A quick word before we start. Thomas Nelson sent me a copy of this Bible to review, and the opinions here are my own. The Amazon links below are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Open most Protestant Bibles and you go straight from Malachi to Matthew. Open this one and the Old Testament keeps going. Tobit. Judith. The Wisdom of Solomon. Three books of Maccabees. And when the Old Testament finally does end, it ends with Daniel.

That was my first surprise with The Orthodox Study Bible. It was not my last.

I am not Orthodox. Most of you know I teach from the NKJV, and I come at this Bible as a Protestant. But I love church history, and this Bible opens a door most of us have never walked through. It shows you how the Eastern Orthodox Church reads Scripture, and it puts the voices of the early church right there in the margins. I find it one of the most intriguing Bibles I have ever held.

What This Bible Is

The Orthodox Study Bible is a full study Bible built for Orthodox Christians and for anyone who wants to understand them. Thomas Nelson describes it as the work of a pan-Orthodox team of scholars and pastors, meaning the contributors come from across the Orthodox churches rather than from one jurisdiction.

The New Testament is the New King James Version, the same text I teach from every week. The Old Testament is different. It is a fresh English translation of the Septuagint, the ancient Greek Old Testament, prepared by the St. Athanasius Academy of Orthodox Theology. More on that in a minute, because it is the heart of what makes this Bible unusual.

What You Get

Feature	What It Includes
Old Testament	The St. Athanasius Academy Septuagint, including the Deuterocanon
New Testament	The New King James Version
Commentary	Notes drawn from Christian writers and teachers of the first ten centuries after Christ
Book introductions	An introduction and outline for each book
Liturgical notes	Notes tying passages to the seasons of feasting and fasting in the Church calendar
Lectionary	Readings for the Church year
Prayers	Morning and evening prayers
Articles	Supplemental articles, including an overview of the books of the Bible, saints of the Old Testament, and Christology
Icons	Full-color icons
Index	A subject index to the study notes
This edition	Black genuine leather, 1,856 pages, list price $129.99

The Old Testament the Apostles Quoted

Some background first. Beginning in the third century before Christ, Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek for the Greek-speaking Jews of the Mediterranean world. Tradition says there were about seventy translators, and the translation took its name from that number. Septuagint. Seventy.

By the time of the apostles, Greek was the common language of the Roman world, and the Septuagint was the Old Testament most believers outside Judea knew. When the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, they often quote it in a form that matches the Septuagint. The Orthodox Church has kept reading that Greek Old Testament ever since.

Most English Bibles, the NKJV included, translate the Old Testament from the Hebrew text. So when you read this Bible, you are reading a different textual stream from the one in your usual Bible. Most of the time you will barely notice. Now and then you will.

When I reviewed the NET Bible, Full Notes Edition, I spent some time on Isaiah 7:14. The Hebrew word there is almah (עַלְמָה, H5959), a young woman of marriageable age. When Matthew quotes the verse, he uses the Greek parthenos (παρθένος, G3933), virgin. Matthew did not invent that word. It was already sitting in the Septuagint, translated by Jewish scholars centuries before Christ was born.

In the Orthodox Study Bible you read Isaiah the way Matthew read him. You are holding the Greek tradition Matthew quoted. For a student of the Bible, that is worth the price of admission.

The Books Our Bibles Leave Out

I will say it plainly. I love that these books are here.

The Orthodox Old Testament includes books and passages that Protestant Bibles leave out. Thomas Nelson calls them the Deuterocanon. In this Bible you will find 1 Ezra, Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Wisdom of Sirach, Baruch, the Epistle of Jeremiah, and 1, 2, and 3 Maccabees. Esther and Daniel carry their longer Greek forms, so Daniel includes Susanna, Bel and the Serpent, and the hymn of the three young men in the furnace. The Prayer of Manasseh appears with 2 Chronicles, and the Psalter has 151 psalms.

Many Protestants assume these books are a Catholic or Orthodox oddity. They are closer to home than that. The 1611 King James Bible printed the Apocrypha between the Testaments. The Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles said the church reads these books “for example of life and instruction of manners,” while declining to build doctrine on them. For a long time, English-speaking Protestants knew these stories.

And you need some of them to read your New Testament well. In John 10:22 we read, “Now it was the Feast of Dedication in Jerusalem, and it was winter” (NKJV). Where did the Feast of Dedication come from? You will not find it anywhere in the Protestant Old Testament. You find it in 1 Maccabees 4, when Judas Maccabeus and his brothers cleansed the temple after Antiochus Epiphanes defiled it and dedicated the altar again. Jews still keep that feast today. We call it Hanukkah.

Or take Hebrews 11:35. “Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection” (NKJV). Many readers have connected that verse to the mother and her seven sons in 2 Maccabees 7, who died under torture rather than break God’s law, confessing that God would raise them up. Read that chapter and Hebrews 11 hits harder.

