Biblia Douay-Rheims

La Biblia Douay-Rheims ( / ˌ d uː eɪ ˈ r iː m z , ˌ d aʊ eɪ -/ , ^{[ 1 ]} EE. UU. también / d uː ˌ eɪ -/ ), también conocida como la Versión Douay-Rheims , Biblia Rheims-Douai o Biblia Douai , y abreviada como D-R , DRB , y DRV , es una traducción de la Biblia de la Vulgata latina al inglés moderno temprano por miembros del Colegio Inglés de Douai como un esfuerzo de la Contrarreforma . ^{[ 2 ]} La parte del Nuevo Testamento fue publicada en Reims , Francia, en 1582, en un volumen con extensos comentarios y notas. La parte del Antiguo Testamento fue publicada en dos volúmenes en 1609 y 1610 por la Universidad de Douai . El primer volumen, que cubre Génesis a Job , fue publicado en 1609; La segunda edición, que abarca desde el Libro de los Salmos hasta 2 Macabeos (escrito «Machabees» ) y los tres libros apócrifos del apéndice de la Vulgata que siguen al Antiguo Testamento ( Oración de Manasés , 3 Esdras y 4 Esdras), se publicó en 1610. Las notas marginales sobre la traducción y los textos originales hebreos y griegos de la Vulgata componen la mayor parte de la edición. En 1589, William Fulke cotejó el texto completo de Reims y las notas en columnas paralelas con las de la Biblia de los Obispos . Esta obra se vendió ampliamente en Inglaterra, lo que motivó su reedición en tres ediciones más hacia 1633. Las ediciones de Fulke del Nuevo Testamento de Reims fueron de crucial importancia para la exégesis inglesa del siglo XVII . ^{[ 3 ]}

Gran parte de la primera edición empleaba vocabulario latino, lo que dificultaba especialmente su lectura. Por consiguiente, el obispo Richard Challoner emprendió una revisión de la traducción : el Nuevo Testamento en tres ediciones de 1749, 1750 y 1752; y el Antiguo Testamento (sin los apócrifos de la Vulgata ) en 1750.

Las ediciones posteriores de la revisión de Challoner contienen cambios menores en el texto. El Nuevo Testamento de Challoner fue revisado exhaustivamente por Bernard MacMahon en una serie de ediciones de Dublín publicadas entre 1783 y 1810. Estas versiones de Dublín sirvieron de base para algunas Biblias de Challoner impresas en Estados Unidos durante el siglo XIX.

Las ediciones posteriores de la Biblia de Challoner impresas en Inglaterra suelen seguir los textos del Nuevo Testamento de Challoner de 1749 y 1750, al igual que la mayoría de las ediciones impresas del siglo XX y las versiones en línea de la Biblia Douay-Rheims que circulan por internet.

Aunque la Biblia de Jerusalén , la Nueva Biblia Americana Edición Revisada , la Versión Estándar Revisada Edición Católica , la Nueva Versión Estándar Revisada Edición Católica y la Versión Estándar Inglesa Edición Católica son las Biblias más utilizadas en las iglesias católicas de habla inglesa, la revisión Challoner de la Douay-Rheims a menudo sigue siendo la Biblia preferida por los católicos de habla inglesa más tradicionales . ^{[ 4 ]}

La ciudad francesa de Douai (entonces perteneciente a los Países Bajos españoles ) fue un importante centro de católicos ingleses que huían de la Reforma inglesa . ^{[ 5 ] [ 6 ]} En 1568, en la recién fundada Universidad de Douai , el cardenal William Allen , antiguo canónigo de la Catedral de York , estableció un seminario católico , el Colegio Inglés . ^{[ 7 ] [ 8 ]} Allí, los eruditos publicaron la primera traducción completa de la Biblia al inglés realizada bajo los auspicios de la Iglesia Católica. ^{[ 9 ]}

