I have to confess that when I saw the Timeless Truths Bible it particularly caught my eye because of another Bible I’d recently seen, The Ancient-Modern Bible. That one is in my preferred NKJV, but it’s…weird. I bring it up here because having seen that one, when this one came through my email, I was especially interested — and because readers who have heard of both might be curious how they are and are not alike.

What is the Timeless Truths Bible?

The Timeless Truths Bible is a Bible, obviously, which brings in a number of elements from church history. The end result is a Bible edition that clearly places our faith in a context of the historical church. It does this through a variety of elements: marginal commentary, historic confessions, brief biographies of historic church figures, and even artwork.

The Bible Itself

Let’s start our exploration with the Bible itself — that is, the actual main text. The Timeless Truths Bible uses the NET Bible translation. This is not my top translation, but that’s largely because it isn’t particularly common, and I prefer to use a translation which is not only good but readily available as the underlying text for various materials. Of course Bibles like this one are changing that balance. From what I’ve seen, the NET translation is a pretty solid translation, with a good balance of word-for-word (formal equivalency) and phrase-for-phrase (dynamic equivalency) approaches.

If you read it at the NET website, you can even see extensive translation notes for every verse/passage, showing alternatives and explaining why they made the translation choices they did. Obviously, that’s a bit unwieldy to put in every print edition of the Bible, but it’s there, so you can use it as a reference if you’re ever wondering, “why did they translate that as…?” It does translate John 3:16 in a manner that bothers me; the translation notes provides necessary clarification but, unfortunately, that doesn’t negate the misleading nature of the rendered text.

This particular edition — the Timeless Truths Bible — doesn’t contain any translation notes at all. No cross-references. No “some manuscripts omit this phrase.” Nothing. Apart from the marginal notes I’ll talk about later, there are no notes throughout the text of this Bible. Whether that’s a pro or a con, you decide. It does leave the Bible with a very “clean” layout and appearance.

The layout also relies on blue text, rather than red, to provide contrast. This seems to be a growing trend, and I like it a lot. It provides sufficient contrast in the formatting to enable things to be clear, but it’s gentler on the eyes than red — less jarring. It’s a black-letter edition, meaning the words of Jesus are in the same text color as everything else. Some people don’t like this, but I prefer it, as it avoids the implication that those words are somehow more the Word of the God than the rest of Scripture.

The text is in paragraph format, apart from poetry, and section headings are provided in blue. Each book has a brief introduction giving the key information in a quickly-scannable format.

This version is leatherette, and it includes two ribbons and beautiful decorative gilding.

Timeless Truths Bible Marginal Notes

The marginal notes are the first place this edition begins to set itself apart. In keeping with the clean format — and historical tradition — there is no “footnote” area in this Bible. You know how study Bibles often have areas at the bottom of the page with all the commentary? This doesn’t have that. What it does have is wide margins, which are interspersed with notes from various church fathers.

The overall impression is that of a wide-margin Bible where a few dozen of your friends have already taken notes. These notes primarily come from well-known figures from church history, such as Iranaeus, Origen, Augustine, John Calvin, and Charles Spurgeon. I haven’t itemized every note, but it looks as though they overall are consistent with the Reformed tradition (which is, in turn, consistent with the confessions the book contains).

I appreciate that the lifespan of each commentator is included with his name every time his commentary is used, because I don’t know about you, but I have trouble remembering where all of these people fit into history just off the top of my head!

Snapshots of Historic Church Figures

There are also snapshots of historic church figures, in the form of brief 1- to 2-page biographies. As far as I can tell, these are not indexed anywhere; you just have to find them as you flip through. This seems a little weird to me, since all the commentary  is indexed. If these are incorporated into that main index, I couldn’t readily identify them. These include (parentheticals are where the bios are located):

