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ProVobis
Guest
I don’t know. I still think a side-by-side Greek-Latin-vernacular gives one a better picture of the True Bible, which I don’t believe can be achieved in any one language.
newadvent.org/bible/
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newadvent.org/bible/
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SonCatcher
Guest
Modern translations are of older texts in Greek and Hebrew; but whatever.
The pronouncement that the Vulgate is free of doctrinal error does not mean that all other languages should be translated from Latin. The Greek and Hebrew are also free of error (being the original languages) and provide the possibility of retaining deeper meaning when used as a translation source.The lectionary is not being updated. It has the 1970 Old Testament and 1986 New Testament with further revisions.
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Rich_C
Guest
Probably so, I’m only trying to communicate what the Church says about the Vulgate, but now I think I exagerrated somewhat out of misunderstanding.
That should teach me not to comment on scripture threads. I’ve never been much of a Bible-reader myself.
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ProVobis
Guest
Here’s a 1610 sample version of the Douay-Rheims. I don’t think it could be used today.
powerscourt.blogspot.com/2010/08/douay-rheims-1610.html
powerscourt.blogspot.com/2010/08/douay-rheims-1610.html
It isn’t. It remains beneficial to read and is part of our Catholic heritage and one may certainly prefer it over all else, much like many Protestants still prefer the King James. But the DR (and KJV) does not benefit from the most recent scholarship and discoveries from the last century. It will do fine as a devotional Bible, but will no longer be suitable for serious study.
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Iron_Donkey
Guest
Actually, aside from purely typographical changes (‘vv’ to w, and making the u’s, v’s, f’s and s’s match modern spelling), it’s not that bad. (Not that I have any particular reason to say it’s better or as good, just that it would still be usable without changing the words used, just the spelling of them - so as a translation, so far as I can tell just from looking at that sample, is fine.)
po18guy
Well-known member
The Bishop Challoner revision is much updated, and appears to be the more commonly encountered version.
The RSV-2CE is excellent, as well. My daily bible is a 1953 Confraternity bible that uses the Douay Old Testament combined with the Confraternity New Testament. It does have a bit of an in-betweenness to it, but I like its readability, as it balances the archaic and the modern.
I see the NAB as a somewhat squishy, gender-neutral and modernist translation which has atrocious footnotes. I believe it to be best as a comparative version.
If one has an older King James Version with the Deuterocanon, they will still be well-served by it, as its language was clearly influenced by the Douay-Rheims.
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Lancer
Guest
The Vulgate is not infallible. It’s just the official bible of the Latin Church.
The only infallible translation is the LXX.
It simply means that the Vulgate was approved and official at that time, was and is free from moral and doctrinal error, and it would be a foolish scholar who rejects it. In fact, serious scholars of the present day, both Catholic and Protestant look to the Vulgate as a cross-reference if the original language has suffered in transmission.
That does not mean that the Vulgate itself cannot be revised with new discoveries, as indeed it was in the late 20th century.
That does not mean the Douay (which is an English Bible) is superior. In fact, in many ways and in light of current scholarship, it’s now inferior, relatively speaking.
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floresco
Guest
There is more than one version of the Greek and more than one version of the Hebrew. Sometimes the different versions contradict each other so it is not possible that they are all without error.Modern translations are of older texts in Greek and Hebrew; but whatever.
Even Bibles written in the original languages are copies of copies of copies. Scribal errors creep in.
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jwinch2
Guest
We are spinning our wheels here a bit. This idea of older or newer manuscripts having more less scribal error is interesting, but we have to remember that well before there was a written tradition, there was an oral tradition. With the Old Testament, we are talking how long as an oral tradition before texts were written down and then later compiled? For the New Testament we are talking in the hundreds of years before anything was compiled.
Scripture scholars use various manuscripts and texts to check each other. They aren’t basing their translation on one set of manuscripts and ignoring another. It is a matter of compiling the evidence in areas that are questionable and then making the best call you can at the time. With all of that, modern scripture scholars aren’t exactly flocking to the DR. And it isn’t because of the style of English. As if someone who has learned Koine Greek, Latin, and Hebrew so that they can study Sacred Scripture would be intimidated by an older version of English.
The truth is that Scripture Scholarship has come a long way since the 1600’s. We have access to manuscripts that we didn’t have then, both as texts of scripture, but also other non-Biblical sources. That is something that is often overlooked. Access to non-Biblical writings of the time have been a great resource in helping scholars to learn the proper way to translate words and phrases based on the way they were used during certain periods of time.
As noted above, even the Vulgate has undergone a translation update based on new scholarly evidence, and now the Nova Vulgata is the official translation of the Holy See.
