The Jerome Biblical Commentary is a series of books of Biblical scholarship, whose first edition was published in 1968. It is arguably the most-used volume ofCatholicscriptural commentary in the United States.
The book's title is a reference toJerome, known for his translation of the Bible into Latin (theVulgate) and his extensive Biblical commentaries.
The Jerome Biblical Commentary was published in 1968 byPrentice Hall: it was edited byRaymond Edward Brown,Joseph A. Fitzmyer, andRoland E. Murphy. It immediately gained enormous fame, selling more than 200,000 copies; it was also translated into Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.[1]
The New Jerome Biblical Commentary was published in 1990 by the same editors as a revised and updated edition.[2][3] In the foreword to the new edition, CardinalCarlo Maria Martini acknowledges it as the work of "the best of English-speaking Catholic exegetes... [that] condenses the results of modern scientific criticism with rigor and clarity. Yet this contemporary approach is achieved without neglecting the long road that Christian tradition has travelled in dedicated, constant, and loving attention to the Word of God.... [The pages of the Bible] are duly situated in their appropriate historical and cultural context."[4] Martini goes on to describe it as "an instrument for richecumenical dialogue" that avoids "arid literalism 'that kills'" and a drift "into generalized spiritual applications."[4] It contains, besides detailed commentary on all the books of the Bible, introductory articles on parts of the Bible and on each book as well as topical articles:
The Jerome Biblical Commentary for the Twenty-First Century was published on 27 January 2022 byBloomsbury Publishing: it is edited byJohn J. Collins, Gina Hens-Piazza, Barbara ReidOP and Donald SeniorCP.
The new volume continues its approach ofhistorical-critical methodology in the light ofCatholic tradition, with a broader array of commentators beyond Europe and North America;Pope Francis wrote a foreword for the volume.[5]