[soc.religion.christian] Rheims-Douai Bible &Re: E-sources of the Bible, in various translations

dhosek@euler.claremont.edu (Don Hosek) (03/06/91)

In article <Feb.27.03.38.57.1991.13507@athos.rutgers.edu>, news@hoss.unl.edu (Network News Administer) writes:
> In <Feb.25.09.32.54.1991.1790@athos.rutgers.edu> appears:
 
>>[I have a list of online bibles that I'll send to him separately.  I
>>don't know of any FTP-able Bible other than KJ.  For copyright reasons
>>there aren't likely to be.  The LDS don't really have a separate
>>translation.  Joseph Smith made some inspired changes to the KJV, but
>>it seems that they use standard translations most of the time,
>>particlarly the KJV.  --clh]
 
> Copyright reasons can't be the explanation for the unavailability of the 
> old Douay-Rheims (Catholic) translation - it dates from about the same 
> time (give or take a century) as the King James Version.  I suspect that 
> the reason for its unavailability in electronic form is just that no one 
> has bothered transcribing it yet.

For those who are interested, the Rheims-Douay (or Douay-Rheims,
depending on whether the names are ordered by time of translation
or arrangement of translation) bible was written more-or-less
contemporaneously with the King James Bible. The RD translation
is largely the work of Gregory Martin and Cardinal William Allen
and was written in two parts: the New Testament was translated at
the English seminary in Rheims, NL. When the seminary was closed
because of the Protestant revolution in the Netherlands (during
which they ceased to be Spanish territory) the English
seminarians moved to Douay in France. There the translation of
the OT was completed. I believe the NT translation predates the
KJ while the OT postdates it, although I don't have ready access
to this information just now. The translation, incidentally, is
based primarily on St. Jerome's Vulgate translation of the Hebrew
& Greek into Latin.

The King James translation, incidentally, has an interesting
lineage of its own which can be traced back nearly one hundred
years before its publication to Tyndale's translation of the
Bible. 

If you can find a copy, Sir Herbert Grierson's _The English
Bible_ is a fascinating history of the translation of the Bible
into English.

-dh