Bishop Richard Challoner
Richard Challoner (1691–1781) was a convert to Catholicism who rose to become the Vicar Apostolic of the London District, effectively the senior Catholic bishop in England during one of the most difficult periods for English Catholics. Appointed coadjutor in 1739 and taking full charge in 1758, he shepherded a persecuted community with quiet determination for over four decades.
Among his many pastoral works, Challoner undertook a thorough revision of the Douay-Rheims Bible. By the mid-eighteenth century, the original text was over a hundred and fifty years old. Its heavily Latinate vocabulary, archaic phrasing, and dense annotations made it increasingly difficult for ordinary readers. Challoner set out to make the Bible accessible to the Catholics of his own day.
What He Changed
Challoner's revision was far more extensive than a simple modernisation of spelling. Working with the Carmelite friar Francis Blyth, he undertook several kinds of changes:
- Simplified vocabulary: The original's distinctive Latinate terms — supersubstantial, longanimity, benignity — were replaced with more familiar English equivalents.
- Modernised phrasing: Archaic constructions and obsolete expressions were rewritten for clarity.
- Corrected against multiple sources: Challoner checked the translation against the Clementine Vulgate, as well as the original Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, incorporating improvements from modern textual scholarship.
- Approximated the King James Version: Many of Challoner's revisions brought the text closer to the phrasing of the KJV, which had by then become the dominant English Bible. This was a pragmatic choice — KJV phrasing had become the standard register of biblical English, and Challoner saw no reason to differ where doctrine was not at stake.
- Stripped the annotations: The original's extensive theological notes, designed to counter Reformation arguments, were largely removed, producing a compact single-volume edition that was far more practical for everyday use.
Multiple Editions
Challoner did not produce a single definitive revision. He issued several editions over more than two decades, each differing from the last:
- 1749: First revised New Testament
- 1750: Complete Bible, with approximately two hundred additional changes to the New Testament
- 1752: Further New Testament revision, with over two thousand readings differing from the 1750 edition
All of these editions were published anonymously. It remains unclear to what extent Challoner was personally involved in every change across the later editions, or whether some alterations were introduced by others in the editorial process.
Examples of Changes
The scope of Challoner's alterations becomes clear when specific passages are compared side by side. In nearly every case, the original's Latinate precision gives way to smoother, more familiar English:
Ephesians 3:6
Original: "coheires and concorporate and comparticipant"
Challoner: "fellow heirs, and of the same body, and copartners"
Ephesians 3:9
Original: "illuminate all men, what is the dispensation of the sacrament hidden from worlds"
Challoner: "enlighten all men, that they may see what is the dispensation of the mystery which hath been hidden from eternity"
Romans 8:15
Original: "the spirit of servitude again in fear"
Challoner: "the spirit of bondage again in fear"
Isaiah 40:22
Original: "He that sitteth upon the compass of the earth"
Challoner: "It is he that sitteth upon the globe of the earth"
These are not isolated cases. Cardinal Wiseman went further than Newman, declaring that "to call it any longer the Douay or Rheimish Version is an abuse of terms. It has been altered and modified till scarce any verse remains as it was originally published."
"Almost a New Translation"
The cumulative effect of Challoner's changes was dramatic. Cardinal John Henry Newman observed that the revisions "almost amounted to a new translation," and that Challoner's version was "even nearer to the Protestant than it is to the Douay" in phraseology and diction — despite both being translations of the same Latin Vulgate. This is not an exaggeration — in many passages, the Challoner text reads so differently from Gregory Martin's original that they are barely recognisable as the same work.
Nearly every "Douay-Rheims Bible" in print today is actually the Douay-Rheims-Challoner revision, not the original text of 1582 and 1609–1610.
This distinction is often overlooked. When Catholics speak of "the Douay-Rheims Bible," they almost invariably mean Challoner's version. The original text — with its Latinate richness, its close fidelity to the Vulgate, and its extensive polemical annotations — has been largely forgotten.
Why the Original Matters
The pre-Challoner Douay-Rheims is not merely an antiquarian curiosity. It is the work of men who translated under extraordinary circumstances — scholars in exile, some of whom would be martyred, producing a translation of the entire Bible in under two years while simultaneously training priests for a mission that could cost them their lives.
The original text reflects a different philosophy of translation, one that prioritised fidelity to the Latin source even at the cost of readability. Where Challoner smoothed and simplified, Martin and his colleagues preserved the texture of the Vulgate — its cadences, its theological precision, its occasionally difficult beauty.
This site presents that original text, with only light modernisation of spelling and punctuation. The translation itself — Gregory Martin's translation — is unaltered.