Why the Douay-Rheims?

[Talmida]

Jerome was a great translator, but he was not a perfect translator.

The D-R is a translation of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, but the Church has corrected/updated that Latin version. The Nova Vulgata is considered the better text.

Other Bibles have gone directly to the Hebrew and Greek texts, bypassing any errors or bias that Jerome may have inserted in his translation.

In Genesis 3:1, the serpent’s question in Hebrew says neither “Why” or “Did”. The Hebrew text does not word questions that way. Some scholars think that the Hebrew words af ki (literal meaning of* af*: even, indeed, also; literal meaning of ki: for, that, because, etc.) that introduce the serpent’s words are used to introduce a rhetorical question that can only be answered in light of a previous situation, for example, Did God really tell you…?

Others think that there really is no question. They suggest that the serpent makes a false statement in v.1 that the woman interrupts to correct in v.2:

"1. The snake was clever, more than all the animals of the field which YHWH God had made, and it said to the Woman, "Even when God said you may not eat from any tree of the Garden – "

1. but the Woman said to the snake, "From the fruit of the trees of the Garden we may eat,
2. but from the fruit of the Tree which is in the middle of the Garden, God said, ‘You shall not eat from it and you shall not touch it, otherwise you will die.’"

Of course it works way better without verse numbers – and that’s okay, because there were no verse numbers in the Hebrew, or the original Latin translations.

Hebrew had no question marks. No quotation marks. No capital letters. More than one interpretation is supported by the text.

As for the section in Genesis 3:6, “her husband with her” the word “with her” (immah) is right there in the Hebrew. * Im* means “with, beside”; the -ah suffix means “her.”

One might ask why Jerome left it out, not why anyone else put it in.

 

[Marysann]

Thank you posters for such an interesting thread. I have a Douay-Rheims Bible but I never compared the texts as you are doing, and so I missed all of these important translation differences. Does anyone know if there is a parallel bible published that contains the Douay-Rheims, the RSV-CE, the NAB and any other modern translations?

 

[mmortal03]

Thank you posters for such an interesting thread. I have a Douay-Rheims Bible but I never compared the texts as you are doing, and so I missed all of these important translation differences. Does anyone know if there is a parallel bible published that contains the Douay-Rheims, the RSV-CE, the NAB and any other modern translations?

There is an excellent one, for the New Testament. I don’t think there is anything for the OT, unfortunately:

amazon.com/Catholic-Comparative-New-Testament-Douay-Rheims/dp/019528299X

 

[rciadan]

Jerome was a great translator, but he was not a perfect translator.

The D-R is a translation of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, but the Church has corrected/updated that Latin version. The Nova Vulgata is considered the better text.

That is a very argueable point. First, St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate has the pronouncement of being free from error at the Council of Trent. The Nova Vulgata has no such pronouncement.

Other Bibles have gone directly to the Hebrew and Greek texts, bypassing any errors or bias that Jerome may have inserted in his translation.

That does not make them more accurate as is addressed in the preface to the original Douay-Rheims. These other versions went to Hebrew and Greek text that are copies made hundreds, if not over a thousand, years after the copies St. Jerome had to work with. They are light years away from the original texts in comarison to the extant texts he used to translate from. I trust his sources more.

In Genesis 3:1, the serpent’s question in Hebrew says neither “Why” or “Did”. The Hebrew text does not word questions that way. Some scholars think that the Hebrew words af ki (literal meaning of* af*: even, indeed, also; literal meaning of ki: for, that, because, etc.) that introduce the serpent’s words are used to introduce a rhetorical question that can only be answered in light of a previous situation, for example, Did God really tell you…?

Others think that there really is no question. They suggest that the serpent makes a false statement in v.1 that the woman interrupts to correct in v.2:

"1. The snake was clever, more than all the animals of the field which YHWH God had made, and it said to the Woman, "Even when God said you may not eat from any tree of the Garden – "2. but the Woman said to the snake, “From the fruit of the trees of the Garden we may eat,3. but from the fruit of the Tree which is in the middle of the Garden, God said, ‘You shall not eat from it and you shall not touch it, otherwise you will die.’”

