Douay Rheims Bible

Pope Damasus assembled the first list of books of the Bible at the Roman Council in 382 A.D. He commissioned St. Jerome to translate the original Greek and Hebrew texts into Latin, which became known as the Latin Vulgate Bible and was declared by the Church to be the only authentic and official version, in 1546.

The DR New Testament was first published by the English College at Rheims in 1582 A.D. The DR Old Testament was first published by the English College at Douay in 1609 A.D. The first King James Version was not published until 1611. This online DRV contains all 73 books, including the seven Deutero-Canonical books (erroneously called Apocrypha by Protestants). These seven books were included in the 1611 KJV, but not in later KJV Bibles.

St. Jerome considered the seven Deutero-Canonical books to be NOT inspired by God, but he was commissioned by Pope Damasus to translate all 73 books into Latin. Pope Damasus considered the 7 DC books to be inspired by God. Later in 1946, after the finding of the dead-sea scrolls, it was discovered that these 7 DC books were used by the Jews in Alexandria, even in their services. This verifies that Pope Damasus was correct.

It is interesting to note that the Palestinian Jews did not accept the 7 DC books for their version of Holy Scriptures and neither did they accept any of the New Testament. Unfortunately, the Protestants base their Bible on this version which comes from a people who did not accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah.

CHALLONER VERSION

The whole Douay-Rheims Bible was revised and diligently compared with the Latin Vulgate by Bishop Richard Challoner in 1749-1752 A.D. The notes included in the text (in italics) were written by Dr. Challoner.

DIGITAL PUBLISHING

The DR Bible was photographically reproduced from the 1899 edition of the John Murphy Company, Baltimore, Maryland, by Tan Books in 1971. Eventually, this edition was optically scanned to produce a large text file which this publisher used for creating this website, with the aid of text-processing software, which automatically creates the HTML web pages and the index for the search engine. The search engine is a separate piece of software.

One important goal of this project was to preserve the original text "as is", without making any changes in the wording, because the original text had the Imprimatur of James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, dated Sept 1st 1899.

The text files were checked quite thoroughly by software written by the publisher for punctuation errors and verses out of order. The index was humanly checked for misspelled words and the corrections were made to the text. However, some spelling errors may still be present in the text. Many verses were out of order in the original file. These have been corrected.

Every effort was made to ensure that this online version is an exact match to the original printed version. No words were added or ommitted from the text, except for correcting errors caused by the scanning process. No words were rearranged. No verse numbers were changed, except for Psalm 9.

Psalm 9 (HERE) has two parts. The first part has verses 1-21. The second part has Hebrews Psalm 10, verses 1-18. These were renumbered 101-118, so that the search feature would give an unambiguous verse number in Psalm 9.

https://www.drbo.org/about.htm Note, in the Protestant Bibles the numbering of Psalms 10 through 146 differs by one. So Psalm 23 in the King James Version is actually Psalm 22 in the Douay-Rheims Version.

Text take from https://www.drbo.org/about.htm