a different one of Joseph's brothers who tries to save his life, is so inane that it hardly merits a response. Both could very well have tried to do so. There could very well have been two good apples in the bunch.

The second part, namely that in one story Joseph is sold to the Ishmaelites whereas in the other he is kidnapped by Midianites, is a bit more difficult, especially if one relies solely on the NAB. This is where the translators change the Scripture to reinforce their views. They rearrange the verse into two neat, contradictory parts. The first part says that Joseph's brothers sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. The second says that some Midianite traders passed by, pulled Joseph out of the cistern, and took him to Egypt. However, the NASB translates the verse literally: "Then some Midianite traders passed by, so they [Joseph's brothers] pulled him up and lifted Joseph out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver. Thus they brought Joseph into Egypt." Obviously this is quite a different statement! There is absolutely nothing in the original Hebrew which would imply that the Midianites kidnapped Joseph while no one was there. Rather, the Midianites' presence is merely parenthetical.

There is only one problem left. How are we to interpret the phrase, "Then some Midianite traders passed by, so they [Joseph's brothers] pulled him up and lifted Joseph out of the pit"? Why would the presence of the Midianites cause Joseph's brothers to pull him out? Here is my theory. Joseph's brothers were bartering with the Ishmaelites. They were trying to get the best price possible. When the Midianites passed by, the brothers' hand suddenly got quite a bit stronger, since the Ishmaelites would then have had to deal with another party bidding for the same slave. So, when the Midianites passed by, the Ishmaelites closed the deal as quickly as possible, thus causing Joseph's brothers to pull him out of the pit. The Hebrew Scriptures make perfect sense as they are.

Indeed they are two different Hebrew words. Perhaps they found part of their money in their bags while they were in camp, and part of it in their sacks when they got home.

Or maybe, just maybe, Pharaoh coincidentally told Jacob to do what he had just done. This is not all that uncommon an occurrence; something similar has happened to me many times. Again, the translators are all too quick to accuse Holy Scripture of error and contradiction when there are any number of ways with which to reconcile the supposedly conflicting statements.

Sadly, the New Testament does not fare much better than the Old under the historical critical knife of the New American Bible; just as the translators enthusiastically embrace Julius Wellhausen's four source theory for the composition of the Pentateuch, so too do they embrace a German multi-source theory for the composition of the Gospel of Matthew. This time the sources are only three (Q, Mk, and M), but nevertheless the substance of the two theories are essentially the same: Scripture was not written by eyewitnesses and is not at all accurate as history.

To wit, the introduction to Matthew teaches that the ancient patristic tradition which ascribes the authorship of this Gospel to St. Matthew the apostle is false (one would think that it would be prudent in this case to defer to the judgment of men like Papias, Irenaeus, and Hippolytus, [25] men who lived far nearer than the NAB scholars to the date of the Gospel's composition and thus would be in a far better position to know, but I digress). Rather it was composed by an anonymous Syrian Christian around 80 A.D. who used for his sources the Gospel of Mark, a hypothesized collection of the sayings of Christ known as Q which was also used by the author of Luke, and certain oral and written traditions known only to him. Certain parts are also said to be fabrications [26]. In any case, the work which has come down to us is not apostolic in origin, but is the product of the synthesis of numerous oral and written traditions with a few flights of fancy thrown into the mix. [27]

The commentators cite as support for this theory the fact that the Gospel of Matthew contains a great deal of the same material as the Gospel of Mark. Allegedly, the author of Matthew used Mark as his primary source. And as an apostle, writing from memory, would not have had to rely for his material on Mark, who was not an eyewitness to Christ's earthly ministry, the NAB concludes that the author of Matthew was not an apostle. The fallacy of this argument is obvious. It presupposes that Matthew was indeed written after Mark, which is anything but a proven fact. In fact, a recent discovery proves quite the opposite: papyri fragments of Matthew 26 known as the Oxford Papyri have been demonstrated by papyrologist Casten Peter Theide to have been written before the temple of Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D. Here is how: the Oxford Papyri were found in the same place, Egypt, as other Papyri which are currently stored in Paris, France. These papyri all use the same style of lettering in Greek, which means that they are from the same time period, since Greek writing styles were all specific to certain periods of time. The Paris papyri contains the date "the year 12 of Nero the lord, Epeieph 30" which in the Gregorian calendar is July 24, 65/66 A.D. Hence, since the scraps of Matthew are from the same time period as these, likewise they were written in the 60s A.D. [28] Subtract from this the time that it would have taken for Matthew's Gospel to be disseminated all the way into Egypt, and we are left with a very early date for its composition indeed.

Another piece of historical evidence which attests to the early date of composition of Matthew comes from an ironic source: a Jewish parody which treats the Gospel of Matthew with derision. Obviously the original work must be older than the parody, so since this story has been dated at about 70 A.D., the Gospel According to Matthew must of course be even older. You can read about this story at South Coast Today. Rabban Gamaliel must be turning over in his grave.

The postulate of the Q source is quite simply a fantasy. It is no more credible than the Muslim theory of the Injil, for there is no hard evidence of it ever having existed. The only justification for this postulate is that Matthew and Luke contain a number of sayings of Jesus which are not contained in either Mark or John. But this could simply be due to the two authors having similar views of which of the sayings of Christ it would be most prudent to record. Mark focused on Jesus's actions and John focused on Jesus's claims to divinity; is it any wonder that two of the evangelists might focus on Christ's teachings about the cost of discipleship?

Lastly, the commentators cite Matthew 22:7 as evidence for the post-A.D. 70 date of composition, in which Jesus alludes to the impending destruction of the Jerusalem temple (a better example would have been 24:2). Apparently they deny that Jesus Christ had the power to predict the future, because to one who acknowledges Him as a prophet this conclusion simply does not follow. On the contrary, the orthodox Catholic uses his historical critical abilities to prove that Matthew was written prior to 70 A.D., and then cites 24:2 as proof of Christ's divinity. But when the NAB translators read 24:2, they immediately conclude that it must have been written after. There is no way that Christ could have known that, they say. Obviously Christians must have put these words into Jesus's mouth after the fact in order to bolster their claims about his divinity. Well, Trypho could not have said it better himself [29]. It is a sad day for the Catholic Church when our own Bibles espouse the claims of anti-Christian Jewish polemicists.

In both of these cases, Bibles which presuppose the inerrancy of Scripture (DRV, NASB, etc.), as Catholic exegetes are bound by the Magisterium to do, choose to follow the manuscripts which contain the historically correct names. Not so with the NAB.

This is what happens when one abandons the traditional Catholic teaching that the Gospels were written by the people whose names they bear. Suddenly one no longer has to read them as history, and one can believe and teach that events which they record did not actually happen.

After the notes on Genesis 37, this is most intellectually dishonest footnote which I have come across so far; once again these "scholars" have mistranslated Scripture for the sole purpose of making it appear to be in error. I am simply dumbfounded by the sheer audacity of these people.

This footnote claims that Matthew was mistaken in identifying the sea of the prophecy of Isaiah as Galilee. According to the NAB, it is actually the Mediterranean. Well, the original Hebrew and the Septuagint both explicitly identify it as Galilee! The NAB translation of Isaiah 8:23 as "district of the Gentiles" is, quite frankly, a lie concocted to support their audacious claim, for the original manuscripts most definitely say "Galilee of the Gentiles!"

As to the more technical aspects of rebutting the claims of this footnote, I will defer to the President of CAI:

As for the NAB's footnote that says it was the "Mediterranean" as opposed to the sea of Galilee, there is absolutely no evidence for this. Matthew's reference to "hodon thalasses" (the way of the sea) is not the road that leads to the Mediterranean but the stretch of country to which the great ancient road, Via Maris, led. The accusative "hodon" is adverbial, and when connected to the genitival "thalasses" acts like a nominative, and is thus an independent expression denoting extent, that is the extent of the region in view, not the Mediterranean. The same is true regarding the phrase "peran tou Iordainou" (beyond the Jordan), that is, it is referring to Perea, which is at the extreme east. This only makes sense, since "the way of the sea" would refer to the extreme west. [30]

Finally, the borders between Zebulon and Naphtali had long since been erased by the time of St. Matthew, so he made no error by combining them as one territory in which Capernaum was situated.

There in absolutely no need to charge Scripture with a contradiction solely because one Gospel omits an element of a narrative which another Gospel contains. In fact, The story in the Gospel of Luke about Jesus going out into the water with Simon fits nicely between vv. 18 and 19 of Matthew. One need only do a little work to find amongst the Gospels a satisfactory if not superlative harmony. All I can say is that these scholars would do well to listen to St. Augustine's advice to Faustus. [31]

Since I dealt with the three-source theory in detail above, I will here confine myself solely to answering these footnotes' two charges of contradiction, namely that in Matthew this sermon takes place on a mountain whereas in Luke it is delivered on a plain, and that in Matthew Jesus addresses the crowds whereas in Luke He speaks solely to His disciples.

As to the former, the Greek words tópou pedinoú which the NAB translators here interpret as "plain" does not have the same semantic range as that English word. It could better be interpreted simply as a stretch of level ground. The NAB translators know this; just look at how they translate it in Luke 6:17. So we see once again that the alleged contradiction vanishes as soon as one decides to be faithful to the original text. There is absolutely nothing contradictory about the statements "He gave a speech on a mountain" and "He gave a speech on a stretch of level ground." Mountains quite often contain stretches of level ground! And certainly if I were hiking down a mountain, and wanted to stop somewhere to give a sermon, this is exactly the kind of spot which I would choose!

As to the latter, a quick look at the two verses preceding Luke 6:20 obliterates the claim that Jesus is there depicted as speaking only to His disciples, and not to the crowds. We learn that "there was a great throng of people... who had come to hear Him... and all the people were trying to touch Him." Indeed, verse 20 does say that Jesus looked at His disciples when He began His sermon, but the preceding verses make it absolutely obvious that there were many, many other people in attendance.

His own composition my foot. There is nothing fraudulent in Holy Scripture.

Contrary to this footnote, Matt 5:31-32 is not a modified form of Jesus's true teachings; it is just as absolute in its prohibition of divorce as the rest of Scripture. All the "exception clause" means is that if a man divorces his wife because she has been fornicating with another man then he is not strictly guilty of causing her to commit fornication. Obviously, she has already done so.

An omission is not tantamount to a contradiction. It is completely nonsensical to charge the Gospels with error simply because one evangelist includes details which another evangelist does not.

I think this is exactly the kind of notion that St. Irenaeus was combating in Adversus Haereses, Book IV, 33:8, the idea that the authors of the Gospels put words into Jesus's mouth in order to justify their religious claims. I have heard similar arguments from atheists.

Yet another reason for the change may be that Jesus gave Levi the new name of Matthew, much like He gave Simon the new name of Peter (Matt 16:18), and that the Bible just does not record it. The Gospels most certainly imply that Levi and Matthew were the same person. Why not just take them at face value?

