Well you didn’t say which versions of which.
I would assume you have a Challoner version of the Douay Rheims, you will actually find this pretty similar to the KJV. Mattter of fact, when Challoner revised the DRB from the extremely literal original it appears he mostly used the KJV to do it. If you have a complete KJV you will find it has more books that the DRB, the books that were in an appendix in the Vulgate. They would be 1 and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Mannasah (sp?). Anyway unless your bible is older, or say a copy of the 1611 KJV and not the 1768 revision, it likely doesn’t contain all of the original books.
The text behind the KJV is the so called Textus Receptus, basically the text of Erasmus with some revisions from the Complutensian Polyglot. It’s really not the best text with the major problem being insertions.
The DRB is based on the Vulgate and as such it’s basis is a translation of a translation. That causes some problems but actually it’s not too bad as such translations go. I haven’t compared the original to see how that compares to the Challoner.
Anyway, both are a bit archaic in language and sometimes that can cause a problem because you read something and give it a meaning of today. I’ll use a couple of examples from the KJV. One such word is “let” now today we read “let” and we take it as to permit something. Whereas in the KJV it can mean the opposite, to hinder to hold back. So one must be very careful to read the context.
Or unicorns. Both the DRB and KJV mention unicorns. People read that and think it is speaking of the mythical single horned horse, even making fund of the Bible on account of that, but it’s not. It’s referring to the single horned rhinocersous. The problem was the Hebrew referred to an animal that we didn’t know. And if you go all the way back to the Septuagint, it referred to the single horned creature. So every translator since then followed the Greek which they could understand. Studies since then have let us know that it is referring to an extinct oxen.
Now you wouldn’t think that would have any change in meaning but it does. There is a passage that speaks of Christ on the horn of the unicorn. Well if you run into a person who insists Christ was hung on a single stake instead of a cross, that’s it’s origin. Basically a unicorn would give you the image of a spike and a skull of an oxen looks like a cross.
There’s quite a few other examples, people will tell you they like the old translations and they will of course study and learn those things, but for some reason it’s been my experience that they don’t.
Anyway the NAB is a modern translation from the critical text. It’s really pretty good, The footnotes drive some people crazy because they exhibit some of the modern critical scholarship. If you ignore the footnotes and go with the text, it’s really pretty good.
The Good News as has been said is really a paraphrase. Now a praraphrase can actually be a good thing. People who aren’t familiar with the Bible often get a lot more at first from reading a paraphrase. But the author is critical since a lot of interpretation goes into a paraphrase and the other thing people overlook is that your language must match the translation very closely. The Good News really is pretty good if you are 50 or 60 years old from the US. Get outside that demographic and your English is probably different enough that it starts to become a problem. It’s hard to dig into a paraphrase and do things like word studies and such because it’s just too much like a commentary. But for just sitting and reading a paraphrase can be quite nice.
You will hear people talking about a current paraphrase, the Message, in quite glowing terms. Drives me crazy. I’m too old for it and have done too much study. But for new Christians, it’s probably pretty good. Problem is people are trying to get things like study bibles based on the Message, boy what a mess that is. But to sit and read, especially for new Christians, it has a niche. But one must be careful with any paraphrase.
And I should note the translation versus paraphrase thing is not a hard line. Every translation contains some paraphrase because the idioms and such of language require it. If you just give a wooden literal rendering from the original, people would be completely confused. So often an idiom in the original is translated into it’s equivalent in English. I think of in the Old Testament where it is said that God grows angry. Well the literal translation is that God’s nostrils grow wide. Translators give you the meaning, God’s angry, rather than the translations, wide nostrils.
JJ
