Eighteen years ago, I walked into my first night class with Scott Hahn on the New Testament. My fiancé and I had the required books for the class divided between us, which were mostly individual volumes of the books of the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible — three of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. Every week, we would attend the lecture and absorb scholar Hahn’s biblical knowledge, trying to let it soak in, hoping to remember it all, and, of course, studying our notes.

A few years after we took our class, it must have been easier for Hahn’s students, as they could get the whole Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: The New Testament in one volume, which was edited by both Hahn and Curtis Mitch. I asked for my own copy of the New Testament for Christmas one year and started to meet monthly with friends, studying different books of Scripture. The women in our group had a wide variety of backgrounds, some having read Scripture their whole lives and others barely reading it at all. The notes and essays in the Study Bible on the RSV: Second Catholic Edition translation, opened our minds and hearts to the Scripture in a completely new way for all of us. 

What makes this Study Bible unique are the extensive essays, introductions to each book, commentaries, charts and notes on nearly every verse of the Bible. The notes are rooted in the Tradition and drawn from the fathers, doctors and councils of the Church, giving the various interpretive senses of Scripture. They tie together the Old and the New Testaments. 

I loved the New Testament edition so much that I started checking several times a year (as many others did as well) on the status of the complete Old Testament. From time to time, I would see that another individual book of the Old Testament had been released, but I held off. I wanted to have the whole Old Testament at once, as I knew it would aid me in both my work as a theological editor and writer but also in my personal prayer life. And sometime late summer 2024, I learned to my great delight that the complete Bible would be released by the end of 2024. I had a copy pre-ordered, the leatherbound as opposed to the hardback, and waited eagerly for it to arrive. 

Then one day, mid-Advent, among the packages that daily accumulated on our doorstep in preparation for Christmas, the long-expected package appeared. My teenagers looked on in surprise as I unboxed the beautifully bound Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: Old and New Testament with a huge grin on my face — and even made one of them photograph me with it. 

I was giddy as I flipped through the 2,320 pages printed on standard Bible stock, saw the familiar 9-point-type-size font, glanced at the nearly 18,000 footnotes, and peaked at the 50-plus maps. Hahn and Mitch had the help of 12 other Catholic biblical scholars to gather and compose the commentary on the books of the Old Testament, a task which would have been unsurmountable without them. The pages of this complete Bible are the same size and formatted exactly as the original New Testament Study Bible, though somehow the full volume is not much thicker than the New Testament. The leatherbound is smooth to touch and lays open easily on a table. However, while it is so large that I have yet to take it in my prayer bag to Eucharistic adoration, I have loved using as a resource at home. 

My husband has been reading the Bible aloud to our family after dinner many nights for over nine years. Now that our children are all above the age of reason, we pause and discuss things, such as the events of the Old Testament and the meanings of St. Paul’s letters. Lately, I have had my new Study Bible nearby and have flipped it open to contribute to the discussion and verify our interpretations. Hahn and Mitch and their colleagues have given a great gift to the English-speaking Church: They combed through volumes and volumes of commentaries and Church documents and have given a clear, concise and dependably Catholic commentary on the Bible. 

I am so grateful for the scholars and the work that they compiled and will be using the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: Old and New Testament for years to come. 

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