I have been Orthodox for about a decade and I just received my own copy of the OSB. Before explaining why I've taken so long to purchase a copy and noting some negatives, let me summarize the positives. Even though I am just starting to seriously go through the OSB and have only compared a fraction of the text to a few (maybe 10) other versions, I can already say that the OSB is the best English translation of the Bible out there. It gets 5/5 stars easily. In the same way that the NKJV preserves and improves upon the simultaneously rigorous and poetic translation of the KJV, the OSB improves many aspects of the NKJV while retaining most of its strengths. It brings back the full canon of Scripture (and in a more traditional order), which is huge—the NKJV only updated part of the KJV and is missing entire books containing key prophecies and histories that are quoted in, fulfilled in, and underly the New Testament. It fixes a lot of issues with the Hebrew texts—the Hebrew texts that most Protestant OTs are based on is a different manuscript tradition than that used and quoted by Christ and the Apostles, something quite apparent to any reader who is familiar with the LXX or older English translations of it (e.g., Brenton's Septuagint). And it finally gives modern English-speaking Christians a good, liturgical-quality translation of the entire Bible that should be acceptable for both home study and public reading. This is *the* version I recommend people for serious use and, if that is what you need, this is the one for you. The TLDR is this: the OSB is the best English-language Bible out there.Having said all of that and without in any way diminishing my glowing recommendation for this amazing work, there are definitely some issues with the OSB that should be addressed in future printings. The first standout is the "study notes"—despite being a faithful Orthodox Christian, the infamy of these notes has kept me away from this excellent translation for years. I used to cringe upon anyone even mentioning the OSB, such were my memories of flipping through and reading them years ago. To put it mildly, the commentary is, in many places, simplistic; as other reviewers have hinted, it is hard to describe just how wastefully crass and conspicuous some of the notes seem. As of this review, I don't even think I can be angry at the notes anymore—if people really need it rehashed again in only slightly more obvious language and according to only the most overt possible reading, fine. Maybe I have just exhausted myself so much worrying and am just numb to them now, but the notes are what they are. Thankfully, there are a lot good things about the commentary—it isn't all bad and is certainly not deserving of all the anxiety I've developed towards it! In all but the most unsubtle of notes, the commentary is actually fairly useful and well-referenced. It isn't really suffused with patristic material and quotations as advertised, but it gets the job done. The commentary really tries to bring out Christ and Trinitarian themes in the OT, something that is usually missed in a non-Christian reading of the text (unfortunately, nearly all moderns—even modern Christians—do not read the text in a Christian way, a problem Fr. John Behr has spoken and written very profoundly on; his talks on scriptural interpretation should be mandatory listening for all modern Christians). Sadly, even in this the notes feel very minimalistic and basic, missing a lot of important references to and prophecies about Christ and frequently pigeonholing rich, complex passages into only one obvious interpretation. For a broad example, while I was pleasantly surprised to see a few of the prophecies in Proverbs explained (I would consider this a more difficult book, as we are not trained to read it prophetically in the post-"Enlightenment" world and thus have a hard time reading it in a Christian manner), the riches in Isaiah (which is pretty obviously a prophecy, even to moderns) feel like they've been barely unearthed. This might still be more "Jesus" than most people are used to seeing in the OT, so that is good, but it doesn't feel like it is deep enough for any Orthodox Christian who is immersed, even weekly, in part of the daily cycle of services and Liturgies and wants to keep going deeper. Obviously, I haven't done a thorough study of every single note in the OSB, but the commentary unfortunately does also have what feels to me to be some modern teaching, either confusingly ambiguous or simply heterodox, in a few places (e.g., the marriage bed in 1 Corinthians seems to be treated as place to express sexual desires, not as a place to *bear children* and *through that* learn the *only* proper place of sexuality and thereby control it, which is the teaching of all fathers East and West), though that seems to be the exception rather than the rule and I don't want to overemphasize the very few seeming mistakes I've come across or scare anyone off. The longer prose sections are fairly basic, but some are useful, like the lectionary (though it is not formatted well), list of the Seventy Apostles, and canon comparison (though Orthodoxy still doesn't have a completely "definitive" canon—as the Church that preceded and wrote the Bible, we never had the need to figure out what to "base" ourselves on, apart from Christ!). Ironically, the morning and evening prayers do not use the OSB's version of the Our Father, which I chuckled at—more signs that this is a work in progress (meaning not just the OSB, but coming closer to a normative and consistent English translation of all the liturgical texts). The intro to Orthodoxy near the beginning of the book was kind of "meh" for me: it is far too focused on issues that were very pertinent to the group of converts from which many of the OSB staff come from. It also latches onto, like the some of the wider study notes I read, very linear and stilted questions of authority, guilt, and other concerns that tend to distort Orthodox teaching. I do not mean to say that they are not giving (or trying to give) Orthodox answers to these questions, only reminding readers that sometimes the question itself is more important than the answer: what we ask can significantly color or distort what we hear and looking through lenses that are used very little (or very differently) in the Fathers but adopted "hook, line, and sinker" by moderns can be very problematic. In that way, this is probably the intro that will be most helpful to moderns and thus I can see why they went with it, but it irks me that I have to read the same rehashing of the same narrow "this is Orthodoxy" oversimplification everywhere. Along those same lines, I still find strange and annoying the continued insistence by members of this group that there were only seven Ecumenical Councils; the patriarchates have said, taught, and put in writing that there are 9—we should be reading about the Nine Ecumenical Councils! Back to the study materials in general, more use of the metaphor of the Church as a hospital or the connection (perhaps even identification) of Pascha and the Final Judgment, for instance, would be welcome, though I think they did a good job of avoiding all the worst pitfalls, especially in the notes to Romans. Again, despite a few specific notes, the commentary is solidly Orthodox; things could be improved