Tuesday, September 23, 2008

New Navarre New Testament


I have known many people who have been blessed by the wonderful Navarre commentaries that have been produced over the past decade or so. For many years, they have been releasing these editions individually, occasionally combining them to produce a compact New Testament or Letters of St. Paul editions. Now, with the entire collection complete, they are about to release a more comprehensive one-volume The Navarre Bible New Testament. Included on the Scepter site is a .pdf file that contains some sample pages. The layout looks similar to the earlier editions, although they certainly adjusted the format a bit to better utilize the Nova Vulgata along with the RSV-CE. They also seem to be using a two color scheme of red and black, which is interesting.

Overall, this new edition looks well made and will probably be a lot more comprehensive than the compact edition that I own. However, two things that will cause me to rethink purchasing this new edition: 1) Price: $79.95 and 2) Size: 7 X 10.

6 comments:

Meg said...

It reminds me of a page of Talmud almost -- the text in the middle, surrounded by commentary.

Wouldn't this be hard to read though? You turn the pages to follow the text and then have to flip back to begin the commentary.

Timothy said...

Meg,

Yeah, I tend to agree with you. And the sheer size of it just seems like it would be tough to use on a normal basis. I don't know what they didn't use the notation system that the New Jerusalem Bible uses. Everything else about the format looks almost the same anyways.

Esteban Vázquez said...

Well, the format (and as I noted elsewhere, also the size and the price!) follows closely that of the original Biblia de Navarra. I suspect they didn't want to mess with layout, so they left it "as is."

Timothy said...

What do you think about the use of red ink?

Esteban Vázquez said...

You know, I'm used to liturgical texts with honest-to-goodness rubricae, so it seems almost natural to me. The cross-references in red, though, seem like a little too much (at least in that font)--they were kinda hard to read in the .pdf!

Esteban Vázquez said...

Oh, and I'm just glad that they didn't use said red ink for the words of Christ. Ugh.