The Ecumenical Bible is out
– Here it is! It has already been available in different editions and translations of course. But now we have a [ecumenical – editorial note] Bible that everyone can call their own – said bishop Andrzej Malicki, president of the Bible Society in Poland, in his sermon during a thanksgiving service to celebrate the publication of the Ecumenical Bible as a single volume.
A presentation of the volume took place the following day.
After more than twenty years of work, the Bible Society in Poland published the entire Ecumenical Bible in a single volume. On 16 March, a thanksgiving service took place in the Evangelical-Reformed Church in Warsaw to celebrate the joyful event, and on the following day, the publication was officially introduced at the National Museum of Ethnography in Warsaw. Both occasions were well attended by clergy and lay people involved in the ecumenical movement, including those who participated in the work on the ecumenical translation of the Bible.
This translation is a joint achievement of translators, linguists and editors from eleven member Churches of the Bible Society in Poland: the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the Church of Christ, the Baptist Union of Poland, the Evangelical-Augsburg Church, the Evangelical-Methodist Church, the Evangelical-Reformed Church, the Polish Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Old Catholic Mariavite Church and the Pentecostal Church.
The project has since 1995 been spearheaded by the Bible Society in Poland, which established the Interdenominational Translation Team to make it happen. The number one rule adopted by translators and editors in their work was to stay faithful to the original text. The language variety of the translation is contemporary Polish.
Individual parts of the translation came out earlier: The New Testament and Psalms (2001), The Book of Psalms as a separate volume (2003) and five volumes of Old Testament books: the canonical Didactic Books (2008), The Deuterocanonical Books (2011), The Pentateuch (2015), The Historical Books (2016) and The Prophetic Books (2016). The translation effort has now been crowned by the publication of the Ecumenical Bible as a single volume. This edition has been revised compared to volumes published since 2001.
Photo story of the thanksgiving service and presentation of the Ecumenical Bible (photo by Michał Karski)