Study Bible

A study Bible is an edition of the Bible prepared for use by a serious student of the Bible. It provides scholarly information designed to help the reader gain a better understanding of and context for the text.

Perhaps the first edition of an English language Bible that qualified as a "study Bible" was the Geneva Bible; it contained extensive cross-references, synopses, and doctrinal points. The text of the Geneva Bible was usually not printed without the commentary, though the Cambridge edition was printed without commentary.

The Church of England disputed some of the statements made in the Geneva Bible annotations. This led to the creation of the King James Bible, which was typically printed with a much less extensive apparatus or none at all. Several commentators have supplied annotated King James Bibles containing their own points of view, but unlike the Geneva Bible, these commentaries are not as thoroughly integrated into the text.

Another historically significant study Bible was the Scofield Reference Bible, first printed by Cyrus Scofield in 1909. This study Bible became widely popular in the United States, where it spread the interpretation system known as dispensationalism among fundamentalist Christians. A new version, the Recovery Version, was published in 1985. It holds a similar interpretation, and this study Bible has a very large number of cross-references and explanatory and interpretative footnotes.

Nearly all Catholic Bibles have explanatory and interpretative footnotes. For example, the Jerusalem Bible is a widely respected study Bible originally made by French monks in Jerusalem, under the auspices of the Catholic Church. The original French edition of 1961 became the basis of versions of this study Bible in several other languages, including English, revised as the New Jerusalem Bible; some versions have more extensive notes than others.

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