This is quite extraordinary; the commentators are implicitly attacking Christ's divinity. If, as they claim, the original meaning of Christ's words to His disciples was "until the parousia," this would mean that Christ mistakenly believed that the end of the world would come within the lifetime of His disciples. As He is God, this is quite impossible. But not so, according to the commentary of the NAB.

Q, Q, Q, Q, Q. Enough of Q already. Practically every other footnote mentions Q. Q simply gets an inordinate amount of attention for a hypothesized document which none have ever seen or heard. This footnote is indicative of the kind of circus which results when one abandons belief in apostolic authorship of the Gospels and decides to dismember them with highly speculative (and no less destructive) textual criticism. [32] And let me add, the position expressed in this footnote and throughout the commentary on Matthew of the NAB was directly reprobated in Lamentabili Sane, which condemned the notion that "The Evangelists... artificially arranged the evangelical parables."

Here we find yet another allegation of contradiction. These scholars have completely forgotten the kind of humility exemplified by St. Justin Martyr [33], and charge the Bible with egregious errors ad nauseum. Suffice to say, there is no contradiction here, just as there have not been contradictions in every other verse whereupon the NAB has accused the Bible of error. In neither account does Herod revere St. John the Baptist. Rather, the motivation behind Herod's unwillingness to execute him is fear (Matt 14:5, Mark 6:20). Herod is worried about saving his own skin. In both accounts Herod is distressed at the prospect of having to kill St. John but grudgingly does so because he is bound by his oath and his public credibility is at stake (Matt 14:9, Mark 6:26).

This is what is so pernicious about the three source theory for the composition of Matthew. No longer is this Gospel an independent witness to the life and deeds of Jesus Christ. No longer is it the testimony of a holy Apostle. No, it is only a slightly edited version of Mark. It is, in the eyes of these scholars, essentially a work of plagiarism.

Cannot be taken as sayings that go back to Jesus Himself? Exactly why not? Again, they seem to be denying not only that the Gospels accurately record what Jesus actually did and taught [34], but even that Jesus could predict the future!

This is yet another perfidious attempt to suggest that Matthew was composed after 70 A.D. and that it contains fabricated material. Jesus died on the Cross long before 70 A.D. so of course this narrative is dealing with the second temple period! The following verses make this even more obvious. Jesus explains that He is not obligated to pay the temple tax because kings do not collect taxes from their sons, but from strangers (the NAB obscures the meaning by replacing "sons" with "subjects"). Clearly, Jesus is the son and God the Father is the king. Hence the temple tax of two drachmas is being collected on behalf of God. Now, I find it hard to believe that God would collect taxes in order to maintain an abominable pagan shrine.

I will let the second Vatican Council answer this question for me. The mother actually asked Jesus this and St. Matthew the Apostle faithfully recorded what he remembered happening when he wrote his Gospel, the historicity of which the Church unhesitatingly asserts. [35]

These statements are, according to several Popes of the not too distant past, "absolutely wrong and forbidden." One would think that these scholars would have the humility to admit that if Scripture understands a passage of Scripture differently than they, it is probably Scripture which is right. In any case, one could easily interpret the "them" of verse seven as referring to the cloaks and not to the donkey and the colt. Jesus sat only on the colt. Verse five's statement that Zion's king comes meek and riding on a donkey and a colt would then be interpreted loosely as referring to how the donkey carried some of His baggage.

Well, this is quite a claim. Since these scholars believe that Daniel was written between 167 and 164 B.C., they are actually claiming that the Jews did not believe in a bodily resurrection until a few hundred years before Christ! Luckily, this contention is contradicted by Isaiah 26:19 and Job 19:26. However, the NAB attempts to explain away and obscure these passages, respectively. The commentary claims that Isaiah 26:19 is solely a metaphor, and the NAB translation of Job 19:26 is so absolutely jumbled that it is almost impossible to make any sense out of it. [36] These wolves are willing to go to any length to convince their readers to accept their heretical religion. They are dead wrong. As Jesus here explains, the resurrection was implicit even in the Pentateuch.

If there is anyone out there who still has not come to the conclusion that these scholars are Protestants, this footnote should convince even them. This is just flabbergasting. The NAB, the official translation of the USCCB, actually thinks that Jesus is here literally forbidding the use of the titles father, master, and teacher. Matthew 23:9 is the verse used by "fundamentalist" Protestants against the Catholic practice of addressing priests as father, and a great deal of apologetic ink has been spilt refuting this interpretation. Why are our own Bibles espousing it? The NAB's commentary seems to be by turns Jewish, Atheist, and Protestant. It is anything but Catholic. Finally, the phrase "the Matthean Jesus" is just repulsive. I am reminded of the speech given at the botched modernist takeover of the Penn State Newman club which took place this past year: "I give you a new Jesus, a Jesus who smiles!"

Once again the NAB espouses an argument which the enemies of Christianity use against the credibility of the Bible, and which the Sacred Magisterium has condemned [37]: supposedly the authors of the Bible mistakenly believed and taught in their writings that the world would end within their lifetimes. There are two possible solutions. One is that Matthew 24 refers primarily to God's judgment of Israel in 70 A.D., and hence actually was fulfilled within the lifetime of the generation which witnessed the life of Christ and wrote the New Testament. This view is known as preterism, and the only real argument that can be made against it is that it requires a somewhat metaphorical interpretation of Matt 24:30 (cf. Matt 26:64). The other possible explanation, which this footnote dismisses all too quickly, is that tautai genetai (= this generation) refers to a specific kind of generation (cf. Acts 4:40, Philippians 2:15), an evil one, and thus the meaning of this passage is that there will be evil people until the end of time.

One wonders why they choose to translate a present participle, following a present tense verb (esti, is) as a future tense sentence. They seem to be trying to downplay the sacrificial character of the Mass.[38]

The traditional explanation for this alleged contradiction is that Judas hanged himself on a tree near a cliff. The branch subsequently broke, and Judas fell down the cliff and "burst open in the middle." The statement of Acts 1:18 that Judas "bought a parcel of land with the wages of his iniquity" could easily be given a metaphorical interpretation.

It is on this sad note that I will end my study of the Gospel According to Matthew According to the New American Bible. Why would they do this? This footnote essentially serves no purpose but to cast doubt on the reliability of the Gospels, and there are more than enough Atheists in the world to do that. A Bible created by Christians should reconcile prima facie contradictions, not point them out. For this reason and many others, the NAB simply does not qualify as Christian.

Daniel is the kind of book upon which martyrs are weaned. Its heroes are men of exemplary courage and piety, preferring to be cast into a raging furnace or a den of lions rather than commit the sin of idolatry. They endure persecution with humility and contrition, all the while thanking the Lord for sending them such just chastisements for their sins. And they triumph, and for their fidelity they receive from God their just reward.

Moreover, Daniel is the kind of book with which souls are won. Its historical prophecies are exquisite in their precision, predicting hundreds of years of history in great detail. In fact, Daniel is probably the best book in the entire Bible for proving divine inspiration to the nonbeliever, for it even identifies by name the nations to which its prophecies refer. Yet more extraordinary, in places the book of Daniel even provides the time frames in which the events it describes will transpire. It is truly an awe inspiring work. The Holy Spirit Who wrote it could not have possibly done a better job.

Suffice to say, the NAB ruins it. Yet again it espouses the claims of the enemies of Christianity; it teaches that Daniel was written after the events which it allegedly predicted had already transpired [39]. Needless to say, this view devastates the moral and prophetic force of this book. Suddenly the fingerprints of divine foreknowledge and inspiration which are the visions of statues, animals, and horns are no more than creative summaries of past history. Suddenly this book of amazing foresight has none at all and even its hindsight is in question. Suddenly the proof of the existence of God is no proof at all.

Thankfully, the preponderance of the internal and external evidence is not on the NAB's side. For example, the author explicitly and repeatedly identifies himself as Daniel, the Daniel who lived in Babylon in the sixth century B.C. and who experienced the events narrated in this book (vv. 8:1,15,27, 9:2, 12:4-5). This is in direct contradiction to the first sentence of the NAB's introduction, which states that the "book takes its name, not from the author, who is actually unknown, but from its hero." [40] Apparently they think the author was lying.

Since the NAB makes no attempt in its introduction to justify its claim that Daniel was written during the Maccabean Rebellion, I will here explain and refute the various arguments which have historically been advanced in favor of this position. The first is that the prophecies are too accurate, and hence could not possibly have been composed until after the events they describe had already occurred. This is of course a circular argument; it presupposes that Daniel is not divinely inspired. The second argument is that a Jewish author in sixth century B.C. Babylon would not have known various Persian and Greek words which are used in this book. However, Daniel lived for a few years after the Persian conquest of Babylon and thus would have known a few Persian words. Also, Greek mercenaries served in the Babylonian army under Nebuchadnezzar [41]. In sum, the Greek and Persian words found in Daniel are no anachronism for a sixth century B.C. Babylonian Jew.

The third argument that is advanced in favor the Maccabean date of Daniel is that the Aramaic used in 2:4-7:28 belongs to a later date than the sixth century B.C. However, "recent discoveries of fifth century B.C. Aramaic documents have shown that Daniel was written in a form of Imperial Aramaic, an official dialect known in all parts of the Near East at that time." [42]

Finally, it is alleged that Daniel contains historical mistakes which an eyewitness to these events would not have made. But yet again, recent discoveries have vindicated this divinely inspired work. For example, the Babylonian king Belshazzar who is mentioned throughout the book was until recently otherwise unknown to history. None of the great historians of antiquity such as Xenophon and Herodotus were aware of him; Nabonidus was the last king of Babylon according to all of them. In the past this led many to question the historical reliability of Daniel. However, the recently discovered Nabonidus Chronicle reports that Nabonidus entrusted his kingship to his son Bel-shar-usus (Belshazzar) while he retired to Arabia. Belshazzar was actually in power when Babylon fell. Now, as the great historians of antiquity are completely unaware of this king, it is abundantly evident that his memory faded into obscurity soon after his kingdom was destroyed. Hence it would be completely impossible that this information would have been known to an obscure Maccabean Jew who was about three hundred years even further removed from these events than the aforementioned historians. Second century B.C. soldiers do not know more about sixth century B.C. history than a fifth century B.C. historians. No, the only possible explanation is that Daniel was there. He was an eyewitness to these events, and he wrote down what he saw.

