The Douay–Rheims Bible (, ), also known as the Douay–Rheims Version, Rheims–Douai Bible or Douai Bible, and abbreviated as D–R, DRB, and DRV, is a translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into Early Modern English by members of the English College, Douai, as a Counter-Reformation effort.Pope, Hugh. "The Origin of the Douay Bible", The Dublin Review, Vol. CXLVII, N°. 294-295, July/October, 1910.
The New Testament portion was published in Rheims, France, in 1582, in one volume, with extensive commentary and notes. The Old Testament portion was published in two volumes by the University of Douai. The first volume, covering Genesis to Job, was published in 1609. The second, covering the Book of Psalms to 2 Maccabees (spelled "Machabees"), and the three apocryphal books of the Vulgate appendix following the Old Testament (Prayer of Manasseh, 3 Esdras, and 4 Esdras), was published in 1610. Marginal notes on translation, and the Hebrew and Greek source texts of the Vulgate, compose majority portions of the edition.
In 1589, William Fulke collated the complete Rheims text and notes in parallel columns with those of the Bishops' Bible. That work sold widely in England, prompting its re-issue in three further editions by 1633. Fulke's editions of the Rheims New Testament were of crucial significance to 17th-century English exegesis.Reid, G. J. "The Evolution of Our English Bible", The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. XXX, 1905.
Much of the first edition employed Latin vocabulary, rendering it particularly difficult to read. Consequently, a revision of the translation was undertaken by Bishop Richard Challoner: the New Testament in three editions of 1749, 1750, and 1752; and the Old Testament (minus the Vulgate apocrypha) in 1750.
Subsequent editions of the Challoner revision contain minor changes to the text.
Challoner's New Testament was extensively revised by Bernard MacMahon in a series of Dublin editions from 1783 to 1810. The Dublin versions were the source for some Challoner Bibles printed in the United States in the 19th century.
Subsequent editions of the Challoner Bible printed in England most often follow Challoner's earlier New Testament texts of 1749 and 1750, as do most 20th-century printings, and online versions of the Douay–Rheims Bible circulating on the internet.
Although the Jerusalem Bible, New American Bible Revised Edition, Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition, New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition, and English Standard Version Catholic Edition are the most commonly used Bibles in English-speaking Catholic churches, the Challoner revision of the Douay–Rheims often remains the Bible of choice for more traditional English-speaking Catholics.
Origin
The French city of Douai (then belonging to the Spanish Netherlands) was a prominent center of English Catholics fleeing the English Reformation.. In 1568, at the recently-founded University of Douai, Cardinal William Allen, formerly a canon at York Minster, established a Catholic seminary, the English College. Scholars there eventually published the first complete English translation of the Bible to be made under the auspices of the Catholic Church.
The college temporarily migrated to Rheims, where a run of a few hundred copies of the New Testament—in quarto form, not the larger folio form—was published in the last months of 1582 (Herbert #177). Consequently, it is commonly known as the Rheims New Testament. Though he died in the same year as its publication, this translation was principally the work of Gregory Martin, formerly Fellow of St John's College, Oxford, and close friend of Edmund Campion. He was assisted by others at Douai, notably Allen, Richard Bristow, William Reynolds and Thomas Worthington,Gutenberg websiteOriginal Douay Rheims.com website who proofread and provided notes and annotations. The Old Testament is stated to have been ready at the same time but, for want of funds, it could not be printed until later, after the college had returned to Douai. It is commonly known as the Douay Old Testament. It was issued as two quarto volumes dated 1609 and 1610 (Herbert #300). These first New Testament and Old Testament editions followed the Geneva Bible not only in their quarto format but also in the use of Roman type.
As a recent translation, the Rheims New Testament influenced the translators of the King James Version, after which it ceased to be of interest to the Anglican Church. While the cities are now commonly spelled as Douai and as Reims, the Bible continues to be published as the Douay–Rheims Bible and continues to shape English Catholic Bible translations.
The title page reads: "The Holy Bible, faithfully translated into English out of the authentic Latin. Diligently conferred with the Hebrew, Greek and other Editions". The cause of the delay was their "poor state of banishment", but there was also the matter of reconciling the Latin to the other editions. William Allen went to Rome to assist in the revisions to the Vulgate. The Sixtine Vulgate edition was published in 1590. The definitive Clementine text followed in 1592. Worthington, responsible for many of the annotations for the 1609 and 1610 volumes, states in the preface: "we have again conferred this English translation and conformed it to the most perfect Latin Edition."Bernard Orchard, A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, (Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1951). Page 36.
