It’s not. And what they’ve “won” is dust and ashes.
The NABPerhaps the most notable example of the modern liberal interpretive school is seen in the officially approved commentary in the New American Bible (NAB), the official Bible of the U.S. Conference of Bishops (who own the copyright) and for Catholics in America. EWTN says, “There is only one English text currently approved by the Church for use in the United States. This text is the one contained in the Lectionaries approved for Sundays & Feasts and for Weekdays by the USCCB and recognized by the Holy See. These Lectionaries have their American and Roman approval documents in the front. The text is that of the New American Bible with revised Psalms and New Testament (1988, 1991), with some changes mandated by the Holy See where the NAB text used so-called vertical inclusive language (e.g. avoiding male pronouns for God). Since these Lectionaries have been fully promulgated, the permission to use the Jerusalem Bible and the RSV-Catholic at Mass has been withdrawn.”Note: while the U.S. Conference of Bishops support liberal scholarship, they are not as regards sharing their translation, forbidding any part of the NAB to be reproduced, distributed, performed or displayed in any medium, including electronic or digital, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. “ However, in America the “Fair Use” provision clearly allows the degree of purpose of what follows Conservative Catholics themselves have criticized the NAB for many things, including numerous historical accounts in the Bible to being fables or folk tales, among other denials, including that of texts used by some to support Roman Catholic teaching, and the translation's use of gender inclusive language while not distinguishing sexual sin from general immorality.I myself first became aware of the basic liberal bent in the NAB when reading the notes in the NAB, St. Joseph’s medium size, Catholic publishing co., copyright 1970, which states that "The Bible is God’s word and man’s word. One must understand man’s word first in order to understand the word of God." ("A Library of Books," p. 19)It goes on to “explain”, under “Literary Genres” (p. 19) that such stories as Gn. cps. 2, (creation) 3, (the Fall) 4:1-16 (Cain and Able); 6-8, (Noah and the flood) 11 (Tower of Babel) were allegorical, and that Balaam and the donkey and the angel, were fables, while Gn. 37-50 (Joseph), 12-36 (Abraham, Issaac, Jacob), Exodus, Judges 13-16 (Samson) 1Sam. 17 (David and Goliath) are stories which are "historical at their core," while overall the author simply used "traditions" to teach a religious lesson All of which impugns the literal historicity of the O.T. overall, even though Jesus referred to many of these and other such stories as actual historical events (Adam and Eve: Mt. 19:4; Abraham, Issac Exodus and Moses: Acts 7; Rm. 4; Heb. 11; Jonah and the fish: Mt. 12:39-41; Balaam and the donkey: 2Pt. 2:15; Jude. 1:1; Rev. 2:14) In explaining away the Bible's attribution of Divine sanction to wars of conquest, it states, "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." ("Inspiration and Revelation," p. 18) Regarding the Gospels, it only allows that the slaughter of the innocents by King Herod, was “extremely probable,” and that people leaving Bethlehem to escape the massacre, is equally probable, but outside the historical background to this tradition, the rest is interpretation. Its “Conditioned thought patterns” (p. 20) hermeneutic also paves the way for the specious argumentation of feminists who seek to negate the headship of the man as being due to condescension to culture, a very dangerous hermeneutic, and unwarranted when dealing with such texts as 1Cor. 11:3. It additionally conveys such things as that Matthew placed Jesus in Egypt to convince his readers that Jesus was the real Israel, and may have only represented Jesus giving the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, to show that Jesus was like Moses who received the law on Mount Sinai. For in "Reading the Gospels, one should distinguish historical facts from theological elaboration." ("The Gospels," e. p. 22) It further states, “The Church was so firmly convinced that the risen Lord who is the Jesus of history lived in her, and taught through her, that she expressed her teaching in the form of Jesus’ sayings. The words are not Jesus but from the Church.” “Can we discover at least some words of Jesus that have escaped such elaboration? Bible scholars point to the very short sayings of Jesus, as for example those put together by Matthew in chapter 5, 1-12” It also explains, “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 NAB has gone through more than one revision, some of the following is taken from a Roman Catholic apologist who quotes form the 1992 version and is likewise is critical at the liberal scholarship behind it (though he elsewhere denigrated Israel as illegal occupying Palestine) . The footnotes regarding the parting of the Red Sea informs its readers that it didn’t actually happen. Rather, the Israelites crossed over the Sea of Reeds which was “ probably a body of shallow water somewhat to the north of the present deep Red Sea.” Thus rendered, the miracle would being Pharaoh’s army drowning in shallow waters. It likewise explains as regards to “the sons of heaven [God] having intercourse with the daughters of men,” (Gen. 6:4) “This is apparently a fragment of an old legend that had borrowed much from ancient mythology.” The NAB footnotes go on to explain the “sons of heaven” are “the celestial beings of mythology.” The current edition will not use render “porneia” as “sexual immorality” or anything sexual in places such as 1Cor. 5:1; 6:13; 7:2; 10:8; 2Cor. 12:21; Eph. 5:3; Gal. 5:19; Col. 3:5; 1Thes. 4:3; but simply has “immorality,” even though in most cases it is in a sexual context. It is a slippery slope when historical statements are made out to be literary devices, and Muslims have taken advantage of the NAB's liberal hermeneutic to impugn the veracity of the Bible, http://www.answering-islam.org/Responses/Shabir-Ally/nab.htm. One of the changes i have noted between the 1970 NAB and the online version of today, is that the former has “justice” (which perhaps the social gospel Catholics preferred) over righteousness in such places as Rom 4:5,6, and that David “celebrates” the man..., while the online NAB has “But when one does not work, yet believes in the one who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness. So also David declares the blessedness of the person to whom God credits righteousness apart from works:” On the other hand there are Catholics who only sanction the Douay-Rheims Bible, yet a Roman Catholic apologist criticizes them. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *In the past the cathodic church had excluded (open to interpretation) lay persons from normally engaging “in dispute, either private or public, concerning the Catholic Faith,” (Pope Alexander IV (1254-1261) in “Sextus Decretalium”, Lib. V, c.) or publicly making 'a speech or teach, thus investing himself with the dignity of a teacher,” (Quinisext Ecumenical Council, Canon 64) and her attitude has been said to “forbid her children to read or to listen to heretical controversy, or to endeavor to discover religious truths by examining both sides of the question," as “there can be no two sides to a question which for him is settled,” (John H. Stapleton, Explanation of Catholic Morals, Chapter xxiii, 1904), for it is stated that the Catholic is “sure of a truth when declared by the Catholic Church as he would be if he saw Jesus Christ standing before him and heard Him declaring it with His Own Divine lips,” (Henry G. Graham, "What Faith Really Means,"1914) **"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." NAB published by the Catholic Book Publishing Co., New York, 1986. Nihil Obstat, with the Imprimatur from the Archbishop of Washington: |