Scripture scholars use various manuscripts and texts to check each other. They aren’t basing their translation on one set of manuscripts and ignoring another. It is a matter of compiling the evidence in areas that are questionable and then making the best call you can at the time. With all of that, modern scripture scholars aren’t exactly flocking to the DR. And it isn’t because of the style of English. As if someone who has learned Koine Greek, Latin, and Hebrew so that they can study Sacred Scripture would be intimidated by an older version of English.
The truth is that Scripture Scholarship has come a long way since the 1600’s. We have access to manuscripts that we didn’t have then, both as texts of scripture, but also other non-Biblical sources. That is something that is often overlooked. Access to non-Biblical writings of the time have been a great resource in helping scholars to learn the proper way to translate words and phrases based on the way they were used during certain periods of time.
As noted above, even the Vulgate has undergone a translation update based on new scholarly evidence, and now the Nova Vulgata is the official translation of the Holy See.
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patrick457
Guest
No, that honor belongs to the Middle English translations attributed to John Wycliff, which is itself also based on the Vulgate.
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patrick457
Guest
Actually it could if you revise the spelling, albeit some might find its highly woodenly-literal translation method - something the original translators believed to be very crucial and important - and neologisms from Latin (“a pacifique host to the Lord”, “clothed with sindon upon the bare”, and “The Gentils to be coheires and concorporat and comparticipant of his promis in Christ JESUS by the Gospel” are but a few examples) a bit grating.
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ProVobis
Guest
Isn’t this the version St. Thomas More took exception to?No, that honor belongs to the Middle English translations attributed to John Wycliff, which is itself also based on the Vulgate.
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wasserfall
Guest
This is an important point.
It seems sometimes that many people have the idea that the translators of the Douay/Rheims bible translated everything in a formal-literal manner because they didn’t know any better.
In fact, there is a long preface to the New Testament (which was the first part published), in which the translators spend a lot of time explaining their translation method and why they considered it proper.
To boil down the argument, they acknowledge that given a difficult passage, it is possible for someone to cross-reference other sources and use external cultural knowledge, etc. to make a scholarly attempt to determine the intended meaning.
However, they argue that such an attempt has no guarantee of correctness, and is actually an act of prideful presumption on the part of the translator, who sets himself up as the authoritative interpreter of Holy Scripture.
Therefore, they argue that a translator must in humility defer judgment on difficult passages, and instead attempt to preserve the formal structure of the text so that, while the literal meaning of the text is faithfully transmitted, no particular interpretation is favored, as that would de facto either bind the teaching authority of the Church or actually cause error to be introduced in the text were the Church ever to authoritatively propose a different interpretation.
Personally I find their argument very logical and persuasive. That is one reason I generally read the Douay/Rheims or Douay/Rheims/Challoner. I am not averse to looking at other translations to see possible interpretations of scripture, but I regard those as exactly that: possible interpretations, not authoritative interpretations.
Lastly, Patrick brought to mind another point: The Douay/Rheims occasionally uses a word in a way that we never use it now. Generally, such a word is either cognate to, or is a direct import from the Latin, and the meaning intended is the Latin meaning, not the English meaning (at least not the modern English meaning).
The word that comes immediately to my mind as an example is “prevent”. “Prevent” is used quite often to mean “come before” in either the sense “appear in front of” or the sense “precede”. It generally does not mean “stop something from happening”.
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patrick457
Guest
St. Thomas More spoke of translations of Scripture that existed before Wycliff. He is mostly right (translations of certain Biblical books in English did exist before the rise of Lollardy), though he does seem to have been slightly mistaken. After Wycliff was put to death, the translation continued to see some use - the text, a literal rendering of the Vulgate, was by itself perfectly fine; the only real problem lay in the prologue, which was deemed to be replete with heretical Lollard ideas - even after the ban on unauthorized translations of Scripture was passed in the 1408 Oxford Convocation. People simply bypassed the ban by removing the problematic additional material and dating copies to before 1408-9. This expunged ‘Wycliff’ Bible was highly popular and circulated widely: consequently many Catholic commentators of the 15th and 16th centuries (St. Thomas More was one), misled by the fake dates, took these Bibles to represent an anonymous earlier orthodox translation of the whole Bible.
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patrick457
Guest
Yep.
They feared that to make ‘presumptive’ translation choices - such as straightening passages ambiguous or unclear in the original or ‘modifying’ speeches and phrases - would be “missing, or restraining the sense of the holy Ghost to our phantasie.”In Early Modern English, ‘suffer’ meant ‘allow’ (“Suffer the little children…”), ‘let’ meant ‘cause’ (preserved in the construction “let…know”), ‘prevent’ meant ‘precede’ or ‘surpass’, and ‘an’ meant ‘if’.
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ProVobis
Guest
Indeed. Somewhere in there lies the Truth for all Catholics.
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SonCatcher
Guest
Yet even with scribal errors, there isn’t any contradiction in doctrine. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain many different versions of some books due to scribal errors. Yet, the community that assembled them considered them all infallible.
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