The other main charge of historical inaccuracy centers on the character of Darius the Mede, who, according to Daniel, succeeded to the kingdom of Babylon at the age of 62. It is an established fact of history that Cyrus, King of Persia, was the man who conquered Babylon. Moreover, Cyrus had already conquered the Median kingdom a few years before. So it is problematic that Daniel describes a man named Darius the Mede, who is unknown to secular history, as becoming king over Babylon immediately after the Persian conquest. However, the Nabonidus Chronicle records that Cyrus appointed a man named Gubaru as sub-governor of Babylon immediately after it fell under his power. It is quite possible that Darius the Mede was simply another name for him. [43] Yet another possible explanation: "Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, in his Antiquities, 10, 245-49 (xi. 4) does report that there was a Darius the Mede, a kinsman, who would have ruled for Cyrus for a time while Cyrus was occupied with other things." [44]

Supposedly vv. 1:5 and 1:18 put the first meeting between Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel during the third year of Nebuchadnezzar's reign, whereas 2:1 puts it in the second. However, according to the Babylonian reckoning, "the year in which a king was crowned was the year of accession, whereas the next full year was the first year of his reign." [45] This alleged contradiction melts away as soon as one learns that historical fact. Nebuchadnezzar took Daniel to Babylon during the year of his accession, and three years later, when Daniel's training was complete, it was the second year of his reign. So we see that the two chronologies can be harmonized quite easily. Moreover, far from being evidence of historical inaccuracy, this is actually evidence that Daniel was written by a Babylonian, not a Maccabean, Jew, for a Maccabean Jew would not have used Babylonian dates. This is especially true with regards to Daniel 1:1, where the use of the Babylonian reckoning puts him in prima facie contradiction to Jeremiah (Jer 25:1, 9; 46:2).

This is another of the many arguments put forth in favor of the proposition that Daniel was written by a Maccabean Jew; Daniel's use of the term "Chaldean" as referring specifically to astrologers is an anachronism in the sixth century B.C. But this is essentially an argument from silence. Other than Daniel, the first known instance of such a usage of the word is in the writings of Herodotus circa 450 B.C. It is not altogether improbable that "Chaldean" could have been used in this way 87 years before.

The New American Bible's exegesis of this prophecy is quite novel; historically the four kingdoms have been understood as Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. The NAB commentators seem to be trying to strip their Maccabean Daniel of the last vestiges of his prophetic foresight, not even allowing him to predict the events of the next few years!

There are several problems with this reading. First, the Median Empire did not succeed the Babylonian Empire; the Persians conquered the Medes some years before the Euphrates was ever diverted and mighty Babylon fell. Second, the Book of Daniel, in v. 8:20, treats the Medo-Persian kingdom as a whole, depicting it as a goat with two horns, one large and one small. One would think that Daniel would be consistent, and treat it as a whole here as well. Finally, Daniel 2:44-45 states that within the lifetimes of the kings of the fourth empire of this prophecy God would establish His messianic kingdom on earth. Christ Himself interpreted this passage as a reference to His person and mission. Yet at the time Our God and King became Incarnate in virginal and immaculate womb of our Mother Mary the Greek empire had long since been conquered by Rome. This interpretation simply does not line up with the facts.

I would like to give credit where credit is due. This is Catholic commentary. Like Ruth after Judges, this is quite refreshing.

The bear could much better be interpreted as Medo-Persia than Media. If it is interpreted as Media one is left with absolutely no clue as to the meaning of the statement that "[the bear] was raised up on one side." However, if one interprets it as Medo-Persia then it makes perfect sense as a parallel to vv. 8:3, 20; it signifies the superiority of the Persians in the kingdom. In addition, the "three tusks... in its mouth" could better be translated as three ribs between its teeth. Thus it would signify the three main conquests of the Medo-Persian Empire, namely Lydia, Babylon, and Egypt. [46]

The leopard could also symbolize the swiftness with which Alexander the Great established his kingdom, in which case the four heads would correspond to the four smaller kingdoms which Alexander's generals carved out for themselves after his death. This is by far the more natural interpretation, as Daniel soon goes into great detail about these events (8:8f; 8:20f; 11).

If one accepts this erroneous interpretation, one is forced to conclude that Daniel believed that God would establish His Messianic kingdom immediately after the overthrow of Antiochus Epiphanes (cf. Daniel 7:25-27). Obviously, this did not happen.

Also, Rome and only Rome could properly be described as "devouring the whole earth, trampling it down and crushing it" (Dan 7:23). The Seleucid Empire simply does not fit the bill.

Once again the NAB espouses an interpretation foreign to the patrimony of the Catholic Church [47]. Apparently they are once again trying to deprive Daniel of those pesky vestiges of prophetic foresight which remain even after they catapult him 370 years ahead. They simply will not allow him to predict the future, no matter what.

This prophecy is about Jesus Christ, not indirectly through its quasi-messianic themes, as the NAB teaches, but directly and exclusively, and I will prove it. First, though at first glance God's decree that at some point in the future Jerusalem would be restored (Jeremiah 30:18) seems a likely candidate for the starting point of the 70 weeks, closer examination rules it out. For this we must consult other translations, as the NAB takes liberties with the text of Daniel 9:25. It translates it, in part, as "from the utterance of the word that Jerusalem was to be rebuilt," whereas literal translations all render this section as "from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem" or some such. This is why this is important: the NAB's rendering makes this prophecy sound like a reference to a general proclamation that Jerusalem would at some point be rebuilt; the literal rendering makes it sound like a reference to a specific command i.e. "go, rebuild and restore Jerusalem." God's decree in Jeremiah 30:18 meshes with the NAB's version, but not with the literal version, as He did not command Jeremiah to build.

To what then, does Daniel 9:25 refer? It refers to Atraxerxes' decree to Nehemiah to rebuild the Holy City (Nehemiah 2:3-8), which took place on Nisan 1, 444 B.C. [48] This is when the 70 weeks (i.e. 490 years) begin. And if we convert the prophetic years of 360 days into precise solar years of 365.242 days, adding the 69 weeks which Gabriel tells us will pass between the decree of Atraxerxes and the coming of Messiah (anointed one) the Prince places us exactly on the date of Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem. [49] So, the anointed one of v 25 is none other than Christ Himself. Moreover, with this hermeneutic, unlike that of the NAB, we have no need to posit that the anointed one referred to in v 26 is someone different from Him Who was referred to in v 25; it is Christ as well. He was cut off and killed, then a few years later the Romans came and destroyed the city and the sanctuary.

Indeed, this prophecy is incredibly precise. Yet if it were written after the events it describes had already transpired it would simply be nothing more than a fraud.

By Jacob Michael

The Gospel of St. John is, in my estimation, one of the most theologically and sacramentally rich books of the entire New Testament. I have done at least three in-depth studies of this gospel, using both Traditional Catholic and more "liberal Catholic" commentaries as my guide, and I can honestly say that this gospel is an endless gold mine - you will never exhaust its depths.

It is also, not surprisingly, a favorite target for modern liberal Scripture scholars. St. John's chronology of events does not fit well with the other three gospels - hence, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the "synoptic" gospels, but these scholars just do not know what to do with St. John.

His gospel is also the most generous when it comes to giving us details about the conflict between Jesus and "the Jews." It is this phrase, of course, that bothers the liberals: "the Jews." "The Jews" reject Christ; "the Jews" seek to kill Him; "the Jews" are angry with Him; people will not speak openly about Jesus "for fear of the Jews." For modern Scripture scholars, this is just unacceptable. But how to get around this? We cannot just disown so great a figure as St. John, can we?

Enter all of the modern critical theories as to who actually wrote St. John's Gospel. Certainly, it wasn't St. John, they say. St. John would not have had such a polemical bent against the Jews; St. John would not have had such a highly developed Christology, nor understood Christ's divinity as clearly as the author of this gospel apparently does; St. John would not, at so early a stage in the Church's life, been thinking so sacramentally. There we have it, then - it was not St. John who wrote this gospel, but rather, it was the "Johannine Community." It was the later Church, those who had studied under St. John, who had taken a seed of his teaching and later developed it - this is the community that eventually wrote, compiled, and edited the Gospel According to John. [50]

This accounts for a lot, doesn't it? It was not St. John who wrote so scathingly about "the Jews" - it was a later Christian community, writing at a time when Jewish/Christian hostilities had grown considerably; it was not St. John who so clearly understood Christology, it was the later Church who had spent time thinking these things through; it was not St. John who had such a highly developed view of the sacraments - this too is the work of a Church community in which the sacraments had lately developed and become important.

As we look at how the NAB handles the Gospel of St. John, we will see these themes repeatedly: the assumption that St. John did not write all of this gospel, the assumption that most of this gospel was edited and re-written by a Johannine Community, attempts to explain away the over-developed polemic against the Jews, and so on. A few comments from the NAB Introduction to this gospel provide a foretaste of what we are going to find: this gospel "is the product of a developed theological reflection and grows out of a different circle and tradition"; it was "probably written in the 90s of the first century"; it is "difficult to accept the idea that the gospel as it now stands was written by one person"; the prologue is "an independent hymn" that was "adapted to serve as a preface to the gospel"; it is hard to accept Johannine authorship of this gospel because it contains "inconsistencies" and a "highly developed theology," and because "some of the wondrous deeds of Jesus have been worked into highly effective dramatic scenes"; "modern scholars find that the evidence does not support" a Johannine authorship; the gospel is "not simply history"; the texts have been compiled and edited "to serve the evangelist's theological purposes," including "opposition to the synagogue of the day" and - incredibly - "the explicit emphasis on [Jesus'] divinity," thus suggesting that these themes were not real concerns of either Our Lord or St. John himself. [51]

Observe the danger of the NAB: the truth is carefully mixed with error. It is quite true that this prologue introduces the major themes of St. John's Gospel, and indeed, this fact will help the reader understand the rest of the gospel. But notice the error: "In origin, it was probably an early Christian hymn." In origin? Equally probable would be the suggestion that St. John wrote the prologue himself, and it was later adopted by the Church as a hymn. It certainly follows a poetic form - but why would this rule out St. John as the author? The other subtle error is that this poem was interrupted with "prose inserts" by a later editor or redactor.

The suggestion that this passage "reflects fourth-century anti-Arianism" is meant to imply that this part of St. John's Gospel was still in the editing stages as late as the 4th Century - the gospel underwent steady development, as opposed to being written by one author and handed down as-is.

While it may be true that "grace" and "truth" are meant to evoke the Old Testament characteristics of God's covenant mercy and faithfulness, the NAB commentators seem to leave open the possibility that God's Old Covenant with the Jews has not been revoked. That is, He sends His divine Son, but with "love" and "fidelity," with Old Covenant characteristics - we should understand from this that the New Covenant is founded upon the same unchanging attributes of God as was the Old Covenant, but the NAB does not suggest that this New Covenant is a replacement for the Old. Instead, it links John 1:14 and the Incarnation with the Old Covenant, thus leaving the question open (although they do answer this question later, see discussion on vs. 16).

Here the NAB does make the right suggestion, that the Old Covenant has been replaced with the New. The problem is that the seed of doubt has already been planted in the footnote on 1:14. This New Covenant... is it just another version of the Old? After all, it seems so strongly linked with "Yahweh" and the Covenant on Sinai. This question is not definitively closed, as the NAB commentators suggest that "grace in place of grace" can also mean "'grace upon grace' (accumulation)." In this view, the New Covenant is just an addition to the Old - an accumulation.

Again it is suggested (even assumed) that the prologue was a later addition, and that the original beginning of this gospel started at verse 19 ("This section constitutes the introduction to the gospel proper"). The heavy hand of the faceless gospel editor is always present.

