Here is an interesting article about the NAB:
http://www.bible-researcher.com/nab.html
The New American Bible
Louis F. Hartman and Myles M. Bourke, eds.,
The New American Bible, Translated from the Original Languages, with Critical Use of All the Ancient Sources, by Members of the Catholic Biblical Association of America. Sponsored by the Bishops' Committee of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. Paterson, N.J.: St. Anthony Guild Press. 1970.
The history of this Roman Catholic version is rather complicated. It was undertaken with the support and oversight of the American hierarchy after Pope Pius XII in 1943 issued an encyclical letter (the
Divino afflante Spiritu) in which he encouraged Roman Catholic scholars to make translations of the Bible from the original languages rather than from the Latin Vulgate, which previously had been the basic text used by Catholic translators. At that time a new translation from the Vulgate, called the
Confraternity Version, was already underway in America, the New Testament having been published in 1941. The corresponding translation of the Latin Old Testament was abandoned after the Pope's encyclical gave permission to translate from the Hebrew, and work began on a translation of the Hebrew, with Louis F. Hartman as the chief editor. This translation of the Old Testament gradually appeared in four volumes in 1951, l955, 1961, and 1969. Work on a new translation of the Greek New Testament (based on the Nestle-Aland 25th edition) began in 1956, with Myles M. Bourke as the chief editor. The completed Bible, as published in 1970, contained a substantial revision of the Old Testament portions which had earlier been published. The 1970 version of Genesis was an entirely new translation. Shortly after the publication of the complete Bible, the American bishops decided that the 1970 NAB New Testament was too paraphrastic for general use,
(1) and so the New Testament was "revised" (translated anew, really, on different principles, from the 26th edition of Nestle-Aland) and published in 1986. This new translation of the New Testament was for the most part more literal, but it employed "dynamic equivalence" in places for the sake of gender-neutral language. The Book of Psalms was similarly "revised" in 1991. Therefore, the most recent editions of the NAB include the 1970 Old Testament, 1991 Psalter, and 1986 New Testament, though some older editions are still in print. A revision of the entire Old Testament, excluding the Psalter, is currently underway, and this is expected to be published in 2003.
Pope John Paul II and other Vatican officials were not happy with this version, mainly because of the
inclusive language, which was mandated by liturgical
guidelines issued by a committee of the U.S. Catholic Conference in 1990
(2) but
specifically disallowed by the provisional
norms for translation of biblical texts sent by Vatican officials to American Bishops in June of 1997,
(3) and also disallowed by the translation guidelines formally promulgated in an
Instruction published by the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in March 2001.
(4) And so, although the NAB is the "official" translation of the U.S. Conference of Bishops, it became necessary for the Scripture portions included in the liturgy of the English Mass to be revised. A complete overhaul so as to remove the inclusive language from the version, in accordance with the liturgical guidelines of the Vatican, would seem to be the next logical step; but this is unlikely to happen because opposition to the Vatican guidelines is very strong in the American hierarchy. Richard John Neuhaus described the confused state of affairs surrounding Roman Catholic Bible versions in 2001:
At present, three translations are approved for Catholic liturgical use: the New Jerusalem, the RSV, and the New American Bible (NAB). The lectionaries and the several publishers of Mass guides, however, use only the NAB. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a wretched translation. It succeeds in being, at the same time, loose, stilted, breezy, vulgar, opaque, and relentlessly averse to literary grace. The bishops had the NAB updated to the Revised New American Bible (RNAB), but Rome had objections to that and hurriedly appointed a committee to fix it up into what might be called the Amended Revised New American Bible (ARNAB), which will soon become mandatory in lectionary use. Technically, the RSV and New Jerusalem are still permitted but, with ARNAB as the mandatory translation of the future, nobody has any interest in printing lectionaries or Mass guides using those versions. There is the additional oddity that you cannot buy an ARNAB Bible, since only the pericopes (liturgical readings) exist in ARNAB-talk. So Catholics do not have a Bible for personal or group reading that uses the same text that they hear at Mass.
(5)
