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→Criticism
”The notes to the New Testament are on the whole straightforward and some readers will find them a help in understanding many of the words and ideas in the text. Most of them though are dull and many of them jejune in the extreme. As a friend put it to me, they remind one of the notes to some school editions of Shakespeare. ‘King Lear plans to divide his kingdom between his daughters’, or ‘Hamlet wonders if it would be a good idea to commit suicide.’ In this book we find similar notes all too often, such as that on Luke 16:11: ‘True riches signify spiritual treasures’, or that on Luke 16:25 ‘This conversation is not between God and the rich man, but between Abraham and the rich man.’ The level is that of a not very bright Sunday School class. Critical questions are avoided by simply not being discussed at all. This is unsatisfactory, since many readers will be seeking help on just these questions. What should have been provided is an article setting out clearly how an Orthodox reader of the Bible should approach these problems. The solution adopted here is a further instance of what I call the attitude of the double-headed Byzantine ostrich." [http://anastasis.org.uk/bible_review.htm]
"The tragedy of the OSB is that, as Kevin Edgecomb once put it privately to me, it should have been better, and in fact was once better. Kevin has recently sent me a number of early drafts of the OSB that were once available online for all to see; these show that the OSB was once an honest-to-goodness translation of the Septuagint, and a rather satisfactory one, at that. However, somewhere along the line (and in all likelihood on account of Thomas Nelson's–the same company headed by an Orthodox deacon, I might add–overriding pressure to market the NKJV by making this an 'Orthodox NKJV' or some such beast), the project became the dubious, embarrassing "'translation" ' that we all have seen. One only need ask Father Patrick Reardon what happened to his translation of the Psalms; other contributors have simple become too jaded by it all and prefer not to speak of the subject. "I think your observation that the people responsible for the OSB have simply ignored most of the criticism of the OSB is very important. One only needs to re-read Fr Ephrem's review to realize that nearly nothing that he rightly criticized in the earlier volume has changed in that later one. This inability to take constructive criticism, which smacks of the hubris of the Americanist brand of convertitis, is surely a major cause that the OSB isn't better that it is." [http://voxstefani.wordpress.com/2009/01/21/neufeld-on-the-orthodox-study-bible/]
== Contributors ==