Linguistic theory that proves nothing other than some have a different opinion and strays form the point of the thread.

Of course it works way better without verse numbers – and that’s okay, because there were no verse numbers in the Hebrew, or the original Latin translations.

True. I ignore chapter divisions myself, other than to help me find the location of a passage, which is the only reason they were inserted at all.

Hebrew had no question marks. No quotation marks. No capital letters. More than one interpretation is supported by the text.

MOre than one interpretation is possible with any text, which is why we need the teaching Magisterium to help guide us into correct interpretaion…

As for the section in Genesis 3:6, “her husband with her” the word “with her” (immah) is right there in the Hebrew. Im means “with, beside”; the -ah suffix means “her.”

One might ask why Jerome left it out, not why anyone else put it in.

Again you are looking at a text that is a thousand or more years after St. Jerome’s and may easily be corrupted, as is suggested, with good reason, in the preface to the original DR. Your source is no more reliable that you claim the Latin Vulgate is not, except that Holy Mother Church has infallibly stated that St. Jeromes Latin Vugate is relaible. Has the Church made any such pronouncement as per your sources?

 

[mmortal03]

That does not make them more accurate as is addressed in the preface to the original Douay-Rheims. These other versions went to Hebrew and Greek text that are copies made hundreds, if not over a thousand, years after the copies St. Jerome had to work with. They are light years away from the original texts in comparison to the extant texts he used to translate from. I trust his sources more.

Don’t get me wrong with my following words, as I don’t disagree with you. But hear me out.

The Church has made statements since then that the original language texts that we now have available for scholars are much more reliable and accessible than the texts that were available when they made that argument about translating from the Vulgate for the Douay Rheims.

With that said, I haven’t heard that what we have now in the original languages can replace what we have from the Vulgate, either.

Especially with what has since been found of the Dead Sea Scrolls as a similar example, and with knowledge of the origin of the Vulgate, I don’t think we can honestly just throw it out, and let me include the Septuagint in this same regard as well. The trend of Bible scholarship of placing secondary importance on extant Bible texts simply because they are not written in the original language, which has seemingly been done for quite a long time, is quite narrow minded.

Going a little off topic, I’d really like to know what computer work and statistical analysis has been done to compare all the textual differences that there are. It seems like something that would have been done in the late 20th century and can now be done very easily today. I have heard that the bulk of what we have are minor differences, and that there are few cases where the differences would really affect the message. Maybe what is more likely a problem is the faulty translation of the texts today into modern languages like English. What would you say if the bigger issue was getting the message across into English, and not the differences between the Vulgate, the Septuagint, the Hebrew, and the Greek NT? What if the Douay Rheims did a better job of getting the nuances translated into English than any of the modern tries at it?

 

[Talmida]

rciadan wrote:

That is a very argueable point. First, St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate has the pronouncement of being free from error at the Council of Trent. The Nova Vulgata has no such pronouncement.

Hmmm. Do you really think Moses had horns? See Exodus 34:29

Douai-Rheims:

And when Moses came down from the Mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord.

Jerome’s Vulgate:

cumque descenderet Moses de monte Sinai tenebat duas tabulas testimonii et ignorabat quod cornuta esset facies sua ex consortio sermonis Dei

Nova Vulgata:

Cumque descenderet Moyses de monte Sinai, tenebat duas tabulas testimonii et ignorabat quod resplenderet cutis faciei suae ex consortio sermonis Domini.

RSV:

When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, with the two tables of the testimony in his hand as he came down from the mountain, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.

The Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made about 2 centuries BEFORE Christ (and used both by the Apostles and by the Eastern Church) :

LXX (1851 Brenton’s edition):

And when Moses went down from the mountain, [there were] the two tables in the hands of Moses,-- as then he went down from the mountain, Moses knew not that the appearance of the skin of his face was glorified, when God spoke to him.

The horns were an error. Translators before and after Jerome identified the word correctly. And that is just ONE of the errors in the Vulgate.

