What do you think of the large bibles that have voluminous commentary on each section? I'm talking about bibles like the "Anchor Bible", "Interpreter's Bible", "New Interpreter's Bible", etc. which take up entire shelves and spend hundreds of pages on each book.
I enjoy them, right now I am reading Mark in the New Interpreter's Bible (it's about 220 pages). It provides a lot of useful historical and cultural context (i.e. Who are the pharisees? What did Jesus' words mean to the Jews who heard them? etc.) as well as information on the original greek texts and extended discussion on variant readings.
A typical passage is anywhere from 1-30 verses, which is followed by "commentary" which is the aforementioned stuff, and then a "reflections" section which talks about issues of faith dealing with the Bible passages.
However, I see why people might not like these because they are obviously not written from a biblical infallibility standpoint, talking about the construction of Mark from multiple sources, ways that Mark changed his sources, contradictions, whether a particular quotation attributed to Jesus is really his verbatim quote or whether it's constructed from multiple quotes or teachings of early theologians, etc. However, the people on the staff are all Christians except for a few Jewish people who contributed articles like "The Old Testament in Jewish Thought" (I imagine they fall on the liberal side of the field, though)
(I think that the biggest "prize" for length goes to the Anchor Bible's "Amos" volume, which is 960 pages long. Amos is 6 pages in a KJV I looked at.)
-Chris
I enjoy them, right now I am reading Mark in the New Interpreter's Bible (it's about 220 pages). It provides a lot of useful historical and cultural context (i.e. Who are the pharisees? What did Jesus' words mean to the Jews who heard them? etc.) as well as information on the original greek texts and extended discussion on variant readings.
A typical passage is anywhere from 1-30 verses, which is followed by "commentary" which is the aforementioned stuff, and then a "reflections" section which talks about issues of faith dealing with the Bible passages.
However, I see why people might not like these because they are obviously not written from a biblical infallibility standpoint, talking about the construction of Mark from multiple sources, ways that Mark changed his sources, contradictions, whether a particular quotation attributed to Jesus is really his verbatim quote or whether it's constructed from multiple quotes or teachings of early theologians, etc. However, the people on the staff are all Christians except for a few Jewish people who contributed articles like "The Old Testament in Jewish Thought" (I imagine they fall on the liberal side of the field, though)
(I think that the biggest "prize" for length goes to the Anchor Bible's "Amos" volume, which is 960 pages long. Amos is 6 pages in a KJV I looked at.)
-Chris
I go to the Library to use theirs. 
