Nearly every “Douay-Rheims” sold or posted today is not the original 1582/1609 translation but Bishop Richard Challoner’s revision of 1749–1752. How far did he change it? We set the first translators’ text beside Challoner’s, verse by verse — and beside the King James Version — and simply counted.
Across the whole Bible — some 35,700 verses compared — Challoner reworded about eleven verses in every twelve; only one in twelve comes through untouched. Most of his changes are small and systematic (the possessive “our Lord,” the Vulgate’s Latin names, a steady exchange of one word for another), but taken together they reword the great majority of the text.
Comparing all three across the New Testament, Challoner’s wording is closer to the King James Version than the original is in about two-thirds of verses (65.7%). The first translators had deliberately resisted the Protestant English of their day; Challoner, writing in an age steeped in the King James Bible, drifted back toward its cadences. Sometimes the result is word-for-word:
In a handful of places the change is not merely of style. Where the first translators kept the Vulgate’s Christus as “Christ” in the Old-Testament prophecies — reading them, as the Fathers did, as pointing to the Messiah — Challoner substituted “anointed,” the rendering of the Protestant Bibles. It stands so in some fourteen verses.
Challoner’s is a Catholic revision, and a worthy one. On the words that carry Catholic doctrine — the very words the first translators fought hardest to defend — he stood with them and against the Protestant readings: do penance (not “repent”), charity (not “love”), justice and justifications (not “righteousness” and “ordinances”), priesthood, church, altar, tradition. This is a difference of English, not of faith. Our reason for returning to the original is not that Challoner is unsound — it is that his revision is a revision, and the first translators’ own words are worth reading as they wrote them.
What makes the original remarkable is that its translators told you whythey rendered each hard place as they did — something almost no English Bible offers. Gregory Martin, the principal translator, wrote an entire book, A Discovery of the Manifold Corruptions of the Holy Scriptures (1582), defending the fidelity of these very renderings, word by word, against the English versions of his time. To read the Rheims-Douay in its first form is to read a translation whose every choice was deliberate and openly argued. Read it here →
The original is our own transcription of the 1582 Rheims and 1609/1610 Douay printings; the Challoner text is the standard public-domain edition (Project Gutenberg #8300); the King James is Project Gutenberg #10. Verses were matched by book, chapter, and verse and compared at the word level (lowercased, punctuation removed). “Identical” means the same words in the same order. The King James comparison is over the New Testament, where the three share the same books and versification; the Psalms are excluded there, their numbering differing between the Hebrew and Vulgate traditions. Figures are approximate, and a small number of verses differ in versification between the editions.