Chances are that you've never seen one
of these. I've only seen this one in
person. It's one that I've owned for
about thirty years now.
It's the Jerusalem Bible, but it's the
Compact Reader's Edition in black
sheepskin, and it has a single ribbon
marker 3/8 of an inch wide. And as you
can see, white headbands, gilt but not art-gilt edges. I purchased this book at the
Carpenter Christian Supply store at
2205 Pacific Coast Highway in Lomita,
California on the 18th of March 1985, and
I paid $40 for it. I don't think the
store is still there. I looked on Google
Maps and it appears that location is now
occupied by an Ace Hardware.
I paid $40, I checked with the ISBN, and
the book is selling at Amazon.com for
about $1141.47.
But you don't have to pay that much, because I
saw that one sold on eBay last year for
about $60. Here's the box, or what remains
of the box. Jerusalem Bible Compact
Reader's Edition. Black sheepskin binding.
And there is the ISBN. I will post that
somewhere, either in the description or
in a comment, so you can have it if
you're interested. To give you a better
sense for the size, here it is as
compared with my Cameo Cambridge. The Cameo
also has the Apocrypha. It actually
has a couple of more books of the
Apocrypha than the Jerusalem Bible does.
So they are side by side. Jerusalem Bible,
it's thinner. It's not as wide, but they are roughly
the same height. And, of course, the Cameo has art gilting, whereas the old
Jerusalem Bible only has gilt edges. Dimensions are 7 and 5/8 inches tall,
4 and 7/8 inches wide, and it is about one and 5/8 inches thick.
It has, in the Old Testament, 46
books, comprising 1340 pages.
In the New Testament, it has 27 books, 339 pages. Here is
the Table of Contents. Page thickness is
29 micrometers. And on the basis of
that, I estimate the paperweight to be 27
GSM [grams per square meter]. It's a book that must have been
printed somewhere around, circa, 1980 --
somewhere between there and the year I
bought it, which was 1985. So you should
expect to see some print nonuniformity
issues. I think this shows it fairly well.
Next to each other so that you can see.
Page 301 on the right is a much darker
in page 299 on the left.
It contains Apocryphal books, as I
mentioned. Most Protestant Bibles did too,
in a different section, of course. In a
Catholic Bible they're interleaved with the
canonical books. But most Protestant books [Bibles] also contained the Apocryphal
books until the early 1800s, the 19th
century. It is probably a good thing, in my
mind, that they don't now, because, to make
their thin lines Bibles, publishers would
have to make the paper even thinner than
they do today.
And, of course, to combat show through,
they would have to make the ink even
lighter. Historically, the Apocryphal
books have sometimes been important.
John Bunyan in his "Grace Abounding" talks about hearing a verse that greatly
encouraged him and looking for a year to
try to find it. But he looked through his
Bible; he couldn't find it. It took him a
whole year to, because it's actually here
in the book of Ecclesiasticus, chapter 2
verse 10. "Look at the generations of old
and see: who ever trusted in the Lord and
was put to shame?" There are people who
say that, had it not been from for this
verse from the Apocryphal scriptures, he
never would have written "Pilgrims
Progress." Perhaps the most famous aspect
of this Bible is the fact that J.R.R.
Tolkien was one of the editors.
Tolkien also translated the book of
Jonah. Now it was later edited, and
Tolkien translated it from the French.
There's some controversy about whether
the Jerusalem Bible was translated
entirely for the French, or
whether the ancient languages were used
at the beginning. At any rate it appears
that it was translated from the French
and then adjusted to agree with the
Hebrew. But Tolkien translated Jonah, we're fairly sure, from the French, and I found
an online source that pointed me towards
Jonah 2:7 as being a Tolkien-esque
verse. And if you look at it, it really
does read in a Tolkien-esque
fashion.
Let's see, is that in focus? It's focusing
about there. "The seaweed was wrapped
around my head / at the roots of the
mountains." Does sound kind of
Tolkien-esque to me. So you have an Old
Testament, which has Apocryphal books
buried in it. You have the New Testament, which is the
same as the Protestant New Testament and just about everyone else's New Testament.
I think maybe the Ethiopians and the
Copts have different New Testaments.
At the back, we have, after the book of
Revelation, we have a chronological table,
which takes you through history -- where
there's a divided kingdom, they break it
into Israel and Judah. And then after the
chronological table, Measures and Money.
So there's no -- there are no maps.
There is no concordance.
So here we are at the New Testament. You
have an introduction to the synoptic
Gospels here at the beginning. Then you
come to the book of Matthew. You have the
title in all caps: the Gospel according
to St. Matthew. Then a Roman numeral one.
So what they've done is they've outlined
the book. They have "The Birth and
Infancy of Jesus" at one. On the third page they have, "The
Kingdom of Heaven Proclaimed." And then
subsections. So it's in an outline format. They
also have bolded headings to the
sections. "The virginal conception of Jesus."
"The visit of the Magi," etc. The pages
themselves are 182 millimetres top to
bottom, 112 millimeters wide. The margins: at the
top of the page, the margin is about 13 millimeters. At the bottom, it's only 7. The inner
margin, from the gutter
to the text itself,
the left justified edge of the text, is
10 millimeters. And the outer margin is
12 mm. These numerals here in the margin
indicate the verse. I'll zoom in; I'll show you
that. So you have a dot over here.
