Nahemah wrote:The Douay Rheims Bible translation predates KJ, though Jamie Saxt was influenced by the New Testament translation when he was collating his version.
Roman Catholics do not use the KJ, for obvious reasons of theological differences, so for an interesting read if you want to compare, I 'd recommend it as well.
It can be downloaded from here, I am not sure about print copy availability though.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kof ... edir_esc=y
Bible history time:
There has been partial translation of the bible into english stretching back to the 7th century. None of these were official or complete. Often it was just the psalms or gospels that was translated. The church was mostly okay with this since these were still done by Catholics. Wycliffe's Bible done in 1395 was almost complete.
Then in 1517 Luther started making trouble in the neighborhood.
Tyndale Bible in 1523 was the first complete translated bible. He was tied to the stakes, strangled and then burned.
Coverdale's Bible came out in 1535. He was exiled. 3 times.
Two years later Matthew's Bible came out. The author was burned at the stakes.
Taverner's Bible came out in 1539. But was only printed in folio.
Great Bible is the first authorized English translation of the bible. under commission of Thomas, Lord Cromwell, Secretary to Henry VIII and Vicar General.
Henry broke with the catholic church, and wanted an english bible.
So the great bible is the FIRST english bible in 1539.
Henrys successor on the other hand was not impressed and queen Mary restored the Church of England to allegiance to Rome. This forced all the bible translators to flee the country. Including the Great Bible, which was burned. Cromwell was beheaded and Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley where burned at the stakes.
The Geneva Bible was done in 1557-1560. Geneva is a city in Switzerland.
After Mary's death, Henry's daughter Elizabeth toke over and the 'bishops bible' was introduced in 1568. The bishop bible is a combination of the great bible and the geneva bible.
THEN, we finally get to the Douay-Rheims. They started in 1582 but the translation was slow, and done in steps so we didn't see a complete printed version until 1610.
It is a faithful English translation of the Latin text. But the old testament is also translated from the latin. Or at least, some versions of it was.
They've done modern translations and editions of it, but if you can find the old text, it's really good. But it's hard to find.
And then finally in 1611 The King James bible came out.
So why the hell did I say that the king James bible is the original???
The king James bible was a massive undertaking. Instead of just 1-2 guys doing the translation they compiled a team of 47 scholars. They went back to some of the earliest versions of the bible in all languages they could find and instead of translating from the latin text they translated the old testament directly from the Hebrew, and the new testament from the Greek and Aramaic "originals".
Now, I have to put Originals in "" because they didn't use originals. The original versions of the bible are lost. So are most manuscripts and most versions of the bible is also gone. In fact, most of the first 900 years of christian history is pretty much gone.
S they used copies of copies of the originals, and to be honest, not all of those copies was 100% correct.
The only complete version of the new testament is in latin, so they did use the latin version as well for some parts.
This has later been "fixed" in modern translations, but they've done the horrible mistake of using greek manuscripts to remove all of the latin. Unfortunately, these manuscripts don't say the same thing as the latin version, and several sections are still missing. Almost all of the modern English translations are missing these sections. It's usually about 21 lines of the bible that have been removed.
This has led to us nowadays having 112 complete versions of the english bible and about 900 incomplete ones.
Now, I hope everybody understand that this is an extreme simplification of a pretty complex subject. Some of the translations mentioned are really just re-prints of earlier attempts, some of them are even translations of other translations and even if king james is the most complete and accurate version of these, it wasn't 100% complete or accurate.