Style The Douay–Rheims Bible is a translation of the Latin Vulgate, which is itself a translation of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts. The Vulgate was largely created through the efforts of Saint Jerome (345–420), whose translation was declared to be the authentic Latin version of the Bible by the Council of Trent. While the Catholic scholars "conferred" with the Hebrew and Greek originals, as well as with "other editions in diverse languages",1582 Rheims New Testament, "Preface to the Reader." their avowed purpose was to translate after a strongly literal manner from the Latin Vulgate, for reasons of accuracy as stated in their Preface and which tended to produce, in places, stilted syntax and Latinisms.
Other than when rendering the particular readings of the Vulgate Latin, the English wording of the Rheims New Testament follows more or less closely the Protestant version first produced by William Tyndale in 1525. An important source for the Rheims translators has been identified as that of the revision of Tyndale found in an English and Latin diglot New Testament, published by Miles Coverdale in Paris in 1538.Reid, G. J. "The Evolution of Our English Bible", The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Vol. XXX, 1905. Furthermore, the translators consulted the original Greek texts to inform their use of grammatical articles, which did not exist in Latin. Consequently, the Rheims New Testament owes rather more to the original languages than the translators admit in their preface. Where the Rheims translators depart from the Coverdale text, they frequently adopt readings found in the Protestant Geneva Bible or those of the Wycliffe Bible, as this latter version had been translated from the Vulgate, and had been widely used by English Catholic churchmen unaware of its Lollard origins.
Nevertheless, it was a translation of a translation of the Bible. Many highly regarded translations of the Bible routinely consult Vulgate readings, especially in certain difficult Old Testament passages; but nearly all modern Bible versions, Protestant and Catholic, go directly to the original-language Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek biblical texts as their translation base, and not to a secondary version like the Vulgate. The translators justified their preference for the Vulgate in their Preface, pointing to accumulated corruptions within the original language manuscripts available in that era, and asserting that Jerome would have had access to better manuscripts in the original tongues that had not survived. Moreover, they could point to the Council of Trent's decree that the Vulgate was, for Catholics, free of doctrinal error.
The decision to consistently use Latinate language by the Rheims–Douay translators is reminiscent of Stephen Gardiner's criticisms in favour of more Latinate vocabulary in Bible translations. More and Gardiner had argued that Latin terms were more precise in meaning than their English equivalents, and consequently should be retained in anglicized form to avoid ambiguity. However, David Norton observes that the Rheims–Douay version extends the principle much further. In the preface to the Rheims New Testament the translators criticize the Geneva Bible for their policy of striving always for clear and unambiguous readings; the Rheims translators proposed rather a rendering of the English biblical text that is faithful to the Latin text, whether or not such a word-for-word translation results in hard to understand English, or transmits ambiguity from the Latin phrasings:
This adds to More and Gardiner the opposite argument, that previous versions in standard English had improperly imputed clear meanings for obscure passages in the Greek source text where the Latin Vulgate had often tended to rather render the Greek literally, even to the extent of generating improper Latin constructions. In effect, the Rheims translators argue that, where the source text is ambiguous or obscure, then a faithful English translation should also be ambiguous or obscure, with the options for understanding the text discussed in a marginal note:
The translation was prepared with a definite polemical purpose in opposition to Protestant translations (which also had polemical motives).
Influence In England the Protestant William Fulke unintentionally popularized the Rheims New Testament through his collation of the Rheims text and annotations in parallel columns alongside the 1572 Protestant Bishops' Bible. Fulke's original intention through his first combined edition of the Rheims New Testament with the so-called Bishops' Bible was to prove that the Catholic-inspired text was inferior to the Protestant-influenced Bishops' Bible, then the official Bible of the Church of England. Fulke's work was first published in 1589; and as a consequence the Rheims text and notes became easily available without fear of criminal sanctions.
The translators of the Rheims appended a list of words that might be unfamiliar to the readerAppendices, "The Explication of Certaine Wordes" or "Hard Wordes Explicated" examples include "acquisition", "adulterate", "advent", "allegory", "verity", "calumniate", "character", "cooperate", "prescience", "resuscitate", "victim", and "evangelise". In addition the editors chose to transliterate rather than translate a number of technical Greek or Hebrew terms, such as "azymes" for unleavened bread, and "pasch" for Passover.
Challoner Revision
Translation