John Paul II’s Scripturarum Thesaurus introduces us to the Nova Vulgata, and states,

In past times the Church considered that the old Vulgate edition was sufficient and was abundantly effective for sharing the word of God with the Christian people: something indeed which this New Vulgate edition will be able to accomplish all the more fully.

You are correct, we are not told that the Nova Vulgata is error free. I guess the reason for that is that documents previously declared error-free were proven otherwise.

The Exodus quotation is a tiny error – the misplacement of a vowel dot is the difference between the Hebrew words “horn” and “beam of light.” But it had a huge influence on anti-semitic thought: a people with horns were considered diabolic.

Don’t get me wrong, his achievement is amazing, but human beings make mistakes, and Jerome was human.

Again you are looking at a text that is a thousand or more years after St. Jerome’s and may easily be corrupted, as is suggested, with good reason, in the preface to the original DR. Your source is no more reliable that you claim the Latin Vulgate is not, except that Holy Mother Church has infallibly stated that St. Jeromes Latin Vugate is relaible. Has the Church made any such pronouncement as per your sources?

I don’t know much about the New Testament, but the Hebrew sources are a good deal older than that – and of course can be compared with the LXX, to see how the Rabbis put the Hebrew into Greek in the years BC.

As for the infallible declaration – not everything that we think is infallible really IS infallible. Mother Church was well served by JPII was she not? And he said we can be more fully served by the Neo-Vulgate.

 

[mmortal03]

I don’t know much about the New Testament, but the Hebrew sources are a good deal older than that – and of course can be compared with the LXX, to see how the Rabbis put the Hebrew into Greek in the years BC.

The oldest surviving nearly-complete manuscripts of the Old Testament in any language are copies of the Septuagint, the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus of the 4th century and the Codex Alexandrinus of the 5th century; the oldest extant complete Hebrew texts date 700 years later, from around 1000.

 

[bilop]

The oldest surviving nearly-complete manuscripts of the Old Testament in any language are copies of the Septuagint, the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus of the 4th century and the Codex Alexandrinus of the 5th century; the oldest extant complete Hebrew texts date 700 years later, from around 1000.

This is a crucial point. Anything translated from the Hebrew, in modern times, is many centuries later than the Greek, or what St. Jerome used.

Jesus and the Apostles used and quoted the Septaguint. The New Testament was written largely in Greek, maybe Aramaic originally for one or two of the Gospels (but we have no surviving copies).

There is no reason to translate from the Hebrew, ever. They are Masoretic texts that do not reflect the O.T. that Jesus and the Apostles knew.

God Bless

 

[Jerry-Jet]

The real bottom line is this: what percentage of errors in the Douay Rheims are contra to Catholic doctrines and what percentage of errors in other translations are contra to Catholic doctrines?

Error is error but some errors are bigger than others.

You never hear that from the new translation proponents.

So what if they go back to the original languages and get some things right if they have more errors involving Catholic Doctrine which is much more important?

Also why is making an English translation of the Nova Vulgata the most forbidden thing in all of biblical translation?

I’ll take its errors over anyone else’s errors anyday.

 

[Cranch]

Thank you posters for such an interesting thread. I have a Douay-Rheims Bible but I never compared the texts as you are doing, and so I missed all of these important translation differences. Does anyone know if there is a parallel bible published that contains the Douay-Rheims, the RSV-CE, the NAB and any other modern translations?

I don’t know of one that contains the combination you mention, but here is a cool web site (sponsored by an evangelical university) where you can create a custom parallel bible out of texts available online. Some of these versions are more obscure, but there are plenty useful versions. You could as an example compare the D-R, KJV, NASB and NRSV all at once. There’s also various, Greek, Hebrew and Latin texts. One reminder: the linked commentary is not Catholic but by Matthew Henry, the noted 17th century Presbyterian which will no doubt contain Calvinist thought.

