There are many, many translations of Bibles out on the streets to pick from. Even within the Catholic Church there are many approved and acceptable Bible translations to pick from.
Should you be able to read and understand Latin, the recommend Bible is the Catholic Latin version, as it is the closest translation to the Greek books that would have been read by Jesus and used by those people of Jesus’ time and for several years after that.
But, if you are an English speaking person, as of November 27, 2011, you will want to have at least one copy of the New American Bible, Revised Edition, as it is the translation that is used in, now, ALL English speaking Masses as of the 27th of November, 2011.
Now, if you are into scholarly studies of the Bible, a SECOND (you should still have a copy of the NAB/RE Bible on your book shelf so that you can go along with the Mass!) Bible to have would be the New Jerusalem Bible, which is a very good translation, and in most cases has a lot of great “side bar” information.
Be sure you have a Bible that has ALL of the Canonical books in them! Martin Luther, in his Reformation, decided to take out seven books from the Old Testament to match what the Jewish were now using, based on Hebrew written text (although he translated from the Vulgate, which was the Latin translation from Greek text). At the time of Jesus, most of the written word, even by the Jewish was in Greek. Jesus would have been reading text from Greek books, and not Hebrew.
With the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient text, we are finding that the text used to create the Greek text of that time are pretty much dead on to the older Hebrew text, so the translation differences are not what many people thought in the early years of the Reformation and Protestant Schisms.
Prior to the late 90s or early 100s, the Jewish Faith accepted those seven books as inspired and used them as well. (Those books are: Tobit, Judith, 1&2 Maccabees, Baruch, Daniel (although this is still in the Jewish Ketuvim), Wisdom and Sirach) It was not until this time that a SMALL few of the leaders of the Jewish Synagogues decided to remove them from their Nevi’im and Ketuvim as they were not written in Hebrew first, and before a certain time. UNTIL that time, they were considered inspired by the faithful though!
There are other Bibles that are accepted by the Catholic Church, but unless you are really wanting to get into deep research and in depth studies of the Bible, the only one needed is the New American Bible, Revised Edition that just recently came out. A good “second” Bible to have is the New Jerusalem Bible.
In Christ!
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