Bible néo-Crampon Libre

The Sainte Bible néo-Crampon Libre is, in its own description, a modernization of the French Catholic translation by Crampon. Augustin Crampon, a canon of Amiens cathedral, translated every book of the Bible from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek; the work first appeared in a bilingual edition with the Vulgate between 1894 and 1904, came out in a single volume in 1904, and was revised in 1923. The modernized version is copyrighted 2022 by the Fraternité de Tibériade, a Catholic community.

The inherited method is Crampon's: a translation close to the originals, sober, in a French still read with respect today. The modernization updates the language without changing the character of the text. It adds section headings with parallel passages, explanatory footnotes, and uses the name Yahweh, as in Exodus 3:15, where a note discusses the name's link to the verb "to be".

For French readers who want a Bible from the Catholic tradition that is solid and free, it is a strong choice, and its faithfulness to the original makes it useful to Protestant readers too. The honest limit: in its source it includes the deuterocanonical books (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees), and in Midvash those books are left out, because the reader follows the 66-book canon. Anyone who wants the full Catholic Bible needs to go to the source. As a recent modernization from a single community, it also lacks the weight of use behind the major French Bibles, such as the Jerusalem Bible.

It is free because the Fraternité de Tibériade published it under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. You can read, quote and share it without asking, with credit and the same license on derivative works.