New Testament and Psalms (RSV)

Review

SECTION ONE The Revised Standard Version New Testament and Psalms, published by Ignatius Press, is the foundational text of Christian life in a single portable volume. The RSV-Catholic Edition was commissioned specifically to meet the scholarly and liturgical standards of Catholic Christianity: its formal-equivalence translation philosophy keeps it close to the Greek and Hebrew originals while remaining readable in contemporary English. The Psalms have been the Church's prayer book for three thousand years — they were on the lips of Jesus in Gethsemane, at the Last Supper, and from the cross — and their inclusion alongside the New Testament makes this edition a complete primer in biblical prayer. The intended audience is anyone seeking a study-quality, theologically reliable text: seminarians, adult converts, spiritual directors, and committed lay readers who want to work with the same translation that grounds Catholic academic theology. This is not a devotional paraphrase. It is Scripture as the Church reads it. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The opening chapters of John's Gospel assert that the Word through whom all things were made became flesh — not as a concession to matter but as its glorification. This directly affirms the CCMMP premise that the human person is a unity of body and soul, not a soul imprisoned in a body. The resurrection narratives across all four Gospels press the same point: the risen Christ eats fish, shows wounds, and is physically embraced, refusing any reading of salvation as disembodied escape. - **Fallen**: The Pauline letters, particularly Romans 7, give the most precise scriptural account of what Aquinas would later name concupiscence as disordered desire: 'I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.' This is not mere moral failure but a structural wound in the will, the very disorder that the CCMMP locates under the Fallen state. The Psalms of lament — 22, 38, 88 — chart the inner experience of that wound with a honesty that no clinical language quite matches. - **Redeemed**: The Letter to the Romans, chapters 5 through 8, is the New Testament's densest treatment of redemption as a real transformation of the person, not merely a legal declaration. Grace, for Paul, is not a covering over of sin but an interior renewal: 'You have received the spirit of adoption.' This maps directly onto the CCMMP's Redeemed state as genuine restoration of the person's capacity for right relationship with God, self, and neighbor. - **Prudence (teachability)**: The Wisdom literature embedded in the Psalms — particularly Psalms 1, 19, and 119 — trains the reader in what Aquinas calls docility: the disposition to receive instruction from a source wiser than oneself. Meditating on these texts as a daily practice is not passive but actively forms the cogitative sense toward God's order rather than toward disordered appetite. - **Justice (worship)**: The Psalter as a whole is the Church's manual for the virtue of religion — the potential virtue that directs worship toward God as its proper object. The range of psalm-forms (hymn, lament, thanksgiving, royal psalm, wisdom psalm) ensures that worship is not reduced to a single emotional register but covers the full arc of the creature's response to the Creator.

✓ Strengths

• ✓The Revised Standard Version text, published by Ignatius Press, preserves the formal equivalence of the original Greek and Hebrew, making it a reliable source for lectio divina and theological study alike.
• ✓The Psalms address the full range of human emotional and spiritual experience — lament, praise, contrition, confidence — giving readers a vocabulary for honest prayer that neither spiritualizes suffering nor remains stuck in it.
• ✓The New Testament, particularly the Pauline letters and the Gospel of John, provides the primary doctrinal architecture for understanding the unity of body and soul: the resurrection accounts insist that redemption is not escape from the body but its transformation.
• ✓The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) functions as a sustained training in the cardinal and theological virtues, grounding prudential judgment, justice, fortitude, and temperance in the concrete demands of discipleship rather than in abstract principle.
• ✓The Ignatius Press edition signals a deliberate editorial stance: the RSV-CE is the translation used in formal Catholic academic and liturgical contexts, making this edition suitable for serious theological formation rather than casual devotional reading.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠Without introductory material, maps, footnotes, or cross-references, readers unfamiliar with the historical and literary context of the New Testament may struggle to interpret difficult passages — particularly the Pauline theology of law and grace in Romans and Galatians — without supplementary guidance.