 

[colliric]

rciadan wrote:

Hmmm. Do you really think Moses had horns? See Exodus 34:29

Douai-Rheims:

Jerome’s Vulgate:

Nova Vulgata:

RSV:

The Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made about 2 centuries BEFORE Christ (and used both by the Apostles and by the Eastern Church) :

LXX (1851 Brenton’s edition):

The horns were an error. Translators before and after Jerome identified the word correctly. And that is just ONE of the errors in the Vulgate.

If you actually bother to read that passage in the DR, you will understand that the word Horns does not refer to physical horns on his head, but rather duel Rays of light protruding from the top of his head like a “Halo”. It’s the same thing as saying his face was “shining with light” or whatever the RSV says. These horns were made of light… wait a moment, that’s what the RSV infers too, that his face was shining and light was protruding from his face!

Jerome identified the word correctly, he did not mean anything bad, he very clearly infers they are 2 shining rays of light. It’s just that Horned is a different way of saying the same thing, that has like the name “Holy Ghost” become possibly archaic because of our own connotations… even though “Ghost” still means “manifesting Spirit” like it originally did.

Another example is “Apocalpyse”, which is also considered an archaic name for the final book of the bible.

 

[Cranch]

You are correct, we are not told that the Nova Vulgata is error free. I guess the reason for that is that documents previously declared error-free were proven otherwise.

If you are referring to the Vulgate, I believe the Council of Trent declared it free of doctrinal error. If you mean something else please cite.

The Exodus quotation is a tiny error – the misplacement of a vowel dot is the difference between the Hebrew words “horn” and “beam of light.” But it had a huge influence on anti-semitic thought: a people with horns were considered diabolic.

“A people with horns”? I would never downplay the evil of anti-Semitism, but I don’t get this. Even with the mistranslation accepted as scripture, is God supposed to have made the bearer of the ten commandments and leader of the chosen people diabolical? Did the rest of the Israelites grow horns? Has any Christian, anti-semitic or not, ever come across a Jew with horns? More likely as Ruth Mellinkoff suggests in The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought, (University of California Press, 1971) Jerome’s translation must have made sense at the time. To quote Karla Langedijk in a review of this book published in* The Art Bulletin*, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Dec., 1972):“As we shall see…the reader of the Vulgate would have understood this passage in the light of an age-old tradition: the horned head or the head wearing a horned headdress symbolized divinity, honor and power in ancient civilizations. Such horned accouterments rated as devices which made manifest both magical power and protection…The earliest representation, which dates from about 1025–1050, shows Moses wearing a headgear topped by horns.”
Horns

 

[mmortal03]

I don’t know of one that contains the combination you mention, but here is a cool web site (sponsored by an evangelical university) where you can create a custom parallel bible out of texts available online. Some of these versions are more obscure, but there are plenty useful versions. You could as an example compare the D-R, KJV, NASB and NRSV all at once. There’s also various, Greek, Hebrew and Latin texts. One reminder: the linked commentary is not Catholic but by Matthew Henry, the noted 17th century Presbyterian which will no doubt contain Calvinist thought.

I didn’t make it clear before about the Bible that I linked to, but The Catholic Comparative New Testament contains the New Testament of the NAB, RSVCE, NRSV, Jerusalem Bible, New Jerusalem Bible, Douay-Rheims, and Good News Translation.

 

[lak611]

I didn’t make it clear before about the Bible that I linked to, but The Catholic Comparative New Testament contains the New Testament of the NAB, RSVCE, NRSV, Jerusalem Bible, New Jerusalem Bible, Douay-Rheims, and Good News Translation.

Is the Old Testament available?

 

[mmortal03]

Is the Old Testament available?

No, Oxford Press hasn’t published it, and I have never heard anything about them choosing to. It would be nice.

 

[colliric]

If you are referring to the Vulgate, I believe the Council of Trent declared it free of doctrinal error. If you mean something else please cite.

