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The Bible in English before the KJB

04 November 2023

By the close of the 16th century the English reader was confronted with a series of translations tailored to suit his or her religious tastes. Some of these, such as the Geneva Bible (1560), reflected the concerns of those committed to the Reformation. Others, such as the Douai-Reims New Testament (1582), represented the response of the Roman Church to the growing success of Protestantism.

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The first substantial efforts to translate the complete Bible into English were made in the late-14th century by followers of the Oxford scholar John Wycliffe (d. 1384). The idea of an English Bible did not, however, immediately find fertile soil. In a world before printing, each copy of this controversial translation had to be written painstakingly by hand. Before Henry VIII's break with Rome, English Bibles also faced concerted opposition from England’s Church and state.

The second half of the 16th century saw a number of new English versions of the Bible. Some of these, such as the Geneva Bible, met the needs of Protestant reformers. The Geneva text, compiled by followers of Jean Calvin, had particular appeal for the Protestant group who would come to be known as Puritans. At the same time, Protestants were not the only group interested in producing a vernacular Bible.

The Douai-Reims Bible was created in response to the multiplication of Protestant English Bibles in the first half of the 16th century. It was the brainchild of Roman Catholics who fled England at the accession of Elizabeth I. This group established an English College in the Flemish town of Douai in 1568. Europe’s ongoing political upheavals led the College to relocate temporarily to Reims in nearby France. While there a team led by Gregory Martin completed a translation of the New Testament in 1582. Modern scholars now generally recognise that this text played an important role in the formation of the KJB. The Douai-Reims Old Testament did not, however, appear until 1609-10 by which time the English College was once again based in Flanders.

The key feature of the Douai-Reims Bible is that it is a translation based on the Latin Vulgate, not on the original Greek and Hebrew sources. This approach was imposed by the decision of the Council of Trent, a meeting of the leaders of the Catholic Church in response to the Reformation, to endorse St Jerome’s Latin text as the officially accepted Christian scripture. Versions of the Douai-Reims text remained the key English translation for Catholics until the mid-20th century.

Canterbury’s copy comes from the collection of John Grimes, the first Roman Catholic bishop of Christchurch. This edition was originally prepared in the early-19th century by George Leo Haydock, a member of the English College at Douai who returned to England during the French Revolution.


Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, Christchurch (2005). Photograph: Greg O'Beirne (GFDL/Creative Commons)
Further Reading

 

Gordon Campbell, The Bible: The Story of the King James Version, 1611-2011 (Oxford: OUP, 2011), chapter 1.

B. S. Allom, 'Bishop Grimes: His Context and Contribution to the Catholic Church in Canterbury' (unpublished MA thesis, University of Canterbury, 1968).

Christopher de Hamel, The Book: A History of the Bible (London: Phaidon, 2001), chapter 7.

Diarmaid MacCulloch & Elizabeth Solopova, 'Before the King James Bible', in Manifold Greatness: The Making of the King James Bible, ed. by Helen Moore & Julian Reid (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011), pp. 13-39.

Richard Marsden, 'The Bible in English in the Middle Ages', in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception, and Performance in Western Christianity, ed. by Susan Boynton & Diane J. Reilly (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 272-95.

David Norton, The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), chapter 1.

 

Resources @ Canterbury

The Holy Bible: translated from the Latin Vulgate: diligently compared with the Hebrew, Greek, and other editions in divers languages: the Old Testament, first published by the English College at Douay, AD 1609: and the New Testament, first published by the English College at Rheims, AD 1582, notes by George Leo Haydock (Glasgow: McCready; Dunedin: Thomson & Niven, 1850)

Frontispiece to Canterbury's 1850 English translation of the Vulgate Bible © University of Canterbury (2.5MB)

  • John Grimes was the first Roman Catholic bishop of Christchurch and instigator of the basilica project
  • Grimes's library, of which this was a part, came to the University of Canterbury in 1982. It contains a significant number of theological & historical works

'Judith with the head of Holofernes' (Judith 13) from the 1850 English translation of the Vulgate © University of Canterbury (2.5MB)

  • George Leo Haydock's English version of the Vulgate first appeared in 1811-14. This 1850 edition features extensive illustration
  • The text of the Haydock Vulgate is based on a heavily revised version of the original Douai-Reims translation prepared by Richard Challoner in the mid-18th century, which, in turn, had been further modified by Bernard MacMahon. This version is much closer to the language of the KJB than the earlier English Roman Catholic versions of the Bible

'Rebekah receiving Isaac's presents' from the 1850 English translation of the Vulgate (Genesis 24) © University of Canterbury (2.5MB)

  • Haydock's key contribution to the new edition was an extensive commentary
  • The Haydock Vulgate appeared in a variety of different editions, this one being printed in Dunedin
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