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INTRODUCTION TO THE HARPER COLLINS STUDY BIBLE "By Wayne A. Meeks" The Bible is the most familiar book in the English-speaking world; certainly it is the one most often published and most widely owned. Yet many a serious reader has found it one of the strangest of books. This paradox arises from factors in the book's history as well as from dimensions of our own history that have shaped the expectations with which we begin to read. "Enabling the Reader to Read" The most elementary of the obstacles standing in the way of reading the Bible is that its component parts were originally written in languages most of us do not know. Reading must therefore begin with a translation. The New Revised Standard Version stands in a tradition, many centuries old, of translating the Bible so that ordinary people can understand it when it is read aloud in worship gatherings or when they study it for themselves. More immediately, the NRSV stands in a direct succession from the King James Version of 1611 (as Professor Metzger explains in the Translation Committee's preface, pp. xxv-xxx). The NRSV is one among a large number of recent translations of the whole or parts of the Bible that together give to the present generation of English readers an unprecedented variety of fresh renderings of the original languages. All these are informed by significant advances in historical, archaeological, and linguistic knowledge that have occurred in recent decades. The NRSV is selected for this "HarperCollins Study Bible "for several reasons, of which two are most significant. First, the declared intention of the Translation Committee to produce a translation "as literal as possible" makes this versionwell adapted for "study." For example, careful reading is enhanced when we can observe such things as the recurrence of certain key words; if these are rendered into our language with some consistency, the task is obviously easier. Second, the NRSV was designed to be as "inclusive "as po