Endorsements infuriate me. The vast majority provide no practical help because i) the celebrity is only doing it for the money; and ii) the endorsements are for products I can easily evaluate for myself. Do I need George Clooney to tell me which coffee capsules I prefer?
However, when I actually need professional guidance before purchasing, I find useful endorsements hard to come by. Take the New Testament. For the past year, I have been working with a King James Bible published by Cambridge University Press. It has no footnotes on textual choices or exegetical commentaries, rendering it is essentially useless.
As exegetes know, the New Testament was created out thousands of diverging manuscripts written in Ancient Greek, most of which are centuries removed from the events in question. These original manuscripts are littered with mistakes. Some are minor and unintentional: many copyists used the abbreviation ‘KW’ for ‘KURIW’, which is Greek for ‘Lord’. At one point, a copyist interpreted this as ‘KAIRW’ or ‘time’, so that in some Bible versions Paul urges people to ‘serve the time’ instead of ‘serve the Lord.’ Others errors are major and intentional. Take the story of Jesus saving adulterous woman by telling the angry Pharisees “the one who is without sin” should cast the first stone. This story isn’t in any of the earliest and best copies of the Bible, and scholars agree it was added decades afterward to the Gospel of John, perhaps by a scribe who had heard the story and thought it should be in the book. Similarly, it was a scribe who added the last twelve verses of the Gospel of Mark; scholars believe the original ending was considered too abrupt and uninspired.
Once you know all this, it is vital to have a Bible that provides the proper historical and exegetical background for the text. But how do you choose? The vast majority of Bibles are aimed at prosthelytizing and don’t raise tricky questions. Obviously, this is where you need an endorsement. I sent a note to Bart Ehrman, the legendary exegetical scholar who is the author of dozens of books on the Bible, including the popular masterpieces Misquoting Jesus and Jesus, Interrupted. He didn’t hesitate to endorse : the HarperCollins Study Bible using the New Revised Standard Version.
All my fellow confused Bible shoppers can thank me at their convenience.