Already we are exposed to the gross suggestion that the anti-Jewish polemic of this gospel is the result of the gospel having been written much later in history, when Jewish/Christian hostilities had reached a peak. To say that this "usage reflects the atmosphere, at the end of the first century, of polemics between church and synagogue" is to make the conflict between Jesus and the Jews nothing more than a petty argument between two religious institutions. It is to accuse St. John of putting words into Our Lord's mouth in order to further his sectarian quarrels [52]. It also suggests that this gospel was not written until after the end of the first century, when in fact, the internal evidence suggests that it was written prior to 70 A.D. (the present-tense verb used in 5:2, "there is in Jerusalem ... a pool" suggests a pre-70 A.D. date, since there was no pool in Jerusalem after the Romans destroyed the city). [53]

This note reveals the basic tendency of the NAB to always assume textual error rather than to give the benefit of the doubt to Sacred Scripture. It is true that the "priests and Levites would have been Sadducees, not Pharisees," but this does not rule out the possibility that this group of priests and Levites were still sent by the Pharisees.

The poison in this footnote is not fully developed and may remain hidden to the average reader who is not familiar with the larger arguments set forth by liberal bible scholars. The fuller discussion (see Raymond Brown's commentary on John in the Anchor Bible Commentary series) proposes that John the Baptist was mistaken as to Our Lord's identity - as the footnote suggests, John the Baptist thought that Jesus "existed before me," not because he understood Our Lord's divinity and pre-existence, but because he mistakenly believed Our Lord to be Elijah.

The implication here is that either St. Luke or St. John is mistaken and/or ignorant. Either St. Luke's "tradition" (as opposed to "divinely inspired record") is wrong, or St. John's portrayal of John the Baptist is wrong. Considering that St. Luke most likely gathered his infancy material directly from interviews with the Blessed Virgin, and considering that St. John lived with the Blessed Virgin and cared for her after Our Lord's Passion, it is more than unlikely that these two men would have had two conflicting understandings of this "tradition." But that is precisely what the NAB wants you to understand, so that you will assume that St. John could not have written this gospel. It must have been penned by the Johannine Community, who must have been ignorant of the Lucan "tradition."

Their conclusion here is amazing! Even though this reading is supported by trusted Greek manuscripts, it is "suspect" - and why? Precisely because "it harmonizes this passage with the synoptic version." Apparently anything in St. John's Gospel that agrees with the synoptic gospels is automatically "suspect."

Yes, the other gospels do record that Our Lord cleansed the temple at the end of His ministry. The NAB's suggestion, however, that "the order of events in the gospel narratives is often determined by theological motives rather than by chronological data," suggests that the gospel writers are inclined to fudge the facts in order to support their pre-determined theological conclusions, rather than to derive their theological conclusions from the observed empirical facts. Why not suggest that maybe, just maybe, Our Lord cleansed the temple twice during His ministry, once at the beginning and once at the end? After all, St. John is quite fond of literary "bookends"; the opening of the gospel ("the Word was God") parallels the conclusion (St. Thomas' confession, "My Lord and my God!"); the beginning of Jesus' ministry at Cana is attended by His "mother" and a few "disciples," just as the ending of His ministry at the Cross is also attended by His "mother" and a few disciples. As I said, St. John is fond of bookends - why wouldn't he record that Our Lord cleansed the temple at the beginning of His ministry, to provide the first bookend to the other gospels' end-of-ministry cleansing?

A simple grammatical examination would show that there is nothing out of the ordinary here. The original verse read "zeal ... has consumed me," past-tense; as quoted by St. John, it is "zeal ... will consume me," future tense. But if something is true in the past, does this preclude the possibility that it might be true in the future as well? If I said that, three years ago, love for my wife consumed me, would anyone bat an eye if I later said that love for my wife will consume me? But the NAB would rather imply that the gospel author has tampered with a text in order to make it fit his conclusions.

A couple of points should be addressed here. First, the NAB assumes that verses 16-21 are the "reflection" of "the evangelist," and not a continuation of the words of Our Lord. This is without warrant. It seems to be predicated on the next assumption, that "the shift from singular through John 3:10 to plural in John 3:11 may reflect the early church's controversy with the Jews." They are referring, of course, to Our Lord's words, "we speak of what we know and we testify to what we have seen, but you people do not accept our testimony." Naturally, the NAB uses this as an opportunity to say that these words are later additions by a controversy-ridden Church. In actual fact, however, it is much more likely that Our Lord is speaking here, and has shifted to the plural because He is now speaking of the plurality of testimonies given by Himself, His Father, and John the Baptist (see chpt. 5). But the NAB will not consider that Our Lord spoke so clearly about the Trinity, or that St. John could have understood this Trinitarian theology - this understanding did not develop until much later (around the 3rd-4th Century, c.f. Raymond Brown's book Introduction to New Testament Christology).

Again, the NAB cannot resist the temptation to say that the author has changed the words of Our Lord, or inserted his own theological ideas that are not necessarily supported by the Old Testament.

This is truly strange. By what logic do the NAB commentators conclude that the word "eternal" refers to "quality of life" rather than "duration?" When has "eternal" ever implied anything but duration? Why would the NAB wish to downplay the gift of ever-enduring life?

Here the NAB proffers more unwarranted suggestions that an editor freely cut, pasted, and "transposed" the texts of this gospel.

There is a lot of heavy editing on the part of the NAB translators here. They clip out the phrase "waiting for the movement of the water," because it connects with the next verse, omitted entirely by the NAB and relegated to a footnote. The NAB notes that "this turbulence was believed to cure," an unacceptable option for anti-miracle modernists. The next verse only lends credibility to the healing properties of the water, because it was a supernaturally-caused "turbulence." See next note.

The NAB commentators will not for one minute consider that such a miracle could take place, suggesting only that "the angel was a popular explanation of the turbulence and the healing powers attributed to it." What they miss completely is that their deletion of this verse, as well as the end of the preceding verse, makes verse 7 difficult to understand: "I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me." The man believes the water is stirred up by some miraculous power, and the deleted verse would explain why the man complains that others get into the pool before him: "the first one to get in [after the stirring of the water] was healed of whatever disease afflicted him." His complaint in verse 7 makes little sense without this verse and the ending of verse 4, but the modernists are happy to exclude from the gospel any suggestion of miracles and angelic interaction with the material world.

Notice how the NAB matter-of-factly takes a swipe at Our Lord's omniscience! If the text says that Our Lord said or did something with foreknowledge of "what he[sic] was going to do," the NAB suggests that this is merely the author's opinion, inserted to portray Our Lord in a manner fitting with his theological views.

This is another of the NAB's repeated suggestions that this gospel underwent heavy editing at a later date. On the surface of it, there is absolutely no reason for this suggestion - there is no evidence that this was a "later interpolation," as opposed to a comment that came straight from the pen of St. John. The note here exists for only one reason: to advance the enlightened" view of biblical critics that the Sacred writings were actually written, edited, compiled, redacted, re-edited, and finally published over the process of decades and centuries - thus weakening our belief in an inspired, God-speaking-through-one-man piece of Sacred Writing.

When it comes to ardently defending the dogmatic truths of the faith, the NAB cannot be counted on to speak with unwavering certitude. In fact, this is a symptom found in most modernists - they are unable to speak in definite terms, dogmatic terms, terms that would betray their own confidence. Thus, their terminology is shot-through with words like "perhaps," "possibly," "maybe," "in a sense," "in a certain way," etc. Where this footnote should affirm that Our Lord's words, "the flesh is of no avail," definitely do not refer to the Eucharist (why would Our Lord be saying that the Eucharist is "of no avail"?!), the NAB can only tell us that these words are "probably not a reference to the eucharistic body of Jesus." Probably?! This is the kind of weak, mealy-mouthed, non-committal, vague and ambiguous language that plagues modernist writing today, not only in biblical studies, but even in official Church documents written of late.

The NAB is quite content to imply that Our Lord is a liar. He says "I am not going up" to the feast, yet He does go up; and even though there is, by their own admission, an "early attested reading" that includes the words "not yet" (i.e., "I am not yet going up to the feast"), the NAB is not inclined to accept this as genuine - they say it "seems a correction." That is, a later editor added these words in order to exonerate Our Lord, even though the NAB would seem to be convinced that He did indeed lie. As an aside, the "not yet" would not only exonerate Our Lord, it would also make more sense in the context, pairing nicely with His next words, "my time has not yet been fulfilled."

There is the slight suggestion here that the other gospel writers are wrong when they say that insanity was caused by demon possession (such as St. Mark records). Rather, in keeping with the modernist non-committal terminology, "the insane were thought to be possessed by a demoniacal spirit."

The NAB commentators botch the meaning of this text, which even Raymond Brown gets right in his commentary on John. While it is true that "Rivers of living water will flow from within him" is not an exact quotation from the Old Testament, had the NAB correctly translated this verse, it would have become clear that there is only one OT passage that would apply. The translation "from within him" is weak, and obscures the meaning of the Greek koilia, which refers to the "innermost chamber." St. John has used this term because it is flexible enough to accommodate both the prophecy of the Old Testament and the fulfillment in the New: the "innermost chamber" of the temple was the source of flowing water in Ezek. 47:1, where Ezekiel saw water flowing from the "right side" of the temple; this "innermost chamber" is also a fit description of the heart of Our Lord, from which water flowed when He was pierced by Longinus on His right side. Thus, this passage can only be referring to Ezek. 47:1 (it is a perfect fit), and it can only be referring to Our Lord - the NAB obscures this with their hemming and hawing, typically non-committal comments, "From within him: either Jesus or the believer... Grammatically, it goes better with the believer." The next verse, which indicates that this flowing water is "the Spirit" should have given the meaning away for the NAB; as I said, even Fr. Brown understands in his commentary that this double-procession of water and Spirit corresponds to the Crucifixion, when His literal Spirit and literal water both proceed from Our Lord's innermost being.

Modernists can always be counted on question the authenticity of certain gospel accounts. There is no cap or limit on this attitude, as the Jesus Seminar has surely taught us. After casting serious shadows of doubt on the story of the woman caught in adultery, they have the nerve to throw us a small bone: "The Catholic Church accepts this passage as canonical scripture." This fact, however, does not stop them from spewing such opinions as, "the story of the woman caught in adultery is a later insertion here, missing from all early Greek manuscripts," "there are many non-Johannine features in the language," "there are also many doubtful readings within the passage," "it fits better with the general situation at the end of Luke 21," "it was probably inserted here because of the allusion to Jeremiah 17:13," and so on. With a little bit of imagination and giving benefit of the doubt to traditional Johannine authorship, even these hopeless modernists could have arrived at the conclusion that this story is most certainly authentic and originally a part of the gospel: the "woman" who is caught in adultery is part of a cast of "women" in St. John's Gospel who have a symbolic role to play; in chapter 4 the Samaritan "woman" with her five husbands is symbolic of the northern kingdom of Israel, with Her five "baalim" idols; likewise, this "woman" of John 8 is the other half of this Kingdom picture. Because she is caught in adultery in Jerusalem (or near there - the presence of the Pharisees verifies this), she represents the southern kingdom of Judah, the southern counterpart to the northern Samaritan woman, who also seemed to have marital problems. Judah is here symbolically accused of being an adulterous wife, just as she was so accused in the prophets, and would be accused again in the Apocalypse. Without this story, the northern Samaritan woman is incomplete, representing only half of the divided kingdom. Why is it so hard to believe that St. John completed this picture by recording the historically authentic account of the Jerusalem woman caught in adultery?

