The Catholic line

From the Vulgate, by way of exiles in Flanders, to a Bible due in 2027 — including the least advertised fact on the whole chart.

Wycliffite Bibles

The first complete English Bible, made out of the Vulgate in the 1380s and 90s, copied by hand and banned for it. Two centuries before the Douay — and no ancestor of anything else on this chart. It stands on its own because that is historically what it did.

Douay-Rheims

Made by exiles. The English College, founded at Douai in Flanders, spent 1578–93 relocated to Rheims in France — hence the double name and the two dates. New Testament, Rheims 1582. Old Testament, Douai 1609–10, in two volumes; the thirty-year gap was simply that they could not afford to print it.

The principal translator was Gregory Martin, an Oxford scholar said to have worked through about two chapters a day, revised and annotated by William Allen (later cardinal), Richard Bristow and Thomas Worthington.

From the Latin on purpose. The Council of Trent had declared the Vulgate the authentic text for the Latin Church, so the Vulgate was the base and the Greek and Hebrew were consulted rather than followed. Wycliffe had done the same two centuries earlier, and it was then the last deliberate translation-of-a-translation on this chart for three and a half centuries — until Knox did the same thing again in 1945, from the same Latin, for the same reason.

Not the first English Bible, and not the Bible of the Mass. It was the first complete Bible in English produced by and for Roman Catholics — but Old English partial versions go back to the 10th century, and the Wycliffite Bibles were a complete English Bible out of the Vulgate two centuries earlier. And it was never the text of the Mass: the liturgy was Latin until the 1960s, and the most a congregation heard of it was the Sunday Epistle and Gospel re-read in English from the pulpit before the sermon. The Douay was for reading, study and argument.

The English is extraordinary. So literal that the Latin often stands untranslated — supersubstantial bread at Matthew 6:11, azymes, pasch, prepuce, exinanited. It was mocked for it. But a surprising number of those borrowings are ordinary English now: acquisition, adulterate, advent, allegory, calumniate, character, cooperate, evangelize, resuscitate, verity, victim.

Challoner revision

⚠️ Virtually every “Douay-Rheims” printed since is Challoner, not the 1582/1610 original.

Challoner made the Douay’s cramped Latinate English readable. He also did something that is rarely advertised: he revised it substantially toward the King James wording. His text is closer to the KJV than to the 1582 Rheims.

It is the least advertised fact on this chart, and it means English-speaking Catholics and Protestants have shared more phrasing than either side tended to say. It is drawn in gold, because it is borrowed wording and not descent — no text was inherited and no committee took the other’s book as its draft.

🇮🇪 An Irish wrinkle worth checking on any Irish-printed copy. Bishop Bernard MacMahon issued Irish revisions of Challoner between 1783 and 1810, and Douay Bibles printed in Dublin often descend from his text rather than from Challoner’s London one. A family Bible printed in Ireland may be MacMahon rather than plain Challoner — the title page will say.

Confraternity Version

The hinge of American Catholic Bible work, and the chart’s most easily missed link.

The 1941 New Testament was still a revision of Challoner. Then, mid-project, the Old Testament was begun again from the Hebrew. That unfinished Old Testament was carried straight into the New American Bible — which is why Challoner and the NAB are connected at all.

Without this box the American Catholic line looks like two unrelated projects. With it, the descent from the Vulgate to the Bible read at Mass in the United States is continuous.

Knox Bible

One man, nine years, from the Vulgate — with the Greek and Hebrew consulted — into deliberately literary English. The standard English Catholic Bible of the 1950s, and the third translation-of-a-translation on this chart, after Wycliffe and the Douay.

Its place in the lectionary is deliberately not claimed here. It was widely used in England and Wales in the 1950s and 60s and readings from it were heard at Mass, but exactly what was authorised, where, and for how long is not settled by the sources used.

The Catholic editions of Protestant Bibles

Three Bibles in the Tyndale line acquired Catholic editions, and all three arrows are dotted, because in every case the instruction was adapt, do not re-translate.

RSV Catholic Edition, 1966. The deuterocanon in Vulgate order; Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53–8:11 lifted from the footnotes into the text; “full of grace” at Luke 1:28; the minimum otherwise.

RSV Second Catholic Edition, 2006

Drop thee and thou, restore “virgin” at Isaiah 7:14, and conform to Liturgiam Authenticam.

NRSV Catholic Edition

Imprimatur 1991, published 1993 — the books reordered, and an imprimatur.

ESV Catholic Edition, 2018

The deuterocanon added and a few renderings changed. This is the one that went on to become a lectionary; see what is read at Mass.