Douay-Rheims 1899

History

At the end of the sixteenth century a significant part of the English Catholic clergy and of its centres of formation was in exile. The college that trained the English clergy had been founded in 1568 by William Allen (1532 - 1594) — afterwards a cardinal — at Douai, in Flanders, then a dominion of the King of Spain. It was from that college in exile that the first complete Catholic Bible printed in English came.

The motive was polemical before it was devotional. Several English translations of Protestant origin were in circulation and were being quoted freely in religious controversy, and the Catholic side lacked an English text of its own to appeal to. Most of the translating fell to Gregory Martin (1540 - 1582), formerly of St John’s College, Oxford, who turned about two chapters into English a day; Allen, Richard Bristow (1538 - 1581), Thomas Worthington (1549 - ~1627) and William Reynolds (1544 - 1594) went over what he produced. The annotations were prepared by Allen, with Bristow and Worthington, to answer the theological arguments of the Reformers one by one.

In 1578 political difficulties moved the college from Douai to Reims, and it was there that the New Testament came out, in 1582, printed by John Fogny. The Old Testament, whose publication had been delayed chiefly by financial difficulties and by the college’s circumstances, appeared in two volumes only in 1609 and 1610, by which time the college had returned to Douai. Hence the double name — Rheims for the New Testament, Douay for the Old.

The English read today under that name, however, is not Martin’s. Between 1749 and 1752 Bishop Richard Challoner published a series of revisions of the New Testament and of the Old, wanting a Bible of moderate size and price and of readable English; many of his changes, taking the Vulgate as their reference, moved closer to the wording of the Protestant King James Version (Authorized Version), above all in the vocabulary and cadence of the English. Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801 - 1890) thought the changes so significant that they “almost amounted to a new translation”; Wiseman wrote that to go on calling it the Douay version was “an abuse of terms”. The American edition of 1899, digitised here, belongs to that later line.

Curiosities

The Rheims New Testament appeared nearly thirty years before the English King James Version, and later studies have shown that it exerted a significant influence on it — a translation made expressly against the Protestant versions ended up leaving its marks on the most famous of them.

Another characteristic feature of the Douay-Rheims is its relationship with the Vulgate. The original translation took the Latin text as its basis, though the translators also compared it with the Hebrew, the Greek and other versions. This leaves visible marks when the text is set side by side with the original biblical languages. A famous example appears in Genesis 3:15. The Clementine Vulgate reads ipsa conteret caput tuum — “she shall crush thy head” — and the Douay-Rheims follows that reading: “she shall crush thy head”.

The difference becomes especially interesting when the text is compared with the biblical Hebrew. The Leningrad Codex, the oldest complete manuscript of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible, preserves in Genesis 3:15 the form הוּא (huʾ), a masculine singular pronoun. The Hebrew clause therefore has a masculine subject, whereas the Clementine Vulgate has ipsa, feminine.

The later Portuguese Catholic tradition keeps the Latin reading. In the translation of Fr. Matos Soares, based on the Vulgate, one also finds “ela te pisará a cabeça” — “she shall crush thy head”. The reader can thus observe a particularly interesting textual line: the Masoretic Hebrew of the Leningrad Codex has huʾ (“he”), while the Vulgate and the Catholic translations that depend on it have the feminine reading ipsa (“she”).

The question, however, is more complex than simply saying that the Vulgate “translates the Hebrew differently”. The Latin manuscript tradition of Genesis 3:15 also shows variants such as ipse and ipsum, and the history of this reading is ancient. The feminine form ipsa acquired enormous importance in the Western Christian tradition and, later, in the Marian interpretation of the verse. For that reason, a comparison of the Leningrad Codex, the Vulgate, the Douay-Rheims and Matos Soares makes visible not only differences of translation, but also the transmission and interpretation of the biblical text across the centuries.

Sources

• Douay Bible — Bernard Ward, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York, 1909)
• Influence on the King James Version — thedouayrheims.com