This is yet another baseless assertion that this gospel was written much later in history, and that it anachronistically credited Our Lord with the late first century hostility between the Church and the Jews. This, of course, weakens the truth that St. John did indeed write this gospel, and was divinely inspired to record Our Lord's condemnation of the Old Covenant and His divine judgment upon Israel; the NAB dismisses St. John's inspired testimony as nothing but a human conflict between two religious groups.

This is another subtle suggestion that neither Our Lord nor St. John emphasized with any real clarity the divine nature of Jesus Christ. Here, Our Lord is "placed on a par with Yahweh," but placed there by whom? By the Johannine Community? Why does this footnote not rather read, "Jesus places Himself on par with Yahweh?" It is an insinuation that the author of this gospel is putting words in Our Lord's mouth.

We are getting used to this by now; the NAB takes for granted that much of this gospel was crudely patched together from several sources by an editor who was apparently clumsy enough to have left his obvious fingerprints all over his botched final product.

The force of the NAB comment is this: perhaps (there's that non-committal language again!) these are the words of Our Lord, speaking of the Gentiles; or perhaps these are the words of the evangelist, placed in the mouth of Our Lord to give them more weight, directed to a particular group of people at a particular time, and thus, a time-conditioned statement that is not universal in scope.

Why not accuse Our Lord of being evasive as well? We've already accused Him of lying, and of being ignorant of certain things.

Are the NAB commentators suggesting, by saying "these seem to be Johannine compositions," that Our Lord did not actually utter these words? As usual, they are non-committal and ambiguous. In a later footnote (on 13:31-38), they suggest that "several speeches have been fused together," which would make St. John or St. John's community the editor and compiler of Jesus' words.

Here we find still another suggestion that Our Lord's hostile words viz. the Jewish religion are not His words at all, but a later addition by an anti-Jewish Christian Church.

Once again the NAB teaches the "detestable error," to use Pope Leo XIII's term, that this gospel is not the work of an inspired apostle, but a collection of somewhat-related material which the Johannine Community weaved together, edited, and glossed to serve their own theological and polemical ends.

This may be one of the most gruesome notes in this entire gospel. The NAB commentators will not entertain the notion that Our Lord a) was aware of or b) imparted to His disciples clear knowledge of His own divinity. Thus, when a text such as this one clearly shows that Our Lord knew His own divinity, and that St. John knew it and left a clear written witness of his knowledge, the NAB says that this text "was clearly added in the editing of the gospel as a reflection on the preceding verse." There is absolutely no evidence that this verse was added later, much less "was clearly added" later. This gratuitous assertion is evidence of only one thing: liberalism run-amok in an ostensibly "Catholic" bible.

With no real supporting evidence, the NAB scholars here insert the notion that these soldiers were "Roman troops." In so doing they are exemplifying the very flaw which they so often impute to the authors of Sacred Scripture: they are adopting a strained interpretation, utterly foreign to the text which they are interpreting, in accord with their own preconceived theological views.

They identify these soldiers as Romans because they wish to minimalize the Jews' culpability in the plot to kill Christ. But the text clearly implies that this "band of soldiers ... from the chief priests" was composed of Jews. All throughout St. John's Gospel, he has been identifying specifically Jewish hostility to Our Lord, and the Jewish conspiracy to have Him killed. There is nothing in the gospel to suggest that the Romans had any real interest in killing Christ; in fact, St. John contrasts the Jewish hostility to Our Lord with the ironic acceptance of Our Lord by Gentiles, such as the Roman centurion in chpt. 4. Again, at the trial before Pilate, the Roman governor seems anxious to extract himself from the equation - all of this is evidence against the NAB theory that the Romans went ahead and dispatched their own troops to arrest Jesus. Such a suggestion is highly unlikely, but it does make for good politics when dealing with present-day Jewish/Catholic ecumenism.

The NAB commentators again betray their eagerness to exculpate the Jews, following the ambiguous directives of the Second Vatican Council. Once again they attribute unfavorable texts to later writers who were unduly influenced by a temporary religious/political situation. The Gospel of St. John does not record the historical and divinely-inspired reality, they say; it merely records a "tendency" of early Christians to "place the guilt of the crucifixion on the Jewish authorities," because the two groups were hostile to each other at that time.

What do you suppose is meant by the NAB comment that "what we have here is not a record but a series of single stories?" More shadows are cast on the reliability of this testimony from St. John.

Naturally, the NAB commentators will take these verses as a signal of the end of the original gospel, and understand the rest of the gospel as a later addition. They do not entertain the possibility that this is simply St. John's literary way of concluding the Passion narrative, and that he himself penned the final chapter as a kind of "epilogue," to parallel his "prologue" - which, of course, the NAB commentators do not believe he wrote either.

As expected, the NAB concludes that this final chapter is a "tradition" that "was ultimately derived from John but preserved by some disciple other than the writer of the rest of the gospel." Of course, this is prefaced by the ubiquitous "perhaps," since these modernists are ready to conclude nothing as certain - everything is speculation and theory and open to further development and/or evolution. They reach this particular conclusion because "there are many non-Johannine peculiarities in this chapter," which is rather circular reasoning: what exactly constitutes a "Johannine peculiarity" is defined and determined precisely by these same modernists, so in reality, this final chapter simply does not line up with what they have decided is the Johannine literary style.

As a final parting jab, the NAB strips this passage of any prophetic power - rather, they would have us believe that it was an innocuous "proverb about old age," but later "used as a figurative reference to the crucifixion of Peter."

And here we have one last assertion that this gospel was written by the Johannine Community, and not by St. John himself.

By Jacob Michael

The second book of the Pentateuch is called Exodus (Greek, departure), because it tells the story of the exodus of the Hebrews from the land of Egypt. Under the leadership of Moses, the sons of Israel are freed from slavery to Pharaoh and experience God's providential care as they journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land.

One of the main features of this book, which we believe on the testimony of Tradition to have been written by Moses [54], is the miraculous way in which God provides for His people. He parts the Red Sea so they can cross over on dry land; He provides them meat for their journey; He sends them miraculous bread from heaven to sustain them; He supplies miraculous water from the rock to quench their thirst.

The NAB commentary, so thoroughly influenced by the modernist principle of "de-mythologizing" the Scriptures, very often calls these kinds of miracles into question. Rather than accept the fact that God intervened multiple times in the affairs of nature, the NAB would rather explain these miracles by appealing to natural phenomena. [55] We will see this as we go along.

Modernists simply refuse to be dogmatic. Rather than take a firm stance one way or the other, they prefer to hint and suggest, to dance around their denial of orthodoxy and refuse to be pinned down. Here, they say that the miracle of the ten plagues which God inflicts upon Egypt "seem to be similar to certain natural phenomena of that country." So what is that supposed to mean? Oh, nothing ... just wanted to cast a small shadow of doubt on your belief in miracles, that's all. These "natural phenomena" are only "represented as supernatural" by the anonymous authors of Exodus.

The NAB here suggests that the miracle of the Locust Plague was really the work of regularly occurring natural phenomena. In this case, a wind blew, and brought with it - as it sometimes does, naturally - a swarm of locusts. Nothing too miraculous about that, is there?

As modern Scripture scholars are wont to do, the NAB commentators hint at the possibility - nay, the probability - that the Red Sea was only a "body of shallow water," thus making it rather unremarkable that the Hebrews were able to cross over the sea in their escape from Egypt. Of course, that really raises the question of how Pharaoh and his armies managed to drown themselves in this "shallow water" - which would seem to me to be almost a greater miracle than the Red Sea parting in the first place.

Contrary to the belief that God actually caused a supernatural darkness to overshadow the land - a pitch-black darkness at that - the NAB attributes this phenomenon to "a storm from the south" that darkened the sky "with sand from the Sahara." No great miracle there ... just keep moving along.

Not even the miraculous manna from heaven escapes the de-mythologizing explanations of the modernist NAB commentators. Did the manna really fall, in a miraculous fashion, from the heavens? The NAB will only concede that it "is said to come down from the sky." The alternative, they suggest, is that the manna was - "perhaps," of course - "similar to a natural substance that is still found ... on the Sinai peninsula." In a sad display of inability to say anything with certainty, they concede that "it is, at least in part, clearly miraculous." In part? Which part? How do they so easily go from "perhaps this is explainable by natural causes," to "it is, in part, clearly miraculous?" Pure fluff, no substance.

Ah yes, what would any good NAB commentary on a book of the bible be without a suggestion or two that the book was written, compiled, and edited over a long process by several people? Without any explanation, they simply assert that this passage "was once" longer, and that new elements have "been inserted," while other elements have been rearranged from where they "stood originally."

Whereas this passage, read for its face value, tells us that God has control even over the actions of insects, the NAB wishes us to know that "some" - the ever-present and never-defined "some" - do not believe this is a miracle. Rather, it is understood "figuratively of various troublesome afflictions," or perhaps a mistranslation of the word "leprosy." Believe whatever you want, as long as you aren't naive enough to believe it was a miracle.

Here is yet another unwarranted commentary on the editing process which this book underwent. How these commentators can say with such certainty where various passages originally went, or where they "logically" belong is beyond me. [56]

More commentary on the purely human editing process that shaped the production of Exodus, with some more gratuitous re-arranging of verse order.

"In the interpretation of Acts, care must be exercised to determine Luke's theological aims and interests and to evaluate his historical data without either exaggerating their literal accuracy or underestimating their factual worth." [57] So concludes the New American Bible's introduction to The Acts of the Apostles. Though they do not do so with quite the frequency that they do to the gospels, nevertheless the NAB commentators are perfectly pleased to accuse this great and God-breathed history of factual error. Moreover, they are equally pleased to accuse St. Luke of biased and self-serving scholarship. We will see this in the analysis of the commentary, just as we see it in the section of the introduction quoted above. In this book St. Luke has "theological aims and interests" to pursue, and as such we cannot always trust the "literal accuracy" of the facts he records. According to the NAB, the word of God did not spread as quickly as St. Luke claims; the apostles were not as brave as he portrays them; and the miracles were not as spectacular as he describes. It is my intent in this section, like all the rest, to demonstrate that the NAB's accusations are without merit.