You do not have to accept these books as Scripture to profit from them. I do not. But I am very glad to have them on my study shelf, in a careful translation, with notes.

The Notes and the Fathers

The commentary is where this Bible teaches you the most about Orthodoxy. Thomas Nelson says the notes draw on Christian writers and teachers from the first ten centuries after Christ. That puts their sources in the church before the split between East and West in 1054.

The sample page printed on the back of the box gives you a taste. The note on Genesis 1:1 quotes the Nicene Creed, “I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” Another note tells you that the opening passage of Genesis is read at Vespers on Great and Holy Saturday. That is the second kind of note in this Bible. It ties the text to the Church’s year of worship, so you see a passage the way Orthodox believers hear it in their services.

Add the lectionary, the morning and evening prayers, and the full-color icons, and you start to understand that for the Orthodox, Scripture is something read and prayed in worship. This Bible was built for the study desk and for the prayer corner.

The cover tells the same story. It carries an icon of Christ holding an open book. The page shows the words of John 13:34-35 in the King James, beginning “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another.”

Where It Came From

The story behind this Bible is church history in its own right.

The project director was Fr. Peter Gillquist. Gillquist had been a staff leader with Campus Crusade for Christ in the 1960s. He and a group of fellow evangelicals started reading the early church fathers, trying to find the church of the New Testament. That search led them, step by step, into Orthodoxy. In 1987 their movement, the Evangelical Orthodox Church, was received into the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese.

So this Bible grew out of evangelicals who went looking for the early church. Thomas Nelson published the New Testament and Psalms in 1993. The full Bible, with the new Septuagint translation, followed in 2008. The general editors included Joseph Allen, Michel Najim, Fr. Jack Sparks, and Fr. Theodore Stylianopoulos, with Fr. Thomas Hopko as a special consultant.

A Word for Protestant Readers

Go in with your eyes open. The notes are written from Orthodox teaching, and they say so. You will read about Mary as the Theotokos, the God-bearer. You will read about the sacraments, about icons, and about Holy Tradition and the Church as the setting in which Scripture is read. A Protestant reader will disagree with some of it, and I do.

But that is part of the value. Most of us know Orthodoxy only from secondhand descriptions. This Bible lets the Orthodox speak for themselves. You can listen to a fellow Christian explain what they believe and why, in their own words, beside the text of Scripture. And when you disagree, you will know exactly what you are disagreeing with.

The Physical Bible

This edition is bound in black genuine leather, runs 1,856 pages, and carries a list price of $129.99. It is a Bible built to last. If that price is more than you want to spend, the same Bible also comes in a brown leathersoft edition and a softcover.

Retailers list this edition with a release date of November 3, 2026, so it may show as a preorder for a little while.

A Pause

A genuine leather study Bible is an investment, and this one costs more than most. Not a deal breaker, but a pause.

The second is the Old Testament itself. Because it comes from the Greek, it will not always match the Hebrew-based Old Testament in your usual Bible. Book names, chapter numbers, and verse numbers will sometimes differ too. That makes it a fine Bible to study beside your main Bible and a hard one to teach a Protestant class from. Keep your NKJV open next to it.

And the notes serve a particular tradition. If you want a neutral survey of how different Christians read a passage, this is not that book. It speaks for Orthodoxy, by design.

Who This Bible Is For

If you love church history, this belongs on your shelf. It puts the early church’s way of reading Scripture in your hands in a form you can use.

If you have Orthodox friends or neighbors and want to understand what they believe, start here. You will learn more from this Bible than from a stack of articles about it.

If you have never read Tobit, Judith, or Maccabees, this is a careful and readable place to meet them.

And if you are Orthodox, or drawn toward Orthodoxy, you probably already know this Bible. This genuine leather edition is a handsome way to own it.

If you want one study Bible to teach from in a Protestant church, choose something else for your main Bible and keep this one close by for study.

A Pastoral Word

Jude wrote his short letter to Christians who were being pulled away from what they had been taught.

“Beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.”

Jude 3, NKJV

The word for “delivered” is paradidōmi (παραδίδωμι, G3860). It means to hand over, to pass something from one set of hands into another. The faith did not start with us. It was handed to the saints once for all, and every generation since has received it and handed it on.

That is why church history matters. When you read the early church, you are listening to the people who carried the faith before you did. Some of them died for it. You will not agree with every conclusion they reached, and you are not asked to. The Bereans tested even Paul against the Scriptures, and we should test everyone else the same way.

But we are poorer when we act as though the faith was handed straight from the apostles to us, with nobody in between. This Bible fills in some of the people in between. Read it with your own Bible open beside it, and test everything.

Recommended, especially for the student of church history.