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| The Ryrie Study Bible, 1978. |
The following dialog is excerpted from a November 1, 2008 interview with Dr. Charles Ryrie by The Baptist Bulletin. Here Dr. Ryrie recounts how The Ryrie Study Bible came to be.
[Baptist Bulletin:]
Can you tell us what led to your work on the Ryrie Study Bible?
[Dr. Charles Ryrie:]
It started one year on the way to my first Christian Booksellers Association meeting in Cincinnati. On the bus going in, a publisher who had published a book of mine said, “I want to talk to you.” He wanted me to edit a multiauthor volume of some sort, I don’t remember now, a dictionary or something. I said, “No, thank you! I am no good at riding heard on a hundred authors, making deadlines, and all that.” So in return he said, “Propose something to me.” I thought about that a while. There weren’t many study Bibles available then. The Scofield Bible had just been revised. The Pilgrim Bible was good, and used. There was a Lutheran New Testament Study Bible, and the Open Bible was maybe out by then. . . . I’m not sure of the dates. So I told him, “I think evangelicals need another study Bible. Not like the Scofield—there’s nothing wrong with it—but more interpretive.” I tried to write something with exegetically standard notes. I would say that the Scofield notes are more thematic, a synthesis of things. (I like the Scofield, that is not a criticism, believe me.) So I proposed this to him, and he agreed.
So we agreed on a New Testament. That’s all they wanted to take a chance at. But by the time I finished my part, that publisher had been sold to a larger conglomerate. The man came back to me and said, “I don’t think we’ll be able to publish your Bible for years, because we’ve got so much going with this merger. So you have the right to do whatever you want with it.”
And ultimately I went with Moody [Press]. One reason was that at that point, Moody was pretty sure they could get rights to the New American Standard, which had just come out. (I had written the notes using the King James.) But they did get the New American, so the notes were adapted to that, and later to other translations as well. That’s how it came to be.