"But" -- that's the beginning of Matthew
6:6 there. So the little black dots in
the text separate the verses. The font is
about a 7.5 point Times New Roman
equivalent. I compare with Times New
Roman when the letters are fairly skinny,
and I think 7.5 works pretty well. If you
look at the e's, they're very close to
the same size at a 7.5 point. There are
notes at the bottom of the pages. This is
stripped down from the 1966 Jerusalem
Bible, which had a much larger font and
extensive notes at the bottom of the
page.
So here I've come to Matthew 16:16, the
same famous passage that Catholic
apologists like to use to bolster the
notion that the Bishop of Rome is a
successor of Peter to whom Christ gave
charge over the church.
So it's this passage: Jesus said, "Simon
son of Jonah, you are a happy man!" God has
revealed this to you. "You are Peter and
on this rock I will build my Church. And
the gates of the underworld" will "never
hold out against it." Then if you look
over here at the the notes, they're
actually quite mild and not very
polemical. Note "b" says that Peter was not
until now a proper name that it's the
Greek Petros which represents the
Aramaic kepha. Note "c" says the gates
symbolize the power of the underworld
to hold captives. Note "d" says the keys
have become the traditional insignia of
Peter.
Really nothing of much of a polemical
spirit there. I'll just show you the
note that has to do with the keys in the
original Jerusalem Bible. And it says
here that Peter is the controller of the
household of God and the keys
symbolized this. In that capacity he is
to exercise the disciplinary power of
admitting or excluding those he thinks
fit. So in cutting it down to size to
make it a Compact Reader's Edition, they
also cut out quite a lot of material
that's of apologetic, pro-catholic nature.
Finally, before we break from this
section of the video, I just want to
mention that the columns are about 80
characters wide. So that's fairly wide,
fairly large number of characters per column. 
this book I showed it without actually
In that last scene I introduced this book.
I showed it without actually giving it a proper introduction. This is
original -- in English -- the original Jerusalem Bible,
which is a much larger
Bible than the later Compact Readers Edition.
The Jerusalem Bible here got its
origin from a Bible called Le Bible de
Jerusalem,
pardon my bad French accent, which
was published in french in 1956. The
Jerusalem Bible was a translation
largely following that, and into English in
1966. The Compact Reader's Edition -- the
Readers Edition and the Compact Reader's
Edition came out in '68. I just read that
there is a newer update of the Jerusalem
Bible. In 1985 this update came out.
This is called the New Jerusalem Bible.
And last month the New Testament and
Psalms of the Revised New Jerusalem
Bible (RNJB) were published. So as of February 2018,
we have a new version of the
Jerusalem Bible. Just like many of these,
they keep keep going on and on. I showed
you the single column format, and this
actually has a long history in Catholic
Bibles. You should be seeing on your
screen an image of Genesis 1 from a 1635
printing of the Douay Rheims Bible. And
you can see that it's single column and
there are a lot of notes along the
boundary, a lot of notes just as in the
Jerusalem Bible. Now that may come as a
surprise to you. You might think,
"Well, that's not what the Douay-Rheims
Bible looks like. The Douay-Rheims Bible
looks like this: it looks like the King
James Version. It has two columns of text.
It's in a verse-by-verse format. Well,
this is a revision of the original Douay-
Rheims Bible. It was revised by a man
named Challinor in 1752 to make it look
more like the King James Version. Just a
brief note, before we end this section of
the video, on the peculiarities of the
translation. Just like the American Standard Version uses "Jehovah"
in the Old Testament, the Jerusalem
Bible uses "Yahweh." "His wife heard the
sound of Yahweh God walking in the
garden in the cool of the day, and they hid
from Yahweh God among the trees of the
garden."
It's a very loose translation. It's about
as loose as the New English Bible. A few
years ago I did a study of 200 verses
chosen at random, and compared 14
different Bible translations, and scored
them in those 200 verses where they took
liberties with the Greek. And as you can
see -- you should be seeing a graphic on
your screen -- the Jerusalem Bible was the
most liberal of them all,  the loosest of
them all. Okay, well next we're going to
look at a few interesting examples.
As the first example, I've taken us to
Matthew 11 6. in the Jerusalem Bible.
Where the American Standard Version has,
"and blessed is he whosoever shall find
no occasion of stumbling in me," the
Jerusalem Bible says, "and happy is the
man who does not lose faith in me." There
is no mention of faith in that verse, in
the Greek.
Well, now we're in Romans chapter 4, verse
1. And where the Revised Version had, "What
then shall we say that Abraham, our
forefather according to the flesh, hath
found?" and where the American Standard
Version had, "What then shall we say that
Abraham, our forefather, have found
according to the flesh?" the Jerusalem
Bible has, "Apply this to Abraham, the
ancestor from whom we are all descended."
Quite loose. As a final example, here I've
taken you to 1st Corinthians 12:13, which
reads in the Jerusalem Bible, "In the one
Spirit we were all baptized, Jews as well
as Greeks." In the Greek here, of course, I think as
you know, it says "in one Spirit we were all
baptized into one body." For some unknown
reason, they omitted "into one body." I checked and there are, as far as I know, no Greek
variants that omit "into one body" there,
but the Jerusalem Bible thought fit to
do so. So it's, as I said, a quite free
translation. So there you have it: an
overview of the Jerusalem Bible Compact
Reader's Edition in black sheepskin.
It's worth somewhere between $60 and
$1140
It has a very nice grain in the
sheepskin. I'll let you see that up close.
The sheepskin is not particularly
soft. It is somewhat firm. You can see
that it returns back
quite rapidly when you turn it. The liner
appears to be a synthetic of some kind. I
don't know much about liners. I'm not
really sure what it is. You can see,
actually, on the backside of this page,
you can see an impression of the very
cool script JB that's on the front.