The college temporarily migrated to Rheims, where a run of a few hundred copies of the New Testament—in quarto form, not the larger folio form—was published in the last months of 1582 (Herbert #177). Consequently, it is commonly known as the Rheims New Testament. Though he died in the same year as its publication, this translation was principally the work of Gregory Martin, formerly Fellow of St John's College, Oxford, and close friend of Edmund Campion. He was assisted by others at Douai, notably Allen, Richard Bristow, William Reynolds and Thomas Worthington,^[10][11] who proofread and provided notes and annotations. The Old Testament is stated to have been ready at the same time but, for want of funds, it could not be printed until later, after the college had returned to Douai. It is commonly known as the Douay Old Testament. It was issued as two quarto volumes dated 1609 and 1610 (Herbert #300). These first New Testament and Old Testament editions followed the Geneva Bible not only in their quarto format but also in the use of Roman type.^[12]

As a recent translation, the Rheims New Testament influenced the translators of the King James Version, after which it ceased to be of interest to the Anglican Church. While the cities are now commonly spelled as Douai and as Reims, the Bible continues to be published as the Douay–Rheims Bible and continues to shape English Catholic Bible translations.^[13]

The title page reads: "The Holy Bible, faithfully translated into English out of the authentic Latin. Diligently conferred with the Hebrew, Greek and other Editions". The cause of the delay was their "poor state of banishment", but there was also the matter of reconciling the Latin to the other editions. William Allen went to Rome to assist in the revisions to the Vulgate. The Sixtine Vulgate edition was published in 1590. The definitive Clementine text followed in 1592. Worthington, responsible for many of the annotations for the 1609 and 1610 volumes, states in the preface: "we have again conferred this English translation and conformed it to the most perfect Latin Edition."^[14]

The Douay–Rheims Bible is a translation of the Latin Vulgate, which is itself a translation of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts. The Vulgate was largely created through the efforts of Saint Jerome (345–420), whose translation was declared to be the authentic Latin version of the Bible by the Council of Trent. While the Catholic scholars "conferred" with the Hebrew and Greek originals, as well as with "other editions in diverse languages",^[15] their avowed purpose was to translate after a strongly literal manner from the Latin Vulgate, for reasons of accuracy as stated in their Preface and which tended to produce, in places, stilted syntax and Latinisms.

Other than when rendering the particular readings of the Vulgate Latin, the English wording of the Rheims New Testament follows more or less closely the Protestant version first produced by William Tyndale in 1525. An important source for the Rheims translators has been identified as that of the revision of Tyndale found in an English and Latin diglot New Testament, published by Miles Coverdale in Paris in 1538.^{[16]:581[17][18]:49} Furthermore, the translators consulted the original Greek texts to inform their use of grammatical articles,^[18]:49 which did not exist in Latin.^[16]:581 Consequently, the Rheims New Testament owes rather more to the original languages than the translators admit in their preface.^[19]:195 Where the Rheims translators depart from the Coverdale text, they frequently adopt readings found in the Protestant Geneva Bible^[19]:195 or those of the Wycliffe Bible, as this latter version had been translated from the Vulgate, and had been widely used by English Catholic churchmen unaware of its Lollard origins.^[20][18]:49

Sin embargo, se trataba de la traducción de una traducción de la Biblia. Muchas traducciones bíblicas de gran prestigio consultan habitualmente la Vulgata, sobre todo en ciertos pasajes difíciles del Antiguo Testamento; pero casi todas las versiones bíblicas modernas, tanto protestantes como católicas, recurren directamente a los textos bíblicos originales en hebreo , arameo y griego como base para su traducción, y no a una versión secundaria como la Vulgata. Los traductores justificaron su preferencia por la Vulgata en su prefacio, señalando las corrupciones acumuladas en los manuscritos originales disponibles en aquella época y afirmando que Jerónimo habría tenido acceso a mejores manuscritos en las lenguas originales que no habían sobrevivido. Además, podían citar el decreto del Concilio de Trento que declaraba que la Vulgata, para los católicos, estaba libre de errores doctrinales.

