The New American Bible Revised Edition, known as the NABRE, is the standard Catholic Bible in the United States. Published in its current form in 2011, it is the English translation approved for use in the lectionary of the Roman Catholic Church in America and is the Bible used in the great majority of American Catholic parishes, schools, and study programmes.

Origins

The translation has its roots in the years following the Second Vatican Council, which encouraged the use of vernacular translations of Scripture in Catholic worship and study. American Catholic biblical scholarship had matured rapidly under the encouragement of Pope Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, which urged translators to work directly from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek rather than from the Latin Vulgate. For four centuries before that, English-language Catholic Bibles — chiefly the Douay-Rheims and its Challoner revision — had been translated from the Vulgate. Divino Afflante Spiritu opened the door to a different kind of Catholic English Bible: one founded on the same original-language scholarship that produced the great modern Protestant translations.

The first edition of the New American Bible was published in 1970 by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine under the sponsorship of the United States bishops. It was the first complete Catholic Bible in English translated from the originals. The New Testament was revised in 1986; the Psalms were revised in 1991 after the original NAB Psalms had drawn criticism; and the rest of the Old Testament was thoroughly revised over the following two decades. The complete Revised Edition, the NABRE, appeared on 9 March 2011 — Ash Wednesday — symbolically placing the revised text at the threshold of Lent. A further revision of the New Testament has been underway since 2013 and is expected to complete the New American Bible 2025.

Translation philosophy

The NABRE translators worked from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, drawing on the most recent critical editions and on manuscript evidence that includes the Dead Sea Scrolls. Their approach is broadly formal-equivalence: they aim to render the original languages faithfully, while making the smaller adjustments needed for clear English. Explanatory footnotes are extensive — a NABRE study Bible typically has more footnotes per page than its Protestant counterparts — and address textual variants, historical setting, theological context, and intertestamental cross-references.

Like every Catholic Bible, the NABRE includes the full canon of Scripture as received by the Catholic Church: the Old Testament with the Deuterocanonical books (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and additional sections of Esther and Daniel), arranged in their traditional Catholic order, together with the New Testament. The NABRE uses inclusive language for human beings where the original Hebrew or Greek is itself inclusive, but retains masculine language for God.

The NABRE’s introductions and footnotes reflect mainstream Catholic biblical scholarship — including historical-critical methodology, awareness of Ancient Near Eastern context, and openness to the documentary and source-critical hypotheses for the Pentateuch and the Gospels. This is one of the features that distinguishes it from older Catholic translations and from more confessionally conservative Protestant Bibles, and it is also one of the features that some traditional Catholic readers find unwelcome.

A sample passage

The NABRE’s formal-equivalence approach with Catholic-tradition vocabulary can be seen in the angel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary at Luke 1:28:

NABRE: And coming to her, he said, “Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you.”

Douay-Rheims: And the angel being come in, said unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

RSV-Catholic Edition: And he came to her and said, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!”

The Greek kecharitōmenē is a perfect-passive participle of the verb “to give grace,” difficult to render economically. The Douay-Rheims and RSV-CE render it with the traditional “full of grace,” carrying weight from the Latin Vulgate’s gratia plena and the centuries of Marian devotion that grew around it. The NABRE’s “favored one” is closer to a literal Greek translation, though it gives up the resonance of the older phrase. NABRE readers will see “full of grace” in the footnote.

The lectionary

One distinctive feature of the NABRE’s place in American Catholic life is its relationship to the Mass. The lectionary used at Mass in the United States is drawn from the NABRE, with some adjustments to suit liturgical proclamation (slightly different wording in a handful of passages, alternative renderings of certain verses for the spoken liturgy). Catholics who hear the readings each Sunday and weekday are hearing, almost word for word, the same translation that they read at home. This integration of personal Bible and liturgical Bible — one text in both settings — is something most American Protestants don’t experience and most American Catholics take for granted.

Adoption and influence

The NABRE is the default Bible in American Catholic parishes, in Catholic schools at every level, in RCIA programmes for adult converts, and in parish Bible studies. It is the text published in the widely-used Saint Joseph Edition Bibles, in Catholic family Bibles, in Little Rock Catholic Study Bible, and in the Catholic Study Bible from Oxford University Press. The Catholic Catechism quotes from earlier NAB editions in many places.

