What Is the Douay-Rheims Bible?
The Douay-Rheims Bible is the earliest complete English translation of the Bible produced by Catholic scholars. It was created by a group of former Oxford men living in exile on the European continent during the English Reformation, when the practice of the Catholic faith in England had been made illegal and possession of Catholic texts was a criminal offence.
The New Testament was published in 1582 at Rheims in northern France, and the Old Testament followed in two volumes from Douai (then in the Spanish Netherlands) in 1609 and 1610. The complete work therefore predates the King James Version of 1611 by several decades.
The Translators
The principal translator was Gregory Martin, a distinguished scholar who had been among the first cohort of students at St John's College, Oxford, alongside his close friend Edmund Campion, who would later be martyred for the faith. Martin began translating in October 1578, working at a pace of roughly two chapters per day, and is believed to have completed the entire Bible by around July 1580 — an extraordinary feat of sustained scholarship.
His work was proofread and revised by William Allen, the founder of the English College at Douai, together with Richard Bristow and Thomas Worthington, who also prepared the extensive theological annotations that accompanied the text. Martin himself did not live to see his Old Testament published — he died of tuberculosis on 28 October 1582, the same year the New Testament appeared, at approximately forty years of age.
The Source Text
The translators worked from the Latin Vulgate, the ancient Latin translation that the Council of Trent had declared the authoritative text for Catholic use. They also consulted the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts for accuracy. This approach gave the translation a distinctively Latinate vocabulary — words like supersubstantial, longanimity, and benignity — which, while theologically precise, could make the text challenging for casual readers. The translators included a glossary to explain these terms.
The translators did not work from a single Greek manuscript tradition. In places their Vulgate source preserves readings that align with older manuscript families — for example, at James 2:20, the original Douay-Rheims reads "idle" (from the Greek arge), a reading found in the Codex Amiatinus, rather than "dead" (nekra) as found in Erasmus's Textus Receptus and most Protestant translations.
Why It Was Created
By the late sixteenth century, several Protestant English translations of the Bible were already in circulation, including the Geneva Bible and the Bishops' Bible. Catholic scholars recognised the need for an English translation that was doctrinally sound, theologically precise, and faithful to the Vulgate tradition — one that could serve English-speaking Catholics who were increasingly cut off from Latin liturgical texts.
The extensive annotations were designed not merely as commentary but as a direct response to the theological arguments of the Reformers, addressing points of doctrinal controversy verse by verse. The translators themselves stated their purpose was, in part, for "the more speedy abolishing of a number of false and impious translations."
The completed Bible was illegal to own in England, and many copies were destroyed. It nonetheless remained the only Bible for English-speaking Catholics who could not read Latin, and its influence would prove far-reaching.
Influence on the King James Version
The translators of the King James Version (1611) explicitly acknowledged the Rheims New Testament in their preface, and scholarship has demonstrated that they drew upon it significantly. Research by Ward Allen in 1969 found that in the revision of the Gospels, roughly one quarter of the proposed amendments adopted readings from the Rheims text. The Rheims translation was made widely available to Protestant scholars through William Fulke's 1589 parallel edition, which printed both texts side by side — ironically intended as a refutation but serving instead as a convenient reference.
Catholic Significance
For centuries, the Douay-Rheims served as the only authorised English Bible for Roman Catholics. It remained the standard text for English-speaking Catholics until the mid-twentieth century, when Pope Pius XII's 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu opened the way for vernacular translations from the original Hebrew and Greek.
The Text on This Site
This site presents the original pre-Challoner text of the Douay-Rheims Bible, as first published in 1582 and 1609–1610. This is not the more commonly encountered Challoner revision of the mid-eighteenth century, which altered the text so extensively that Cardinal Newman observed the changes "almost amounted to a new translation." The original text is significantly more Latinate in its vocabulary and closer to the Vulgate in its phrasing. Spelling and punctuation have been lightly modernised, but the translation itself is unaltered.
To understand what Bishop Challoner changed and why, see The Challoner Revision. For the full story of how this translation came to exist, see History of the Douay-Rheims Bible.