La decisión de utilizar consistentemente lenguaje latino por parte de los traductores de Rheims - Douay recuerda las críticas de Stephen Gardiner a favor de un vocabulario más latino en las traducciones de la Biblia. ^{[ 19 ] : 194} More y Gardiner habían argumentado que los términos latinos eran más precisos en su significado que sus equivalentes en inglés y, por consiguiente, debían conservarse en forma anglicizada para evitar ambigüedad. Sin embargo, David Norton observa que la versión de Rheims - Douay extiende este principio mucho más allá. En el prefacio del Nuevo Testamento de Rheims, los traductores critican la Biblia de Ginebra por su política de esforzarse siempre por obtener lecturas claras e inequívocas; los traductores de Rheims propusieron, en cambio, una traducción del texto bíblico en inglés que fuera fiel al texto latino, independientemente de si dicha traducción palabra por palabra resultaba en un inglés difícil de entender o transmitía ambigüedad de las frases latinas:

No pretendemos modificar los discursos o frases en los pasajes difíciles, sino que los conservamos religiosamente palabra por palabra y punto por punto, por temor a perder o restringir el sentido del Espíritu Santo a nuestra fantasía... reconociendo con San Hierom que en otros escritos basta con dar en traducción sentido por sentido, pero que en las Escrituras, para no perder el sentido, debemos conservar las mismas palabras.

Esto añade a More y Gardiner el argumento opuesto: que las versiones anteriores en inglés estándar habían atribuido incorrectamente significados claros a pasajes oscuros del texto griego original, mientras que la Vulgata latina tendía a traducir el griego literalmente, incluso hasta el punto de generar construcciones latinas incorrectas. En efecto, los traductores de Reims argumentan que, cuando el texto original es ambiguo u oscuro, una traducción fiel al inglés también debería serlo, y las opciones para comprender el texto se discuten en una nota marginal.

so, that people must read them with licence of their spiritual superior, as in former times they were in like sort limited. such also of the Laitie, yea & of the meaner learned Clergie, as were permitted to read holie Scriptures, did not presume to inteprete hard places, nor high Mysteries, much lesse to dispute and contend, but leaving the discussion thereof to the more learned, searched rather and noted the godlie and imitable examples of good life and so learned more humilitie, obedience...

The translation was prepared with a definite polemical purpose in opposition to Protestant translations (which also had polemical motives).

In England the Protestant William Fulke unintentionally popularized the Rheims New Testament through his collation of the Rheims text and annotations in parallel columns alongside the 1572 Protestant Bishops' Bible. Fulke's original intention through his first combined edition of the Rheims New Testament with the so-called Bishops' Bible was to prove that the Catholic-inspired text was inferior to the Protestant-influenced Bishops' Bible, then the official Bible of the Church of England. Fulke's work was first published in 1589; and as a consequence the Rheims text and notes became easily available without fear of criminal sanctions.

The translators of the Rheims appended a list of words that might be unfamiliar to the reader^[21] examples include "acquisition", "adulterate", "advent", "allegory", "verity", "calumniate", "character", "cooperate", "prescience", "resuscitate", "victim", and "evangelise". In addition the editors chose to transliterate rather than translate a number of technical Greek or Hebrew terms, such as "azymes" for unleavened bread, and "pasch" for Passover.

The names, numbers, and chapters of the Douay–Rheims Bible and the Challoner revision follow that of the Vulgate and therefore differ from those of the King James Version and its modern successors, making direct comparison of versions tricky in some places. For instance, the books called Ezra and Nehemiah in the King James Version are called 1 and 2 Esdras in the Douay–Rheims Bible. The books called 1 and 2 Esdras in the King James Version are called 3 and 4 Esdras in the Douay, and were classed as apocrypha. The Books of Chronicles, following the Septuagint and the Vulgate, are called the Books of Paralipomenon (Greek for "of things omitted").^[23] A table illustrating the differences can be found here.

The names, numbers, and order of the books in the Douay–Rheims Bible follow those of the Vulgate except that the three apocryphal books are placed after the Old Testament in the Douay–Rheims Bible; in the Clementine Vulgate they come after the New Testament. These three apocrypha are omitted entirely in the Challoner revision.