Before I begin refuting the footnotes, I would like to spend a while arguing for an earlier date of composition than the NAB proposes, and for the book's historical reliability in general. Though the NAB translators do not explicitly assign a date to Acts, they assign to Luke the 80s A.D., and as these books are the component parts of one two-volume work, by implication they assign to Acts roughly the same time. Thus they believe that 50 years elapsed between the writing of this book and some of the events which it records: plenty of time for exaggeration, interpolation, etc., or as the NAB is wont to call this type of thing, "theological reflection." Of course, for Catholics who believe the Church doctrine that divine inspiration is incompatible with error in every respect, it would not matter whether St. Luke wrote 50 or 30 years after the events he narrated transpired; his history would be true regardless. But for the NAB scholars this is not necessarily the case, so I will endeavor to show their suppositions regarding Acts' date of composition and historical accuracy to be false on purely human grounds.

Probably the best reason to trust St. Luke's account is the accuracy with which he describes the world of 33-60 A.D.; every shred of factual information contained in Acts which is verifiable has been verified. Concerning St. Luke's narrations of trials A New Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture says the following:

[B]eyond all doubt... the historical details concerning Roman officials, law and procedure in this part of Acts correspond exactly to what we know of this period from other sources. The reliability of Acts' sources is the more firmly established in that often the conditions described obtained for a short period only in the mid 1st cent. The accuracy can be due only to eyewitness accounts." [58]

There are two points to be made here. First, if everything contained in Acts which is verifiable by other sources is true, we have no reason not to trust what St. Luke tells us when his words cannot be verified. So, we have no reason to distrust St. Luke's narrative of Pentecost, as the NAB does, or his description of St. Paul's missionary journeys, or any other of the events which are recorded in his book and his book alone. Second, had the Acts of the Apostles been written in the 80s A.D., most if not all of the eyewitness to the trials recorded therein would already have been dead.

Internal evidence also abounds for the accuracy and antiquity of The Acts of the Apostles. First, in three places St. Luke effectively says "I was there, I saw this" by speaking in the first person plural. "We [Paul and I] set sail from Troas"; "we sailed from Phillippi after the feast of the Unleavened Bread"; "we gathered to break bread" etc. So, unless we are to posit that St. Luke was lying, we must take his accounts of these events as literally true, first-hand information. [59] Also, if St. Luke was a companion of St. Paul's, and a physician at that time (Col 4:14), he must have been roughly St. Paul's age. Thus he as well as his sources probably would have been dead by the 80s A.D.

The second piece of internal evidence for the antiquity of Acts is its somewhat anticlimactic ending. It ends with St. Paul under house arrest, teaching those who come to him about the kingdom of God. Now, in his accounts of Pentecost and the shipwreck on Malta, among others, St. Luke demonstrates himself to be a superb dramatist. It seems almost unthinkable that he would end his book without mentioning such climactic events as the burning of Rome, the destruction of Jerusalem, or the martyrdom of St. Paul, had these events already occurred. This is especially true with regard to St. Paul's martyrdom. As the majority of this book is devoted to extolling the virtues of St. Paul, and as to the Christian mind there is no greater feat than martyrdom, St. Luke absolutely would have described St. Paul's martyrdom if it were not still in the future. The very literary genre to which this book belongs, a record of the great deeds of the subject, demands that St. Luke include St. Paul's greatest deed of all, being beheaded for the sake of his Lord. There is only one possible reason why he would not have done so: The Acts of the Apostles must have been written before it occurred.

St. Luke must not have had a very good short term memory, if the NAB is right here. Supposedly the first verses of his second book directly contradict the last verses of his first! Something is wrong here. Intelligent people typically do not contradict themselves in such close vicinity, especially regarding a matter as simple as the date on which an event took place. I am reminded of when Atheists claim that there is a contradiction between Matthew 5:16 and 6:1. If the two statements are contradictory, why did someone as intelligent as the author of Matthew put them right next to each other and assert them both as true? They must be possible to reconcile. And they are.

In order to do so we must correct the NAB's mistranslation of Luke 24:50. It should not read "Then he[sic] led them out as far as Bethany," as the NAB has it. This implies that the Ascension happened immediately after Christ's appearance to the disciples in Jerusalem (on Easter Sunday). But the Greek implies no such thing, leaving room for a 40 day interval between vv 49 and 50. I will defer to the resident Greek scholar at CAI.

Lk 24:50 is the beginning of a new paragraph in the Greek, since it is marked off by the conjunction "de," and thus it is a new event. The confusion occurs because some translations will begin the verse with "Then he led them out," implying that the events are coincident, but the verse actually says "He led them out." With the presence of "de" to set verse 50 off from verse 49, it actually means, "And after these things, he led them out." We don't have such a single word in English... Luke's purpose in mentioning the Ascension is to set up the fuller description of the event in Acts. We could say that Luke is merely mentioning the Ascension in Luke 24 for good measure, since all the other gospels stop at the Resurrection. Luke knows he will be giving the details beyond the Resurrection in Acts, so he decides to give a few lines of what initiates this sequence of events in Luke 24. [60]

Alright, we have answered the NAB's charge of contradiction. Would that this were the only problem in this footnote, but it is not, for the NAB goes on to say one of the strangest things I have ever read. "What should probably be understood as one event (resurrection, glorification, ascension, sending of the Spirit - the paschal mystery) has been historicized by Luke when he writes of a visible ascension of Jesus after 40 days and the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost." What exactly does this mean? Did Jesus not actually, "visibly" ascend into heaven? What does it mean that Luke "historicized" Pentecost? There were no actual tongues of fire? What does the NAB mean when it suggests that the "paschal mystery" was one, simultaneous event? I have only one thing to say to these scholars: there is a reason the Church celebrates Easter, the Ascension, and Pentecost on different days: they happened on different days. What shred of evidence is there in Tradition that they all happened at the same time? Has anyone ever interpreted Scripture in this way, before the scholars who translated the NAB, and the liberal Protestants from whom they have obviously learned their theology?

Such compelling logic, is it not? These events could not possibly have all happened at once because, if they had, the apostles would have been putting themselves in danger of death! Far be it from the apostles to do something that might get them killed! Far be it from the apostles to throw caution to the wind, proclaim Christ crucified, and trust in the providence of God to protect them! No, they would have known that the Sanhedrin would be after their heads if they actually shouted the holy Name of Christ from the rooftops of Jerusalem, so they would have kept quiet for a while.

Let me attempt to restore some sanity to this discussion. As Acts records, the reason the Sanhedrin chose not to immediately execute the apostles was the same reason Herod did not want to execute St. John the Baptist: they were popular. St. Peter had just performed a great miracle which most everyone in the vicinity of the Temple had seen (Acts 3:6), and the Sanhedrin could not deny it (Acts 4:16f), so they were forced to let the apostles off the hook.

I am becoming more and more desensitized to the outrages contained in the commentary of the NAB, but every once in a while they say something so incredible, so flabbergasting, so disgraceful that it appalls even me. This is one of those times. According to the NAB, Pentecost, the Pentecost of history as opposed to the Pentecost of faith, looked a lot like a modern gathering of a Pentecostal Church. There was no great miracle on Pentecost, they say. The apostles did not actually proclaim the Kingdom of God while the Holy Spirit miraculously translated it for men from every nation under heaven. St. Luke only "interpreted" it as such. He only "interpreted" the tongues as intelligible foreign languages. But in reality, the apostles were just in an emotional frenzy, jabbering nonsense.

Or maybe St. Luke is recording what actually happened. As I said above, whenever it is possible to compare St. Luke to known historical fact, his work is vindicated. Ergo, in cases when it is not possible to put his work to the test, we should just trust it. If St. Luke says the ground shook, I believe him.

Again the NAB scholars place themselves under papal condemnation. Again they accuse Holy Scripture of error. And this time they are doing it based on only one source: Josephus. [61] This is one historian against another: the non-inspired Jewish historian of the 90s A.D. versus the inspired Christian historian of the 60s. Well, with whom does the NAB side? Naturally, with Josephus. The question hardly needed to be asked. Never mind that it is possible to accept St. Luke's account as factual without even rejecting the information provided by Josephus. [62] The NAB will accuse Scripture of error any chance it gets.

Not so fast. According to Genesis 15:7 and Nehemiah 9:7, God first called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeans. Apparently God's command in Genesis 12:1 was solely a reiteration.

As for the other discrepancies, it appears that St. Stephen has combined two separate events into one, due to the pressure of the circumstances. I would take this as evidence that St. Luke recorded St. Stephen's speech exactly as he delivered it, rather than as a factual error.

I am reminded of something C. S. Lewis said against the liberal biblical scholars of his day. "Through what strange process has [Bultmann] gone in order to make himself blind to what all men except him see? ...These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight." [63] This is what the NAB scholars are doing here. The obvious lesson of Luke 8:1 is that the apostles surpassed all other Christians in courage; they alone stayed in Jerusalem while other Christians fled. But the NAB twists this passage into teaching apostolic cowardice. According to the NAB, the apostles were not the subject of the persecution, and they did not take a "public stand regarding Stephen's position." They just sat around while other Christians fled for the hills. There is only one disciple who I believe would act like this, and he had already been replaced by Matthias by the time this persecution occurred.

The NAB is suggesting here that a centurion of the Cohort Italica is an anachronism in Caesarea in the 40s A.D. The following is the best solution that I have found: "That Cornelius' household was also at Caesarea suggests that he may have retired and settled there." [64]

Again, the NAB refuses to take what St. Luke says at face value. The text says that "some prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch" and one of them predicted "that there would be a severe famine all over the world." Yet the NAB says that it is more likely that the prophets came to Antioch to request help for the famine which they already knew to be coming. Why? Do they have another source somewhere which gives a conflicting account of the same events?

Only the NAB could see an incongruity here.

"Another reason why Paul does not mention [the Council of Jerusalem's requirements with respect to the Mosaic law] in Galatians could be that they are not enjoined as having value in themselves, as did the works of the Law, but only to make a common life [between Jewish and Gentile Christians] possible." [65] See my commentary on footnote 21:25 for the answer to the contention that St. Paul was first made aware of the decree then.

On the contrary, the presence of the Semitic form of Peter's name, Symeon, suggests that St. Luke is recording St. James' speech exactly as it was delivered. St. Luke primarily uses the Hellenized form of St. Peter's name, but when the name is on the lips of a Hebrew, St. James, St. Luke has it Semitic form. Like I said, this is evidence of authenticity, not of distortion.

I dealt with the contention that the first person is a literary device above, but the NAB has thrown in another twist here by alluding to the possibility that St. Luke is merely quoting a source who was actually present, and that he himself was not, so I will address the issue again. One look at how St. Luke uses the first person in Luke 1:1-4 and Acts 1 makes it clear that he is referring precisely to himself. So, when he starts using it again within the body of Acts we have no reason to suspect that he is putting himself in the shoes of someone else. Theophilus certainly would have understood St. Luke as being an eyewitness to the events he describes. If St. Luke was not actually a companion of St. Paul his narratives in the first person would be deceptive, at best.

Or maybe, just maybe, St. James is reminding St. Paul of the apostolic decree. There is nothing in the text which precludes this interpretation.

If you would like to contribute to this study, email Ben Douglass at hananiah5@yahoo.com.