• Ignatius of Antioch (Gen 20)
• Irenaeus of Lyon (Gen 40)
• Justin Martyr (Ex 10)
• Tertullian (Ex 40)
• Origen (Lev 13)
• Eusebius (Num 12)
• Athanasius of Alexandria (Deu 2)
• Anthony of the Desert (Jos 3)
• Ephre the Syrian (Jdg 2)
• John Cassian (1 Sam 2)
• Basil the Great (2 Sam 4)
• Gregory of Nazianzus (1 Kin 5)
• Gregory of Nyssa (2 Kin 4)
• Ambrose of Milan (1 Chr 2)
• Jerome (2 Chr 3)
• Augustine (2 Chr 36)
• Cyril of Alexandria  (Neh 7)
• Boethius (Job 8)
• Maximus the Confessor (Ps 49)
• Gregory the Great (Ps 99)
• Venerable Bede (Ps 149)
• Bernard of Clairvaux (Pro 9)
• Thomas Aquinas (Is 7)
• John Hus (Is 46)
• Thomas á Kempis (Jer 13)
• Desiderius Erasmus (Jer 50)
• Francis of Assisi (Eze 11)
• John Wycliffe (Dan 11)
• Martin Luther (Am 7)
• Ulrich Zwingli (Zec 14)
• John Calvin (Matt 11)
• Martin Bucer (Mk 2)
• John Knox (Lk 8)
• Menno Simons (Jn 8)
• William Tyndale (Acts 10)
• Ignatius of Loyola (Rom 5)
• John Wesley (1 Cor 6)
• George Whitefield (2 Cor 6)
• Jonathan Edwards (Gal 4)
• John Bunyan (Eph 5)
• Charles Spurgeon (1 Th 2)
• D.L. Moody (1 Tim 5)
• J. Gresham Machen (Heb 7)
• H. Richard Niebuhr (Ja 3)
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1 Pe 3)
• C. S. Lewis (Rev 2)

Each of these also lists some of the individual’s most notable written works, which is helpful for getting an idea of what else you might want to expand your church history reading to. (And many of these are quoted in the marginal notes; check the index.)

Creeds & Confessions

Historical creeds and confessions in this include (again, parentheticals are the locations where these are found within the Timeless Truths Bible):

• Apostles’ Creed (Gen 3)
• The Nicene Creed (Deu 6)
• The Chalcedonian Definition (Ruth 1)
• The Athanasian Creed – “summary selection” (2 Kin 18)
• The Augsburg Confession – “selections” (Neh 9)
• The Belgic Confession – “selected portions” (Ps 78)
• Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion  – selections (Is 8)
• The Heidelberg Confession – selections (Jer 33)
• Canons of Dort – selections (Hos 2)
• The Westminster Catechism – selections (Matt 27)
• London Baptist Confession – selections (Acts 15)
• The Lausanne Covenant – selections (Jude 1)

Sharp-eyed readers will note that only the first few are included in their entirety. I was highly disappointed by this. Not only was this a missed opportunity which, in my opinion, makes their inclusion as part of this “package” less valuable; I find the advertising misleading. The slipcover says that it includes the “text of” these confessions. While, true, it doesn’t say “full text of…” a plain reading of this description does not leave the reader thinking he’s going to get a few small excerpted snippets.

These are formatted beautifully and are easy to read. (Unfortunately, I apparently forgot to take a picture of these.) I also can clearly understand why they chose the excerpts they did to highlight. But I was very disappointed that the full text is not included.

Artwork

The Timeless Truths Bible also boasts “full-color” artwork. It is there, interspersed throughout the pages on special, full-color, heavier-weight glossy paper. It is also in keeping with the “historical” theme of this edition, being historic artwork. But I don’t love it.

Soeme of these images are gruesome or just plain old ugly and, in my estimation, they actually detract from the simple beauty of the book.

In particular, we have The Deluge, by Francis Danby, which depicts men drowning in the Flood and Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac, which…is pretty self-explanatory. While I by no means believe we should avoid the reality of this, I don’t think we need to feature visual artwork of it, either. I would prefer my children not be traumatized by seeing me flip through my Bible.

El Greco’s The Adoration of the Shepherds portrays angels as little fat naked babies, in stark contrast to their biblical descriptions. Accurate to art history? Yes. Accurate to Scripture? No. And therefore a questionable choice for inclusion in a Bible.

Multiple New Testament artworks feature Jesus, and one Old Testament work may depict the Father (it’s slightly ambiguous), which is a strange choice given that all of these will be offensive to many of the Reformed Christian readers who seem to be the primary intended audience for this particular Bible edition.

