Introduction

Gregory Martin was no bystander to the translation wars of his age. A scholar of the English College at Rheims and a Reader there in Holy Scripture,¹ he became the principal translator of the Douay-Rheims Bible, the first complete Catholic Bible in English. Its New Testament appeared at Rheims in 1582, the very year he died; the Old Testament, which he had also finished before his death, remained unpublished for want of funds until 1609 and 1610, nearly thirty years later. A Discovery of the Manifold Corruptions is therefore something rare: a translator’s defense of his own choices, written against the rival English Bibles then in circulation, and an account of why a single word can carry a doctrine, or quietly obscure it.

Published alongside the Rheims New Testament, this book explains the principles that guided its translation while answering the Protestant criticisms surrounding the new Catholic Bible. Few men of Martin’s generation were better placed to make the case he does here. He writes not as a distant observer of the controversy but as one of its chief participants, defending the very translation on which he had labored. It is, in effect, the translator’s own commentary on his work.

His method is worth grasping before his examples, for it is the part that has lasted. Martin does not ask which rendering reads more smoothly. He asks a harder question: does a translation hold to the meaning the words have long borne in the Church’s Latin Bible and in the Fathers, or does it quietly trade that meaning for another? His charge against the Protestant translators is not that they preferred a different doctrine, but that they let their doctrine drive their rendering, choosing, wherever a word would bear two senses, the one their cause required. To render poenitentiam agite as “repent” rather than “do penance,” or presbyteros as “elder” rather than “priest,” is to decide, verse by verse, which Church the English reader will meet in his Bible.

That this was a quarrel with the Protestant translators of 1582, and with them alone, is plain on every page. Martin had no later versions in view, and this book makes no claim about translations that did not yet exist. Yet his test does not expire with its targets. Many of the very renderings he condemned have since become ordinary, and not only in Protestant Bibles. In many of the Catholic translations now in common use, poenitentiam agite is “repent” (Matthew 3:2), the caritas of the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians is “love,” and the gratia a man receives in ordination (First Timothy 4:14) is a “gift.” Each of these is precisely the substitution against which Martin built a chapter.

The honest reader will also see where his alarm did not come to pass. The words he fought hardest to keep at the heart of the Church’s self-understanding have largely held: modern Catholic Bibles still read “church” and not “congregation,” “tradition” and not “ordinance,” “idol” and not “image.” So this is not a verdict that every modern Bible is corrupt. It is something more useful: a test the reader may apply for himself. And the test is plainly still live, for the translations disagree among themselves at the most familiar verse of all. Where one modern Catholic Bible greets Our Lady as “favored one,” another still keeps the words the Church has prayed for centuries, “full of grace” (Luke 1:28).

Behind every example stands a single conviction, the one the Council of Trent had declared a generation before Martin wrote: that the Latin Vulgate is the Church’s authentic text, and that an English Bible is trustworthy in the measure that it faithfully carries the Vulgate’s sense into English. It is the conviction that produced the Douay-Rheims.

There is an irony here that Martin did not live to see: the Bible that still bears his name in most Catholic homes is not his own text but Bishop Challoner’s revision of the 1750s. Newman judged Challoner’s work on the Old Testament “little short of a new translation,” and found the result “even nearer to the Protestant than it is to the Douay.” By Challoner’s day that Protestant standard was the King James Version, whose phrasing had carried forward many of the very renderings Martin opposed.²

To return to Martin’s own words is therefore to recover the Douay as it first stood. In presenting this edition, Sancta Clara Press seeks to restore those original texts to modern readers. Here the reader meets Gregory Martin not through later revisions or summaries but in his own words, and learns to weigh a Bible word by word before turning to the translation he defended.

What follows is his own.

A DISCOVERY OF THE MANIFOLD CORRUPTIONS OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES BY THE Heretics of our days, specially the English Sectaries, and of their foul dealing herein, by partial & false translations to the advantage of their heresies, in their English Bibles used and authorised since the time of Schism.

By GREGORY MARTIN one of the readers of Divinity in the ENGLISH COLLEGE OF RHEMES.

Printed at RHEMES, By John Fogny.