The Psalms of the Douay–Rheims Bible follow the numbering of the Vulgate and the Septuagint, whereas those in the KJV follow that of Masoretic Text. For details of the differences see the article on the Psalms. A summary list is shown below:

The Old Testament "Douay" translation of the Latin Vulgate arrived too late on the scene to have played any part in influencing the King James Version.^[24] The Rheims New Testament had, however, been available for over twenty years. In the form of William Fulke's parallel version, it was readily accessible. Nevertheless, the official instructions to the King James Version translators omitted the Rheims version from the list of previous English translations that should be consulted, probably deliberately.

The degree to which the King James Version drew on the Rheims version has, therefore, been the subject of considerable debate; with James G Carleton arguing^[25] for a very extensive influence, while Charles C Butterworth proposed that the actual influence was small, relative to those of the Bishops' Bible and the Geneva Bible.

Much of this debate was resolved in 1969, when Ward Allen published a partial transcript of the minutes made by John Bois of the proceedings of the General Committee of Review for the King James Version (i.e., the supervisory committee which met in 1610 to review the work of each of the separate translation 'companies'). Bois records the policy of the review committee in relation to a discussion of 1 Peter 1:7 "we have not thought the indefinite sense ought to be defined", which reflects the strictures expressed by the Rheims translators against concealing ambiguities in the original text. Allen shows that in several places, notably in the reading "manner of time" at Revelation 13:8, the reviewers incorporated a reading from the Rheims text specifically in accordance with this principle. More usually, however, the King James Version handles obscurity in the source text by supplementing their preferred clear English formulation with a literal translation as a marginal note. Bois shows that many of these marginal translations are derived, more or less modified, from the text or notes of the Rheims New Testament; indeed Rheims is explicitly stated as the source for the marginal reading at Colossians 2:18.

In 1995, Ward Allen in collaboration with Edward Jacobs further published a collation, for the four Gospels, of the marginal amendments made to a copy of the Bishops' Bible (now conserved in the Bodleian Library), which transpired to be the formal record of the textual changes being proposed by several of the companies of King James Version translators. They found around a quarter of the proposed amendments to be original to the translators; but that three-quarters had been taken over from other English versions. Overall, about one-fourth of the proposed amendments adopted the text of the Rheims New Testament. "And the debts of the [KJV] translators to earlier English Bibles are substantial. The translators, for example, in revising the text of the synoptic Gospels in the Bishops' Bible, owe about one-fourth of their revisions, each, to the Geneva and Rheims New Testaments. Another fourth of their work can be traced to the work of Tyndale and Coverdale. And the final fourth of their revisions is original to the translators themselves".^[26]

Otherwise the English text of the King James New Testament can often be demonstrated as adopting Latinate terminology also found in the Rheims version of the same text. In the majority of cases, these Latinisms could also have been derived directly from the versions of Miles Coverdale or the fourteenth-century textual sequence of the Middle English Bible popularly attributed to John Wycliffe (i.e., the source texts for the Rheims translators), but they would have been most readily accessible to the King James translators in Fulke's parallel editions. This also explains the incorporation into the King James Version from the Rheims New Testament of a number of striking English phrases, such as "publish and blaze abroad" at Mark 1:45.

The Douay-Rheims Only movement advocates for the belief that the Douay-Rheims is superior to all Bible translations into English (both Catholic and non-Catholic). Adherents to this view believe that the Vulgate is superior to basically all Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, believing that those manuscripts had been corrupted "by heretics or otherwise".^[27][28] There are also some in the movement who believe that Catholics should only use the 1610 original,^[29][30] though this is also opposed by most people in the movement.^[28]

