The ESV Church History Study Bible

A review of Crossway's English Standard Version (ESV) Church History Study Bible (ISBN 9781433579684). This edition contains only the 66 books of the Protestant canon.

The text in this edition is printed in two columns, organized into paragraphs. The font is about 9 pts tall. The text is not line-matched. Text and translation notes, as well as references, are printed in a roughly 6.5 pt font beneath the text, but above the ~20,000 notes collected from a range of authors throughout church history. Those notes are in a 7.5 pt font.

The words of Christ are in black ink.

This sewn, brown hardback is 9 3/8 x 6 3/8 x 1.8 inches in dimensions. Pages are 231 x 154 mm (9.09 x 6.06 inches). The dust jacket is blue.

The paper is nearly white and sufficiently opaque. I estimate the paper weight at 32 gsm.

Each book begins on a fresh page with its own brief introduction.

Resources in the back include the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian statement of faith, twelve articles on various aspects of church history, an index to the authors of the notes (giving a thumbnail biography for each), a "full" concordance, and 15 color maps.

The single brown ribbon marker is 6.35 mm wide and about 31 cm long. It is too short.

The overall character of the notes strikes me as Reformed; but Lutheran authors are often featured, as are authors from other traditions.

The edition also includes more than 60 "This Passage in History" callouts. As an example, the one located at Romans 13.13-14 describes Augustine's conversion.

Detailed contents:

00:00 Introduction
02:07 Page layout
05:23 The fonts in the page-bottom material
06:06 The dust jacket
06:51 More on page layout
07:53 Print quality
09:10 The paper
10:24 Ecumenical creeds
10:49 Articles and resources
11:39 The author index
12:24 The concordance
13:09 The color maps
13:50 Binding, ribbons ...
14:33 It lies open in Genesis
15:14 Title pages, copyright pages, contents
17:32 The ESV as a translation
20:19 Font comparisons
21:24 Sampling the commentary
34:11 Sampling the essays
38:04 Concluding remarks