A Discovery of the Manifold Corruptions of the Holy Scriptures
by Fr. Gregory Martin (1582)
Almost no Bible tells you why it was translated as it was. The Douay-Rheims is the rare exception. The year the Rheims New Testament appeared, its principal translator, Fr. Gregory Martin, published this companion volume — a chapter-by-chapter defense of the renderings he had chosen, weighed against the Greek, the Hebrew, the Latin Vulgate, and the Fathers, and against the English versions of his day. To read it is to sit at the translator’s desk and watch him reason.
It is presented here in modern English, with Martin’s own footnotes preserved. The book is a historical document of its age and speaks in the sharp controversial voice of the sixteenth century; we offer it as the translators’ own testimony to the care behind the original Douay-Rheims.