[1] "[T]he young, if they lose their reverence for the Holy Scripture on one or more points, are easily led to give up believing in it altogether" (Pope Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus, no. 18). I know one person whose Catholic faith was destroyed by the NAB; it convinced him that the Bible is full of contradictions, inventions, and historical and scientific inaccuracies, and thus he "gave up on believing in it altogether."

[2] Adversus Haereses, Book II, 28:2

[3] The Saint Joseph Edition of the New American Bible. (New York, NY: Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1992) p. [18]

[4] "This supernatural revelation, according to the belief of the universal Church, is contained both in unwritten Tradition, and in written Books, which are therefore called sacred and canonical because, 'being written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, they have God for their author and as such have been delivered to the Church.' This belief has been perpetually held and professed by the Church in regard to the Books of both Testaments; and there are well-known documents of the gravest kind, coming down to us from the earliest times, which proclaim that God, Who spoke first by the Prophets, then by His own mouth, and lastly by the Apostles, composed also the Canonical Scriptures, and that these are His own oracles and words - a Letter, written by our heavenly Father, and transmitted by the sacred writers to the human race in its pilgrimage so far from its heavenly country... [S]uch and so great is the excellence and the dignity of the Scriptures, that God Himself has composed them."
(Pope Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus, no. 1)

"[B]y supernatural power, [The Holy Ghost] so moved and impelled [the sacred authors] to write - He was so present to them - that the things which He ordered, and those only, they first rightly understood, then willed faithfully to write down, and finally expressed in apt words and with infallible truth. Otherwise, it could not be said that He was the Author of the entire Scripture. Such has always been the persuasion of the Fathers. 'Therefore,' says St. Augustine, 'since they wrote the things which He showed and uttered to them, it cannot be pretended that He is not the writer; for His members executed what their Head dictated.' And St. Gregory the Great thus pronounces: 'Most superfluous it is to inquire who wrote these things-we loyally believe the Holy Ghost to be the Author of the book. He wrote it Who dictated it for writing; He wrote it Who inspired its execution.'"
(Ibid., no. 20)

"You will not find a page in [St. Jerome's] writings which does not show clearly that he, in common with the whole Catholic Church, firmly and consistently held that the Sacred Books - written as they were under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit - have God for their Author, and as such were delivered to the Church. Thus he asserts that the Books of the Bible were composed at the inspiration, or suggestion, or even at the dictation of the Holy Spirit; even that they were written and edited by Him. If we ask how we are to explain this power and action of God, the principal cause, on the sacred writers we shall find that St. Jerome in no wise differs from the common teaching of the Catholic Church. For he holds that God, through His grace, illumines the writer's mind regarding the particular truth which, "in the person of God," he is to set before men; he holds, moreover, that God moves the writer's will - nay, even impels it - to write; finally, that God abides with him unceasingly, in unique fashion, until his task is accomplished."
(Pope Benedict XV, Spiritus Paraclitus, no. 8f)

Pope St. Pius X, in Lamentabili Sane no. 9, condemned the following proposition: "They display excessive simplicity or ignorance who believe that God is really the author of the Sacred Scriptures." The NAB's notion of inspiration distinctly savors of the modernist position which St. Pius X condemned in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, no. 22. And, as the NAB here accuses Scripture of a moral error (not just scientific or historical), it is even worse than the notion decried by Pope Benedict XV in Spiritus Paraclitus, no. 19: "For while conceding that inspiration extends to every phrase - and, indeed, to every single word of Scripture - yet, by endeavoring to distinguish between what they [the modernists] style the primary or religious and the secondary or profane element in the Bible, they claim that the effect of inspiration - namely, absolute truth and immunity from error - are to be restricted to that primary or religious element. Their notion is that only what concerns religion is intended and taught by God in Scripture, and that all the rest - things concerning "profane knowledge," the garments in which Divine truth is presented - God merely permits, and even leaves to the individual author's greater or less knowledge. Small wonder, then, that in their view a considerable number of things occur in the Bible touching physical science, history and the like, which cannot be reconciled with modern progress in science!"

[5] St. Joseph NAB, op. cit., p. [19]

[6] cf. Pope Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus, no. 18

[7] Pope St. Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis no. 36, condemned the following modernist error: "In the Sacred Books there are many passages referring to science or history where manifest errors are to be found. But the subject of these books is not science or history but religion and morals. In them history and science serve only as a species of covering to enable the religious and moral experiences wrapped up in them to penetrate more readily among the masses. The masses understood science and history as they are expressed in these books, and it is clear that had science and history been expressed in a more perfect form this would have proved rather a hindrance than a help." He had this to say about the modernist position: "We, Venerable Brethren, for whom there is but one and only truth, and who hold that the Sacred Books, written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, have God for their author (Conc. Vat., De Revel., c. 2) declare that this is equivalent to attributing to God Himself the lie of utility or officious lie, and We say with St. Augustine: In an authority so high, admit but one officious lie, and there will not remain a single passage of those apparently difficult to practise or to believe, which on the same most pernicious rule may not be explained as a lie uttered by the author willfully and to serve a purpose. (Epist. 28)."
(ibid., no. 37, emphasis his)

[8] Council of Trent, Sess. V, Canon 1

[9]"When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is no no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own... [T]he first eleven chapters of Genesis, although properly speaking not conforming to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time, do nevertheless pertain to history in a true sense, which however must be further studied and determined by exegetes; the same chapters... in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation, and also give a popular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people. If, however, the ancient sacred writers have taken anything from popular narrations (and this may be conceded), it must never be forgotten that they did so with the help of divine inspiration, through which they were rendered immune from any error in selecting and evaluating those documents.
(Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, no. 37f)

[10] St. Joseph NAB, op. cit., p. [20]

[11] De Gen. ad lift. ii., 9, 20.

[12] St. Joseph NAB, op. cit., p. [20]

[13] ibid., p. [21]

[14] ibid., pp. [21]-[24]

[15] "To hear [the modernists] talk about their works on the Sacred Books, in which they have been able to discover so much that is defective, one would imagine that before them nobody ever even glanced through the pages of Scripture, whereas the truth is that a whole multitude of Doctors, infinitely superior to them in genius, in erudition, in sanctity, have sifted the Sacred Books in every way, and so far from finding imperfections in them, have thanked God more and more the deeper they have gone into them, for His divine bounty in having vouchsafed to speak thus to men. Unfortunately, these great Doctors did not enjoy the same aids to study that are possessed by the Modernists for their guide and rule, - a philosophy borrowed from the negation of God, and a criterion which consists of themselves."
(Pope St. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, no. 34)

[16] "Whatever, then, [Scripture] tells us of Enoch, Elias and Moses - that we believe... unless we believe in Scripture we can neither be Christians nor be saved."
(St. Augustine, Contra Faustum Manichaeum, 26, 3, 6)

[17] The NAB does proffer specific arguments against a literal reading of the Bible in many places. I will deal with them throughout the body of this critique.

[18] This is the only possible justification for departing from a literal hermeneutic, according to the rule laid down by St. Augustine and confirmed by Leo XIII.

[19] "What can we say of men who in expounding the very Gospels so whittle away the human trust we should repose in it as to overturn Divine faith in it? They refuse to allow that the things which Christ said or did have come down to us unchanged and entire through witnesses who carefully committed to writing what they themselves had seen or heard. They maintain - and particularly in their treatment of the Fourth Gospel - that much is due of course to the Evangelists - who, however, added much from their own imaginations; but much, too, is due to narratives compiled by the faithful at other periods, the result, of course, being that the twin streams now flowing in the same channel cannot be distinguished from one another."
(Pope Benedict XV, Spiritus Paraclitus, no. 27)

[20] St. Pius X, in Lamentabili Sane, condemned the following propositions: "13. The Evangelists themselves, as well as the Christians of the second and third generation, artificially arranged the evangelical parables. In such a way they explained the scanty fruit of the preaching of Christ among the Jews. 14. In many narrations the Evangelists recorded, not so much things that are true, as things which, even though false, they judged to be more profitable for their readers. 15. Until the time the canon was defined and constituted, the Gospels were increased by additions and corrections. Therefore there remained in them only a faint and uncertain trace of the doctrine of Christ." In Pascendi Dominici Gregis, no. 34 he directly attacked the notion of the Gospels having been created by transfiguring actual history with theological interpretation: "The result of this dismembering of the Sacred Books and this partition of them throughout the centuries is naturally that the Scriptures can no longer be attributed to the authors whose names they bear. The Modernists have no hesitation in affirming commonly that these books, and especially the Pentateuch and the first three Gospels, have been gradually formed by additions to a primitive brief narration - by interpolations of theological or allegorical interpretation, by transitions, by joining different passages together."

[21] St. Joseph NAB, op. cit., pp. [24]-[25]

[22] For instance, the claim that secular science has proved the traditional Christian understanding of Genesis wrong, such that we must now adopt a more liberal, enlightened, and allegorical view, was number 64 on Lamenabili Sane's list of anathematized ideas: "Scientific progress demands that the concepts of Christian doctrine concerning God, creation, revelation, the Person of the Incarnate Word, and Redemption be re-adjusted."

[23] "For I confess to your Charity that I have learned to yield this respect and honour only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error. And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand it."
(St. Augustine, Letter 82, 3)

[24] Compare the prayer of offering which is said after the consecration during the Tridentine Mass: "And this do Thou deign to regard with gracious and kindly attention and hold acceptable, as Thou didst deign to accept the offerings of Abel, Thy just servant, and the sacrifice of Abraham our patriarch, and that which Thy chief Priest Melchisedech offered unto Thee, a holy sacrifice of thanks, and a spotless Victim."
The Catholic Missal, (Chicago, Illinois: The Catholic Press, Inc., 1954) p. 31

[25] cf. St. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, Book III, 1:1: "Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia."

[26] "In large measure the material of these discourses came to "Matthew" from his tradition, but his work in modifying and adding to what he had received is abundantly evident."
St. Joseph NAB, op. cit., p. 7 of the Revised New Testament, quotation marks mine; cf. Pope St. Clement, Epistle to the Corinthians, 45: "You have studied the Holy Scriptures, which are true and of the Holy Spirit. You know well that nothing unjust or fraudulent is written in them"; St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus Haereses, Book IV, 33:8: "[T]he Scriptures... have come down to us by being guarded against falsification, and are received without addition or deletion."

[27] Pope Leo XIII called this a "detestable error" (Providentissimus Deus, no. 10).

[28] Robert A. Sungenis, The Catholic Apologetics Study Bible, Vol. I, The Gospel According to St. Matthew. (Goleta, CA: Queenship Publishing, 2003) pp. 166,167

[29] Trypho was one of St. Justin Martyr's opponents in debate.

[30] Robert Sungenis, e-mail dated July 6, 2004.

