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