Outside the United States, the NABRE has less reach. British and Commonwealth Catholics typically use the Jerusalem Bible or the Catholic edition of the RSV; Catholics in many countries use Bibles translated locally from the originals under their own bishops’ conferences. But within American Catholicism, the NABRE is unmissable: most Catholics who own a Bible own a NABRE, often without thinking about which translation it is.

Who reads the NABRE

The NABRE has several distinct readerships:

  • American Catholic parishioners. The default Bible for Catholics in the United States. Used at Mass, in homilies, in religious-education programmes, in parish Bible studies, and in family Bibles in tens of millions of American Catholic homes.
  • Catholic school and parish-program students. The NABRE is the standard text used in Catholic elementary schools, high schools, RCIA programmes, and adult faith-formation curricula.
  • American Catholic clergy and lay leaders. Priests, deacons, catechists, and pastoral associates work from the NABRE because it is the lectionary text and what their congregations recognise.
  • Readers wanting integration of liturgy and personal reading. Catholics who want their daily Scripture reading to align with what they hear at Mass naturally use the NABRE, since the lectionary is drawn from it.

How the NABRE compares

Within the Catholic translation landscape and beyond:

  • The Douay-Rheims (1582–1610, Challoner revision 1749–1752) is the historic English Catholic Bible the NABRE replaced. The Douay-Rheims is translated from the Latin Vulgate; the NABRE from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Many traditionalist Catholics — particularly those attached to the Latin Mass — prefer the Douay-Rheims for personal reading.
  • The New Revised Standard Version in its Catholic Edition is the favoured Bible of many American Catholic biblical scholars for study, even though the NABRE is the liturgical text. The NRSV-CE has wider ecumenical recognition; the NABRE has the lectionary.
  • The Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSV-CE) and the Catholic edition of the ESV (ESV-CE, 2018) are alternative Catholic Bibles in the Tyndale–King James tradition. Many American Catholics with evangelical or Anglican backgrounds find them more familiar than the NABRE.
  • The King James Version is not a Catholic Bible — it omits the Deuterocanonical books from its main canon and reflects the Protestant settlement of seventeenth-century England. But it is the cultural backdrop of English Bible reading and worth comparing for any English-speaking Christian.

Frequently asked questions

Why does the NABRE have books that aren’t in Protestant Bibles?

The NABRE includes the Deuterocanonical books (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and the additional sections of Esther and Daniel) as canonical Scripture. The Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox churches, and the Oriental Orthodox churches all receive these books as Scripture, following the early Christian usage of the Greek Septuagint. The Protestant Reformers moved them to a separate Apocrypha section or excluded them altogether on the grounds that they are not in the Hebrew Bible. The disagreement is centuries old and reflects different views of how the canon was formed.

Is the NABRE the same translation used at Mass?

Almost. The Lectionary for Mass in the United States is drawn from the NABRE with some adjustments — a small number of verses are rendered slightly differently for liturgical proclamation, and some inclusive-language choices in the NABRE were moderated in the lectionary version at the request of the Vatican. The differences are minor; the great majority of verses are word-for-word identical between the NABRE and the lectionary.

Why do some Catholics prefer the RSV-CE or the ESV-CE over the NABRE?

Several reasons. The RSV-CE and ESV-CE descend from the Tyndale–King James tradition and have an English style some readers find more dignified than the NABRE’s. The NABRE’s footnotes embrace mainstream historical-critical scholarship in ways some traditional Catholics find unhelpful. And many Catholics with evangelical or Anglican backgrounds simply prefer the English of the translations they grew up with. These are matters of taste and formation, not of the NABRE’s validity as a Catholic Bible.

Will the New American Bible be revised again?

Yes. A complete revision of the New Testament — the first since 1986 — has been underway since 2013 and is expected to be published as the New American Bible 2025. The Old Testament of the NABRE will remain in place; only the New Testament is being revised. When the revision appears, it will be the lectionary’s New Testament base in the United States.

Is the NABRE copyrighted?

Yes. The NABRE is owned by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, under the sponsorship of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Permission to quote the NABRE in books, sermons, and other works is granted under standard publisher-permission terms.