Harvard University Press, and Swift Edgar and Angela Kinney at Dumbarton Oaks Library have used a version of Challoner's Douay–Rheims Bible as both the basis for the English text in a dual Latin-English Bible (The Vulgate Bible, six volumes) and, unusually, they have also used the English text of the Douay-Rheims in combination with the modern Biblia Sacra Vulgata to reconstruct (in part) the pre-Clementine Vulgate that was the basis for the Douay-Rheims for the Latin text. This is possible only because the Douay-Rheims, alone among English Bibles, and even in the Challoner revision, attempted a word-for-word translation of the underlying Vulgate. A noted example of the literalness of the translation is the differing versions of the Lord's Prayer, which has two versions in the Douay-Rheims: the Luke version uses 'daily bread' (translating the Vulgate quotidianum) and the version in Matthew reads "supersubstantial bread" (translating from the Vulgate supersubstantialem). Every other English Bible translation uses "daily" in both places; the underlying Greek word is the same in both places, and Jerome translated the word in two different ways because then, as now, the actual meaning of the Greek word epiousion was unclear.

The Harvard–Dumbarton Oaks editors have been criticized in the Medieval Review for being "idiosyncratic" in their approach; their decision to use Challoner's 18th-century revision of the Douay-Rheims, especially in places where it imitates the King James Version, rather than producing a fresh translation into contemporary English from the Latin, despite the Challoner edition being "not relevant to the Middle Ages"; and the "artificial" nature of their Latin text which "is neither a medieval text nor a critical edition of one".^[31][32]

• Tyndale Bible (1526)
• Coverdale Bible (1535)
• Matthew Bible (1537)
• Taverner's Bible (1539)
• Great Bible (1539)
• Geneva Bible (1560)
• Bishops' Bible (1568)
• King James Bible (1611)

• Much of the above text was taken from the article "English Versions" by Sir Frederic G. Kenyon in the Dictionary of the Bible edited by James Hastings (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909).
• "English Translations of the Bible", The Catholic World, Vol. XII, October 1870/March 1871.
• Hugh Pope. English Versions of the Bible, B. Herder Book Co., 1952.
• A. S. Herbert, Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible 1525–1961, London, England: British and Foreign Bible Society; New York: American Bible Society, 1968. SBN 564-00130-9.

• Online and print editions of the 16th/17th century Douay–Rheims Bible:
  • Facsimile Rheims New Testament of 1582: Google Books; facsimile from Gallica
  • Facsimile Rheims First Edition at Internet Archive: 1609 Old Testament (Vol. I); 1610 Old Testament (Vol. II); 1582 New Testament
  • Facsimile Old Testament as printed at Douay in 1609–1610: Vol. I; Vol. II
  • Facsimile Douay Old Testament of 1609/1610, as reprinted in 1635: Vol. I; Vol. II
  • Complete Douay–Rheims Bible:
    • Complete Douay-Rheims Bible (a scan of the 1635 reprint, Old and New Testaments)
    • Douay-Rheims 1582 and 1610 Online (this site offers the complete text and annotations, with "spelling and punctuation lightly modernized")
    • Douay-Rheims 1633 and 1635 Online (this site offers the text in easily navigable HTML, but is currently incomplete)
• Facsimile of Challoner's revision:
  • Parallel edition of the New Testament with the Vulgate and Challoner's revision (Samuel Bagster, London, England, 1872)
• Online text of the Challoner revision:
  • The Bible, Douay-Rheims, Complete at Project Gutenberg, including EPUB and Kindle editions
  • Douay-Rheims (Challoner rev.), fully searchable, including all references and possible to compare with both the Latin Vulgate and Knox Bibles side by side.
  • Douay-Rheims (Challoner rev.), searchable, with tabs to switch between DR, DR+LV, and Latin Vulgate
  • Douay-Rheims (Challoner rev.) as plain text files (OT ZIP, NT ZIP)
  • Douay-Rheims (Challoner rev.), with definitions of unfamiliar words, and searchable via concordance.
  • Douay-Rheims (Challoner rev.) as HTML files
• The Douay-Rheims, 1914 John Murphy edition at Internet Archive
• Works by or about Douay–Rheims Bible at the Internet Archive
• Works by Douay–Rheims Bible at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Douay Bible" . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
• The History of the Text of the Rheims and Douay Version of Holy Scripture (1859), by John Henry Newman
• History of the Douay Bible and Online Text
• History of the Douay Bible. Archived 2015-11-27 at the Wayback Machine
• Title Pages of Early Editions