PREFACE

The DOUAY-RHEIMS is a scrupulously faithful translation into English of the Latin Vulgate Bible which St. Jerome (342-420) translated into Latin from the original languages. The Vulgate quickly became the Bible universally used in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church (which is by far the largest rite).

St. Jerome, who was one of the four great Western Fathers of the Church, was a man raised up by God to translate the Holy Bible into the common Latin tongue of his day. He knew Latin and Greek perfectly; he also knew Hebrew and Aramaic nearly as well. He was 1500 years closer to the original languages than any scholar today, which would make him a much better judge of the exact meaning of any Greek or Hebrew word in the Scriptures. Besides being a towering linguistic genius, he was also a great saint, and he had access to ancient Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of the 2nd and 3rd centuries which have since perished and are no longer available to scholars today. St. Jerome's translation, moreover, was a careful rendering of the original texts into Latin.

The Latin Vulgate Bible has been read and honored by the Western Church for fifteen hundred years! it was declared by the Council of Trent to be the official Latin version of the canonical Scriptures. Hear what that Sacred Council decreed: "Moreover, the same Holy Council . . . ordains and declares that the old Latin Vulgate Edition, which, in use for so many hundred years, has been approved by the Church, be in public lectures, disputations, sermons and expositions held as authentic, and that no one dare or presume under any pretext whatsoever to reject it." (Fourth Session, April 8, 1546). As Pope Pius XII stated in his 1943 encyclical letter Divino Afflante Spiritu, this means that the Vulgate, "interpreted in the sense in which the Church has always understood it, " is "free from any error whatsoever in matters of faith and morals; so that , as the Chruch herself testifies and affirms, it may be quoted safely and whithout fear of error in disputations, in lectures and in preaching . . ." And the DOUAY-RHEIMS BIBLE is a faithful, word for word translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible of St. Jerome. No other Bible version than the Latin Vulgate has been endorsed by the Church in this manner! (Of course, the Bible itself is free from all error, not just from errors of faith and morals, but the Pope was affirming the doctrinal and moral accuracy of even the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible.)

In their translation, the Douay-Rheims commission took great pains to translate exactly; and -contrary to what would appear to be the procedure of the modern Bible translators-when a passage seemed strange and unintelligible, they left it alone, even if obscure, and "let the chips fall as they may." But it would appear that the modern Bible translators, on the other hand, often look at an obscure passage, decide what they think it means, then translate the passage with words that bring out that meaning. The result is that the English is usually (not always!) easier to understand, but it is not necessary what the Bible says: rather, it is the translators" interpretation and understanding of what the Bible says. However, the Holy Ghost may have hidden several additional meanings in any given passage which the translators do not see. Those meanings may well be completely translated out by this method of translation!

Sometimes the question is raised: Why translate from a translation (i.e. from the Latin Vulgate) rather than from the original Greek and Hebrew? This question was also raised in the 16th century when the Douay Rheims translators (Fr Gregory Martin and his assistants) first published the Rheims New Testament. They gave ten reasons, ending up by stating that the Latin Vulgate "is not onely better then all other Latin translations, but then the Greeke text itselfe, in those places where they disagree." (Preface to the Rheims New Testament, 1582). They state that the Vulgate is "more pure then the Hebrew or Greeke now extant" and that "the same Latin hath been far better conserved from corruptions." (Preface to the Douay Old Testament, 1609).

The present Bible is the Challoner revision (1749-1752) of the Douay-Rheims Bible. Catholics owe the saintly Biship Richard Challoner (1691-1781) a great debt of gratitude for undertaking this work. Challoner was one of those courageous priests who traveled around offering Mass secretly for small groups of Catholics during the religious persecutions in England. These Catholics needed a Bible, and had needed one for 100 years. The Douay Rheims Bible had been printed a few times on the Continent, but had never really spread to England. Some Catholics in England were even reading the King James version - a situation which Bishop Challoner knew had to be rectified.

Some of the passages in the original Douay Rheims Bible were needlessly obscure. As an extreme example, Ephesians 6:12 used to read: "For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood: but against Princes and Potestats, against the rectors of the world of this darknes, against the spirituals of wickednes in the celestials."  The spellings were archaic, and the verses were not set off by new lines for clarity. Challoner rectified these problems, checking carefully against the Clementine Vulgate and the original language texts. On the whole, Bishop Challoner's revisions were minor. He replaced certain anglicized Latin words and archaic words and expressions, rearranged the word order of the sentences, and yet maintained the overall word for word accuracy of the 16th/17th - century Douay Rheims Bible.

The Challoner revision of the Douay Rheims Bible was a godsend.  It became the standard Catholic Bible in English until the mid-20th century (when the Confraternity New Testament was published around 1941).  The Challoner revision continued to be called the "Douay Rheims" because of its similarity to the original Douay Rheims Bible.  The great work English Versions of the Bible, by Frs. Pope and Bullough, states that English speaking Catholics the world over owe  Dr Chae first time in history with a portable, cheap and readable version of the Bible, which has now stood the test of 250 years of use. The Douay Rheims Bible is more accurate than any modern Bible because it is based on the Vulgate, which in turn is based on ancient texts no longer extant, which were "captured" and "frozen," so to speak, by St. Jerome in his Latin Vulgate. Thus a very powerful argument exists that the Douay Rheims is the most reliable English language Bible there is.  As the publishers, we look forward to the day when the Christian world will rediscover this fact and come to a renewed appreciation of the monumental work of St Jerome, of the Douay Rheims translators and of Bishop Richard Challoner - men who were raised up by God to make the Bible available to the English speaking world in a completely reliable translation.   

---From The Publishers June 21, 2000