here or there as I nitpick, sure, but this is doctrinally sound stuff and I don't want to insinuate otherwise. On a completely different note, I've already caught some spelling and grammar mistakes in the study material, which is further disappointing. Yet overall, none of this is as bad as I had irrationally feared given my limited experiences with this study Bible years ago and shouldn't be a dealbreaker for anybody, as I'll explain a bit more below; it is simply a weak point for the OSB.I also want to make some comments on the translation, which varies way more than I expected from the NKJV in the OT. I am happy with a lot of the corrections (as noted above, the LXX is what Christ and the early Church used and contains many prophecies that are significantly different—if not completely absent—from the Hebrew texts used by modern Judaism and adopted by many Western Christians), but too many of the changes seem to be minor. Too many of them feel like needless deviations from the NKJV (already a beautifully poetic and well-known, widely-used translation) to match the sentence structure of the LXX—even the Brenton sentence structure—when it does little to change the meaning of the verse. In a few spots (again, these are just some initial findings), it even seemed to take a step backwards: Proverbs 8:22/23, to take one quick example, moves away from the NKJV in order to offer a translation more in accord with the RSV/NRSV line, which has been criticized for seemingly Arian renderings of passages in both the Old and New Testaments. For another brief example (one in the KJV but not the NKJV and more a matter of style and/or my preference), the prayer at the beginning of Sirach 36, a hugely important prayer where I am from, feels a bit sloppy—even Brenton's translation, not a particularly singable version, has more rhythm and flow. I am still on the fence about the OSB's rendering of the Psalms, but that may just be habit (and the fact that HTM, in their Psalter According To The Seventy, already has such a good and ubiquitous version that the OSB crew should have—at just about any cost—found a way to use instead of making yet another translation just different enough to throw people off, especially while chanting!). The NT seems to be purely the NKJV, which is generally a good thing. Sure, there are the common issues that the NKJV shares with other versions, like the wildly incorrect rendering of Mark 13:32 that seems to plague *all* English translations (the OSB does have a study note that says St. John Chrysostom interprets the verse quite differently—but it doesn't communicate that it is because he is, in a very real way given the continued mistranslation, talking about a completely different verse) and the very ancient mistranslation about the "camel" going through the eye of a needle (that is wrong in the original Greek, though, so I can't fault anybody recent there!), but it is still a great translation and beat every other English-language version out there even before the OSB came along.The last set of problems with the OSB is the physical design and construction. The build quality of the book is not great: the dust jacket (it feels cheap and gimmicky and gets in the way of using the book), poor font selection, odd font sizings and weightings, minuscule margins, questionable page thickness/transparency, etc.; all of that makes it more difficult to read and work with. While I am coming to appreciate the little study sections (again, basic as they are), they are so jarring just speckled in weird places throughout who-knows-what book. Yes, I know that some of them are put in these places because somebody who is not Orthodox is going to find them when they inevitably search for "certain passages", but there has got to be a better way—maybe put them after the relevant books and provide a less jarring [but still obvious and large, maybe even box-style] notes about them at the passages themselves? Then there are the icon pages. I am very torn about icons in books (pun intended—icons are meant to be used, and not as Orthodox decoration or as something to flip through, tearing up and/or discarding along with a book). And these are particularly poorly executed: a lot of the icons are from strongly-modern-influenced schismatic sources while gobs and gobs of other [and much better] sources are available, the pages are thicker so they mess with physically navigating through the Bible itself, and they are also very jarring. We really don't need full-color icons interspersed though everything we produce to let people know we are Orthodox and we're [still] not iconoclasts. I guess there is the non-Orthodox angle: the icons have a bit of a strategic and evangelistic positioning. Yet something a bit more subtle, like black-and-white line drawings and reliefs, would still convey a lot without crossing as many lines and blurring, if not undermining, the very meaning and use of the iconography they're trying to safeguard. Though this kind of pulls some of my earlier criticisms back into play, I guess what I would really like is the option to buy a version of the OSB without the "S" (the study part): a solidly built, heirloom-quality Bible with cleaner, nicer text that I can comfortably use in either a home or liturgical setting without covering the text with my fingers as I hold it (1 in margins, please!), ripping the pages, being interrupted mid-sentence by a "helpful" study page when I turn to finish a verse, etc.—but that is just a dream for now!Having gotten through my main issues with the OSB, I want to reiterate that this is still the best English translation I have found overall, both in terms of faithfulness to the text and usability/clarity in modern English, in my years of study. (I did go to school for theology but am not any kind of textual expert or professional academic, so take what you will from what I've said.) I have all these criticisms and want to take the time to point just a few examples of them out not because this is an awful Bible, but because it is such a *good* one and will likely be part of something huge: a consistent liturgical translation of our readings and prayers into English. It is because that project will have such lasting impact—and consequences—that I want to contribute my little offering to, by The Grace Of God, keep it faithful to the traditions that have been handed down to us (2 Thessalonians 2:15). No, the OSB isn't perfect. And actually, in some ways, I don't want it to change any more and have yet another version floating around, but I also realize that there needs to be some change in the OSB—both in the notes, the translation, and the construction. But in any case, this is, even as it currently exists, a great addition to my library and will be my go-to translation from here on out, with the NKJV as a second (though it lacks the full canon). Despite its present shortcomings, it is still something I would strongly recommend to anyone who is a Christian or who is looking into Christianity. Get over the silliest of the notes and the first-run design and you will find the best English translation available with very helpful commentary that isn't full of all the PSA (penal substitutionary atonement) nonsense, antitraditionalism, and doctrinal innovation that just drips from modernistic versions of Christianity. Buy it ASAP!