Since the Bible text is not printed in our books this year, we will all be reading/studying/praying from Bibles with slight variations in words and maybe even chapter and verse numbering. Our tradition at Women's Catholic Scripture Study has been to use the Revised Standard Version-Catholic Edition as our foundational Bible translation for in-depth study. If you do not have a Bible in this translation, the following links will be of help to you:
The Revised Standard Version-Catholic Edition ohttp://jmom.honlam.org/rsvce/
A searchable RSV-CE from the EWTN website
http://www.ewtn.com/devotionals/biblesearch.asp
Catechism of the Catholic Church (read it, search it, online):
http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc.htm
Bible Translations
James Akin of Catholic Answers writes about how to choose a Bible translation: http://www.cin.org/users/james/files/biblever.htm
Here is a link to an article on Bible translations from EWTN: http://www.ewtn.com/expert/answers/bible_versions.htm
Here is a link to an article on Bible translations from Catholic Answers:
http://www.catholic.com/library/bible_translations_guide.asp
Here is yet another link to a Catholic Update article on Bible translations:
http://www.americancatholic.org/Newsletters/CU/ac0704.asp
Deuterocanonical Books
Here is a list of specific verses in the New Testament that quote from the Deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament: (This page also includes quotes from the early Church Fathers that make reference to the Deutercanonical books.)
Click here for a great article by Steve Ray on this topic, and click on the article titled "Bible: Who has the Correct Collection of Books, Catholics or Protestants?"
Click here to read a booklet by Peter Kreeft about creation. Scroll down and look for "book 3" in this Luke E. Hart series on the creed. You can even listen to it being read to you as you follow along in the booklet! ...or download the mp3 file and listen to it on your ipod!
Here is an article from Catholic Answers on Adam and Eve and Evolution: http://www.catholic.com/library/adam_eve_and_evolution.asp
Here's a Q and A for you from Catholic Answers' website (http://www.catholic.com/)
Q: A friend told me that God created other "parents" besides Adam and Eve, including Cain’s wife. Is this heretical?
A: Your friend’s theory is known as polygenism, and it was addressed by Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Humani Generis:
The faithful cannot embrace that opinion that maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the teaching authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own. (HG 37)
Where did Cain’s wife come? Although their names are not recorded in Scripture, Adam and Eve had other children, including daughters—Cain seems to have married his sister. This was necessary (for a time) to propagate the human race. St. Augustine explained this in The City of God, book XV. When the necessity for sibling marriage ended so, too, did God’s allowance of it.
—Jim Blackburn
More from Catholic Answers:
Q: What was Ham’s sin against his father, Noah, which caused Noah to curse Ham and his offspring? Noah didn’t punish Ham simply because Ham saw Noah’s naked body, did he?
A: It appears that Ham’s sin was disrespect for his father. Not only did he see his father drunk and passed out naked, but he told his brothers about his father’s state and did nothing to correct the situation (Gen. 9:21–22). It was his brothers who covered their father and did so while avoiding looking at him in his undignified state (Gen. 9:23). In the culture in which they lived, Ham’s decision to publicize Noah’s indiscretion with alcohol and his undignified sprawl would have been mortifying to his father and would have been considered extremely disrespectful.
—Michelle Arnold
Since Eve was the only woman in existence at that time, whom did Cain marry?
In the first generation of human beings brothers, of course, must have married their sisters—to which there is no biological objection in a thoroughly healthy stock, nor any social objection in the circumstances of the beginning of the human race. Genesis, in its stories of human origins, takes the presence of women for granted, seldom naming them and merely observing, in chapter 5, verse 4, that Adam "begot sons and daughters."
But—since the question was asked about Cain—would we be right in thinking that we ought to have this first generation of humans in mind when we read the story of Cain and Abel? We now know that names in the Old Testament may often stand for nations or races rather than individuals. "Adam" may well sometimes stand for the whole human race; "Eve" for all women. In the story of the fall, we know from the Church’s teaching that these names stand for the two particular individuals who were the first human pair and whose particular act of choice is there told to us. But this may not still apply at the beginning of chapter 4, the story of Cain and Abel.
Indeed, it seems more reasonable to suppose that the inspired writer (whose whole concern is with man’s position before God, not with archaeology) is here skipping over many hundreds of thousands of years, when he gives the story of the murder of the shepherd by the farmer. For we know by ordinary human knowledge that there have been men on the earth for hundreds of thousands of years; whereas agriculture seems to have begun only within the last ten thousand years. . . .
Q: Is the story of Jonah and the whale a myth? (from Catholic Answers)
A: Catholics are free to understand the story of Jonah and the whale as literal history or as didactic fiction. In Catholicism and Fundamentalism, Karl Keating writes:
"The Catholic Church is silent on the proper interpretation of many biblical passages, readers being allowed to accept one of several understandings. Take, as an example, Jonah’s escapade at sea, which readers often find disturbing. Ronald Knox said that ‘no defender of the sense of Scripture ever pretended, surely, that this was a natural event. If it happened, it was certainly a miracle; and not to my mind a more startling miracle than the raising of Lazarus, in which I take it Catholics are certainly bound to believe. Surely what puts one off the story of Jonah is the element of the grotesque that is present in it’ (Ronald Knox and Arnold Lunn, Difficulties, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 109).
"The most common interpretation nowadays, and one that is held by indubitably orthodox exegetes, is that the story of the prophet being swallowed and then disgorged by a ‘great fish’ is merely didactic fiction, a grand tale told to establish a religious point. Catholics are perfectly free to take this or a more literal view. . . .
"Strictly literal interpretations of what happened to Jonah actually come in two forms. One relies on the fact that people apparently have been swallowed by whales and lived to talk about it. In 1891 a seaman, James Bartley, from a ship named the Star of the East, was found missing after an eighty-foot sperm whale had been caught. He was presumed drowned. The next day, when the crew cut up the whale, Bartley was discovered alive inside. If Jonah’s three days in the whale were counted like Christ’s three days in the tomb, after the Semitic fashion—that is, parts of three distinct days, but perhaps only slightly more than twenty-four hours total—then it is possible that Jonah could have been coughed up by that great fish just as his story says. This would be a purely natural explanation of the episode.
"The other literal interpretation is that Jonah indeed underwent what the story, read as straight history, says he did but survived only because of a positive miracle, and several different sorts of miracles have been suggested, such as suspended animation on Jonah’s part or a fish with a remarkably large air supply and decidedly mild gastric juices" (Catholicism and Fundamentalism, Ignatius Press, 129–30).
Is the God of the Old Testament different than the God of the New Testament? Here's an article from Catholic Answers regarding the heresy of Marcionism to shed some light on the question... http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/1994/9403hotm.asp
Click here for free mp3 files of conversion stories and talks on various topics.
Click here to order tabs for your Catechism of the Catholic Church...under $4.00!!!
Click here to read about "the sin of Onan"...(mentioned in the lecture on Genesis chaper 2) Click here to read another article about Onan.