This is the original Douay-Rheims, the first complete English Catholic Bible, presented in a clean, modern reading edition, free to read and share. It is notthe Challoner revision that nearly every other “Douay-Rheims” in print and online today reproduces.
The Douay-Rheims was translated from the Latin Vulgate by English Catholic scholars in exile, principally Gregory Martin, with William Allen, Richard Bristow, and Thomas Worthington, at the English Colleges of Rheims and Douay. The New Testament was published at Rheims in 1582; the Old Testament, long delayed for want of funds, followed at Douay in 1609–1610. Together they form the first complete English Catholic Bible.
Nearly two centuries later, Bishop Richard Challoner thoroughly revised the text (1749–1752), modernizing its vocabulary and reshaping its phrasing, often toward the cadences of the King James Bible. Challoner’s revision is the version almost universally sold and posted as “the Douay-Rheims” today. It is a worthy book, but it is a revision: the original translators’ English had by then been substantially rewritten.
This edition returns to that original, set directly from the 1582/1609 printing, so you can read the Rheims-Douay as its translators actually rendered it.
How much did Challoner change? A verse-by-verse comparison →
Every chapter is offered in two forms, switchable as you read:
The 1582/1609 text exactly as printed, its original spelling, vocabulary, and word order preserved (only the long-ſ and vv → w normalized for the modern eye).
The same translation with onlythe spelling and orthography brought up to date: the translators’ own vocabulary, the old pronouns (thou, thee, ye), the -eth/-est verb endings (raineth, mayest), and the Vulgate’s word order all kept intact. It is a gentle modernization, never a re-translation nor a smoothing toward modern Bibles.
Don’t take our word for it. While reading, toggle between the two— the Modern Spelling / Verbatim 1609 switch, or just press V — and watch only the spelling change: every word, its order, and the rendering stay exactly in place. That is the whole difference between modernizing an edition and rewriting it.
New to the older English (thou, -eth, whence, thereof)? A quick guide →
The names may look unfamiliar at first: Moyses, not Moses; Noe, not Noah; Henoch, Elias, Isaias, Ezechias. These are the forms as they stand in the Latin Vulgate, carried for some fifteen centuries in the Church’s liturgy and in the Fathers, and the translators kept them deliberately rather than adopt the Hebrew-derived spellings (Moses, Noah, Enoch, Elijah, Isaiah) that most later English Bibles, Catholic and Protestant alike, took up. We keep them too, in both editions, modernizing only the dead letterforms. It is one of the clearest marks that you are reading the original Douay-Rheims and not a later revision.
This is a new transcription, prepared by Sancta Clara Press in 2026 directly from the original 1582 Rheims and 1609/1610 Douay printed editions, not a reprint of an earlier digital text. Every verse is validated against the Clementine Vulgate(the Church’s standard Latin edition, promulgated 1592). The translators’ own apparatus is preserved: the chapter arguments, the marginal glosses, and the chapter-end annotations. That same Clementine Latin can be shown interlinearly beside each verse, and doctrinally weighted words are kept as the translators chose them, without the later smoothings.
A note on the Latin: the Rheims translators worked from the Vulgate as it stood beforethe Sixto-Clementine revision, the Rheims New Testament appeared in 1582, a decade before the Clementine edition of 1592, chiefly the Louvain text then current. The Latin shown here interlinearly is that later Clementine edition; it differs from the translators’ base only in minor readings and spelling, the two being substantially the same.
A note on the paragraphs: the first printings do not begin a new line at every verse, but set the Scripture in paragraphs marked by an indented first line, and this edition follows them, so the divisions are the compositors’ rather than ours. Where a chapter runs unbroken in the original, as much of Leviticus and Job does, it runs unbroken here. That division is the one part of the text not read directly from the page-scans: it is taken from the Text Creation Partnership’s independently keyed transcription of these same two printings, and checked against the scans across a sample of chapters in both volumes.
A note on the pointing: the first printings punctuate more lightly than we do, and often set a full stop where a modern printer would use a colon or semicolon, carrying straight on in lower case (you shall die in your sins. for if you believe not that I am he…). There are some hundreds of these. They are not errors, and they are not modernized here: the pointing is left as the compositors set it.
Alongside the Scripture and the translators’ own notes, most chapters offer an optional verse-by-verse commentary— a reading aid we have added, drawn from the classic Catholic expositors and always distinct from the Douay text itself. All of it is in the public domain:
A small ✦beside a verse opens the commentary on that passage. It is a supplement offered for study — never part of the Scripture, and always subordinate to it and to the translators’ own apparatus.
The Douay-Rheims Scripture is in the public domain. This edition, the modern-spelling normalization, the clarifications and glosses, the arrangement of the apparatus, and the typography, is © 2026 Sancta Clara Press, released under CC BY 4.0. The Word is free; the edition is the craft.