[31] "But Faustus finds contradictions in the Gospels. Say, rather, that Faustus reads the Gospels in a wrong spirit, that he is too foolish to understand, and too blind to see. If you were animated with piety instead of being misled by party spirit, you might easily, by examining these passages, discover a wonderful and most instructive harmony among the writers. Who, in reading two narratives of the same event, would think of charging one or both of the authors with error or falsehood, because one omits what the other mentions, or one tells concisely, but with substantial agreement, what the other relates in detail, so as to indicate not only what was done, but also how it was done? This is what Faustus does in his attempt to impeach the truth of the Gospels; as if Luke's omitting some saying of Christ recorded in Matthew implied a denial on the part of Luke of Matthew's statement. There is no real difficulty in the case; and to make a difficulty shows want of thought, or of the ability to think."
(St. Augustine, Contra Faustum Manichaeum, 33:7)

[32] cf. Pope St. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, no. 34: "To aid them in [discerning the origins of the Sacred books] they [the modernists] call to their assistance that branch of criticism which they call textual, and labour to show that such a fact or such a phrase is not in its right place, and adducing other arguments of the same kind. They seem, in fact, to have constructed for themselves certain types of narration and discourses, upon which they base their decision as to whether a thing is out of place or not. Judge if you can how men with such a system are fitted for practising this kind of criticism." I do not deny that textual criticism has a legitimate domain. On the contrary it is extremely useful in determining the contents of the original autographs of Scripture, as only copies of copies remain today. But the textual critic oversteps his bounds when he attempts to discern based on this science where and how the sacred authors plagiarized sources (especially when the sources do not exist), where they added their own inventions and interpolations, and how they artificially constructed their narratives.

[33] "But I shall not venture to suppose or to say such a thing [that Scripture contradicts itself]; and if a Scripture which appears to be of such a kind be brought forward, and if there be a pretext[for saying] that it is contrary[to some other], since I am entirely convinced that no Scripture contradicts another, I shall admit rather that I do not understand what is recorded, and shall strive to persuade those who imagine that the Scriptures are contradictory, to be rather of the same opinion as myself."
(St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 65)

[34] cf. Vatican II, Dei Verbum, 5:19

[35] Ibid.

[36] Cf. Job 19:26, NAS: "Even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh I shall see God." NAB: "And from my flesh I shall see God; my inmost being is consumed with longing." Also, if as the NAB commentary alleges, the Hebrew text has been corrupted, one would think that it would be best to follow St. Jerome's translation, since obviously he had access to manuscripts far older than we. Of course, this would lead us to the conclusion that the Jews believed in the bodily resurrection throughout their history as a people, which is unacceptable to the proponents of "higher" Biblical criticism.

[37] Pope St. Pius X, in Lamentabili Sane, condemned the following notions: "33. Everyone who is not led by preconceived opinions can readily see that either Jesus professed an error concerning the immediate Messianic coming or the greater part of His doctrine as contained in the Gospels is destitute of authenticity... 52. It was far from the mind of Christ to found a Church as a society which would continue on earth for a long course of centuries. On the contrary, in the mind of Christ the kingdom of heaven together with the end of the world was about to come immediately." St. Pius also lamented such erroneous opinions in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, no. 36: "[The modernists] are ready to admit, nay, to proclaim that Christ Himself manifestly erred in determining the time when the coming of the Kingdom of God was to take place, and they tell us that we must not be surprised at this since even Christ was subject to the laws of life! After this what is to become of the dogmas of the Church?"

[38] The NIV, NASB, KJV, and ESV, all Protestant translations, have "is poured out" or "is shed." Since Catholic theology recognizes the Last Supper as the first Mass, and since Christ's blood is poured out at every Mass, Catholic theology requires Christ's blood to have been poured out at the Last Supper.

[39] A prolific third century opponent of Christianity named Porphyry was the first to advance the claim that Daniel was written during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes. Secularists have since taken up the cause. Pope Leo denounced this as a detestable error in the same place he denounced the idea that the apostles did not write the apostolic Gospels.

[40] St. Joseph NAB, op. cit., p. 1021

[41] Charles Caldwell Ryrie, Ryrie Study Bible. (Chicago, Illinois: Moody Press, 1995) p. 1343

[42] ibid.

[43] J. C. Whitcomb, Darius the Mede, The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible, Vol. 2, p. 29

[44] Fr. Most, "Commentary on Daniel," (from the Most theological collection at http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/most/getwork.cfm?worknum=55) 2004

[45] Dr. Barry D. Smith, "The Book of Daniel and the Second-Temple Period," (paper for Atlantic Baptist University at http://www.abu.nb.ca/Courses/NTIntro/InTest/Daniel.htm) 7/12/04

[46] Ryrie, op. cit., p. 1361

[47] "[I]t is permitted to no one to interpret Holy Scripture against... the unanimous agreement of the Fathers."
(Vatican I, Sess. iii., cap. ii., de revel.)

[48] cf. Josh McDowell, The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict. (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1999) p. 200

[49] cf. Harold Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1977) p. 138, quoted in McDowell, op. cit., p. 200

[50] The Jerusalem Bible's "Introduction to Saint John" summs up the evidence against this view: "As for the author of this highly rewarding and complex gospel, tradition almost unanimously makes him John the apostle, the son of Zebedee. Even before 150 A.D. the fourth gospel was known and used by Ignatius of Antioch, by the author of the Odes of Solomon, by Papias, by Justin, and probably by Clement of Rome, which makes it clear that the work was already considered to have apostolic authority. The first explicit testimony is that of Irenaeus, c. 180: 'Last of all John, too, the disciple of the Lord who leant against his breast, himself brought out a gospel while he was in Ephesus.' At about the same time, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and the Muratorian Canon expressly attribute the fourth gospel to John the apostle... This evidence for Johannine authorship is confirmed by the gospel itself which claims to be the work of an eyewitness, a beloved disciple of the Lord. Its vocabulary and style betray its semitic origin; it is familiar with Jewish customs and the topography of Palestine at the time of Christ; its author is apparently a close friend of Peter, 13:23f; 18:15; 20:3-10; 21:20-23, as John the apostle was, according to Luke Lk 22:8; Ac 3:1-4; 4:13,19; 8:14; and its silence with regard to the sons of Zebedee is best explained on the hypothesis that one of the two wrote it. There is no doubt that 'the disciple Jesus loved... who wrote these things,' 21:24, is the one who, with Peter and James, enjoyed Christ's closest friendship, Mk 5:37; 9:2; 13:3; 14:33."
The Jerusalem Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) pp. 143-144 of the New Testament

[51] St. Joseph NAB, op. cit., pp. 142-144 of the Revised New Testament; cf. St. Pius X, Lamentabili Sane, which condemns the following notions: "16. The narrations of John are not properly history, but a mystical contemplation of the Gospel. The discourses contained in his Gospel are theological meditations, lacking historical truth concerning the mystery of salvation. 17. The fourth Gospel exaggerated miracles not only in order that the extraordinary might stand out but also in order that it might become more suitable for showing forth the work and glory of the Word Incarnate. 18. John claims for himself the quality of witness concerning Christ. In reality, however, he is only a distinguished witness of the Christian life, or of the life of Christ in the Church at the close of the first century." St. Pius also lamented modernist attempts to relegate the fourth gospel to the realm of "theological reflection" in Pascendi Dominici Gregis no. 31: "For the Modernists distinguish very carefully between these two kinds of history, and it is to be noted that they oppose the history of the faith to real history precisely as real. Thus we have a double Christ: a real Christ, and a Christ, the one of faith, who never really existed; a Christ who has lived at a given time and in a given place, and a Christ who has never lived outside the pious meditations of the believer - the Christ, for instance, whom we find in the Gospel of St. John, which is pure contemplation from beginning to end."

[52] It is worth repeating condemned proposition no. 14 of Lamentabili Sani here: "In many narrations the Evangelists recorded, not so much things that are true, as things which, even though false, they judged to be more profitable for their readers." Amen, St. Pius. To accuse John of putting polemical words into Our Lord's mouth in order to further his sectarian quarrels is to accuse him of an officious lie: a lie of utility. And, as St. Augustine taught, if there is one officious lie in Scripture, Scripture might as well be full of them.

[53] There is also textual evidence for an early date of composition. The Rylands papyrus fragment, which consists of a few verses of John 18, has been dated at c. 135 A.D., and given that "several decades would have been required between the original writing of the gospel and its being copied and circulated as far as the Egyptian hinterland where the fragment was found" (Ryrie, op. cit., p. 1675) the Gospel According to John must have been written at least by 90 A.D.

[54] And on the authority of the Magisterium, cf. Pontifical Biblical Commission, 1906: "I: Are the arguments gathered by critics to impugn the Mosaic authorship of the sacred books designated by the name of the Pentateuch of such weight in spite of the cumulative evidence of many passages of both Testaments, the unbroken unanimity of the Jewish people, and furthermore of the constant tradition of the Church besides the internal indications furnished by the text itself, as to justify the statement that these books are not of Mosaic authorship but were put together from sources mostly of post-Mosaic date?
Answer: In the negative."

[55] cf. Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors, condemned proposition no. 7: "In the books of the Old and the New Testament there are contained mythical inventions."

[56] "The traces of [the redaction process], [the modernists] tell us, are so visible in the books that one might almost write a history of them. Indeed this history they do actually write, and with such an easy security that one might believe them to have with their own eyes seen the writers at work through the ages amplifying the Sacred Books. To aid them in this they call to their assistance that branch of criticism which they call textual, and labour to show that such a fact or such a phrase is not in its right place, and adducing other arguments of the same kind. They seem, in fact, to have constructed for themselves certain types of narration and discourses, upon which they base their decision as to whether a thing is out of place or not. Judge if you can how men with such a system are fitted for practising this kind of criticism."
(Pascendi Dominici Gregis, no. 34)

[57] St. Joseph NAB, op. cit., p. 180

[58] Dom Bernard Orchard O.S.B. editor, A New Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture. (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1969) p. 1075

[59]Some have argued that St. Luke only uses the first person as a literary device. However, this postulate is "unsupported by any refernce in ancient literature. In the many biographies and accounts of journeys which have come down to us from hellenistic times the use of the first person always constitutes at least a claim that the author was present" (Orchard, op. cit., p. 1077).

[60] Robert Sungenis, e-mail dated August 13, 2004.

[61] "Josephus mentions the revolts of Theudas and of Judas the Galilean but the dates he gives seem improbable. Both must have taken place about the time Jesus was born" (The Jerusalem Bible, op. cit., p. 209, f. n).

[62] "A certain Theudas led a revolt in c. A.D. 45 (Jos.Ant. 20,5), a decade after the date of Gamaliel's speech, and some 50 years after that of Judas the Galilean which it is said (37) to have proceeded. But revolts and messianic uprisings were so frequent in the century before A.D. 70, and our knowledge of the earlier part of this period so meagre, that it is quite possible that another Theudas led another revolt. There are two revolts led by two Judases of Galilee. We cannot accuse Luke of putting incorret history on Gamaliel's lips" (Orchard, op. cit., p. 1084).

[63] "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism" in McDowell, op. cit., pp. 575-576

[64] George Arthur Buttrick editor, The Interpreter's Bible Vol. IX (New York, NY: Abingdon Press, 1954) pp. 133-134

[65] Orchard, op. cit., p. 1093