Augustine Institute President Tim Gray and professor Mark Giszczak discuss the English Standard Version
Gray: "
Catholics and Protestants are close to having a common Bible in English then?"
Giszczak: "The ESV, I think, gives us hope that this translation might be the common Bible for Protestant and Catholic English-speakers for the future. And that’s a really exciting prospect that we’ll be able to read the Bible together, and even pray side by side, with the same Bible translation....the RSV is a great precedent of an ecumenical Bible translation, the ESV follows in that pattern where you have a Protestant board of translators and a Catholic bishops conference agreeing on the translation of the Bible."
"The ESV came out in 2001 as an update of the RSV [Revised Standard Version]"
Giszczak: "The ESV as an update of the RSV changes about 60,000 words from the RSV to the ESV. So it’s a pretty significant change. Of course, a lot of those are changing “thou” to “you”....The RSV was famously criticized for its translation of Isaiah 7:14, where it translates the prophecy of the Virgin birth as “a young woman shall conceive”....the ESV went back to “a virgin shall conceive”.
"ATC reached out to Crossway [ESV Bible’s publisher] in 2016, and said we’d really like to do a Catholic Edition of the ESV in conjunction with the Catholic conference of the bishops"
"the major difference between the Catholic Edition of the ESV and the original ESV is that the Catholic Edition includes the deuterocanonical books, which of course weren’t there in the Protestant editions."
Giszczak: "What I find remarkable is how the evangelical translation oversight committee that produced the original translation worked together with these Catholic scholars"
"the Catholic edition....was agreed upon both by Crossway and by the bishops’ conference, and it was approved on Feb. 4, 2018."