All in all, although there are a few lovely images, the artwork aspect of this Bible is a major fail. Fortunately, since these pages are clearly distinct from the main text pages, they could be carefully cut out. Or apply your Bible journaling skills and cover them up starting with a layer of gesso.

Back Matter

The Timeless Truths Bible wraps up with a bibliography/index of all of the marginal notes and a list of the works of art. It also does contain full-color maps. There is no concordance or any other written back matter apart from the aforementioned lists.

Issues With This Bible

As I mentioned, I strongly dislike the artwork component of this Bible. I was also highly disappointed that the full text of the confessions was not included. And I thought it was super-weird that there’s a whole index to the marginal notes and a list of the artwork, but there’s no index to the biographies or creeds & confessions.

If I were responsible for an updated edition of this book, I would add an index of the biographies (or include them in the existing bibliography/index, with distinct formatting so margin notes and bios can be distinguished). I would also add the full text of all of the included confessions as back matter, and then add a note to each of the inline selections informing the reader that the full text of the document can be found on page __.

I also had a few pages here and there which were folded over and then cut incorrectly. Mostly these were minor, but this one is a pretty big mess. So that’s a quality-control issue. Not a deal-breaker, but worth mentioning.

You Mentioned an Ancient-Modern Bible…?

Back at the beginning of this (now-lengthy) post, I mentioned the Ancient-Modern Bible I recently saw, which is what primed me for the Timeless Truths Bible to grab my attention. Now that I’ve told you all about this Bible, a few readers may be wondering how this one and that one differ. They’re both published by Thomas Nelson, and they’re very similar in some respects.

The formatting is very different. That one has much smaller text (and pages), and the content is really crammed onto the page. There are more marginal notes (by appearances; I didn’t actually count them), so that’s part of it, but the whole layout just has less white space and feels less “clean.”

Book introductions are similar, but “fancier” — which, again, makes them feel less “clean.” The color scheme is black text with red and gold text rather than the blue of the Timeless Truths Bible. Except for the biographies, which look almost identical to this one. Only the biographies (and marginal notes) are interspersed.

However, it has considerably more back matter.

This back matter begins with “supplemental articles” on Creation and Fall, Meditating on His Word, The Church, Salvation and Union with Christ, The Trinity, and What the Whole World is Waiting For. (These are all by modern authors.) It then contains “Creeds of the Church”: The Apostles’ Creed, The Nicene Creed, The Chalcedonion Definition of the Faith, and The Athanasian Creed.

Then the index to the marginal notes. Then a selection of “readings for Advent, Lent, and Easter.”

These are followed by full-color pages that include some historical religious artwork. Some of these pieces overlap the pieces in the Timeless Truths Bible, but they’re less intrusive tucked in the back (and I don’t see the disturbing sacrifice-of-Isaac image here). And also some full-color maps.

The Timeless Truths Bible is, in my estimation, the better option overall. The Ancient-Modern Bible does have a couple extra features this one doesn’t have — the supplemental articles and Lent/Easter/Advent readings — but those seem a little unnecessary to me or even out of place. And the formatting of this one is more user-friendly (although the other is also beautiful in its own way).

The biggest different is the “modern” of the Ancient-Modern Bible. The idea behind that one is that it includes marginal commentary from both historical church figures and modern church figures. But I found the selection very strange. The “modern” part of the commentary doesn’t seem to be distributed across a breadth of evangelical protestant traditions, or to emphasize those modern authors who are most closely follow in the footsteps of the “ancient” commentators. Rather, they seem to emphasize modern authors that many of us in the modern Reformed church would consider shallow, wishy-washy, or even bordering on heretical. No R.C. Sproul. No Francis Schaeffer. But Billy Graham, Jack Hayford, Eugene Peterson, Brennan Manning. And these marginal notes do not include dates, which becomes rather problematic when you don’t know if the author is a long-standing, highly-respected church father or a member of the modern church who may or many not have been fully tried and tested yet.

With all of that said, I was intrigued when I saw that Bible but pretty disappointed with the overall execution of it, so I was doubly intrigued when I saw this Bible — and happy to report that, although there are a couple of changes I would make if I had my “druthers,” I believe this one is, overall, well-executed. It’s a good, readable, trustworthy Bible.

Where Can I Get It?

You can learn more about the Timeless Truths Bible — including other available cover options — and buy it here.