“A people with horns”? I would never downplay the evil of anti-Semitism, but I don’t get this. Even with the mistranslation accepted as scripture, is God supposed to have made the bearer of the ten commandments and leader of the chosen people diabolical? Did the rest of the Israelites grow horns? Has any Christian, anti-semitic or not, ever come across a Jew with horns? More likely as Ruth Mellinkoff suggests in The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought, (University of California Press, 1971) Jerome’s translation must have made sense at the time. To quote Karla Langedijk in a review of this book published in* The Art Bulletin*, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Dec., 1972):“As we shall see…the reader of the Vulgate would have understood this passage in the light of an age-old tradition: the horned head or the head wearing a horned headdress symbolized divinity, honor and power in ancient civilizations. Such horned accouterments rated as devices which made manifest both magical power and protection…The earliest representation, which dates from about 1025–1050, shows Moses wearing a headgear topped by horns.”
Horns

The Challoner version has this note, which makes sense:
“Horned” That is, shining, and sending forth rays of light like horns.

Which makes complete sense. “Shining” therefore is also valid as modern translation, however “horned” is much more physically descriptive of a “Halo” effect with physical light coming from his face. So Jerome is just as right in translating it as “horned”, because he means “horned with light”, i.e “physically Shining with light”.

 

[rciadan]

The Church has made statements since then that the original language texts that we now have available for scholars are much more reliable and accessible than the texts that were available when they made that argument about translating from the Vulgate for the Douay Rheims.

Please produce such a statement.

With that said, I haven’t heard that what we have now in the original languages can replace what we have from the Vulgate, either.

The Vulgate, specifically St. Jerome’s Latine Vulgate is the only edition of the scriptures ever to be pronounced as "
ordains and declares, that the said old and vulgate edition, which, by the lengthened usage of so many years, has been approved of in the Church, be, in public lectures, disputations, sermons and expositions, held as authentic; and that no one is to dare, or presume to reject it under any pretext whatever." This is directly from the Council of Trent

The trend of Bible scholarship of placing secondary importance on extant Bible texts simply because they are not written in the original language, which has seemingly been done for quite a long time, is quite narrow minded.

This is the same error that the Jews made when they refused to any longer accept the Septuagint around AD90. This is the same error Martin Luther fell into for the purpose of avoiding biblical references to doctrines he did not believe in. This is the same error scholars and theologians are falling into today, all with the same goal as the Jews first and later the Protestant Leaders. I cannot but help to notice that so many of the differences are in regard to passages that specifically support age old Catholic Traditions and Doctrine.

I have heard that the bulk of what we have are minor differences, and that there are few cases where the differences would really affect the message.

My own experience upon simply reading the DR on a daily basis and comparing it to the Mass readings for any given day is that there are myriad major changes.

Maybe what is more likely a problem is the faulty translation of the texts today into modern languages like English. What would you say if the bigger issue was getting the message across into English, and not the differences between the Vulgate, the Septuagint, the Hebrew, and the Greek NT?

This is THE issue. The modern versions have failed as is evident by thier constant revisioning.

What if the Douay Rheims did a better job of getting the nuances translated into English than any of the modern tries at it?

This is the whole point. I do not say that there can never be a better translation. As of this date, I do say that the DR is the only accurate one. I also maintain that the sources that modern scholars are using today are in no way as reliable as what St. Jerome had at hand. I would like to see something other that a “scholars opinion statement” to the contrary.

But again, the point of this thread is to point out these differences as we come across them and to give our opinion as to thier importance. In that spirit let me point out Genesis 3:15 A passage that is very important. To see this is true, simply look at so many of all the statues and paintings of Mary that have been done through the centuries, where she is depicted as stated in this verse, with her heel on the head of the serpent.

The Douay-Rheims:

1. 
   ]I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed:* she** shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.
   Let’s look at the NAB:
   
   5 *I will put enmity between you and the woman,
   and between your offspring and hers;
   He will strike at your head,
   while you strike at his heel."
   
   KJV:
   
   And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed;** it** shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
   
   I will let these three speak for themselves, while asking, which one is in agreement with centuries of Catholic Tradition?

 

[SFH]

Jerome was a great translator, but he was not a perfect translator.

The D-R is a translation of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, but the Church has corrected/updated that Latin version. The Nova Vulgata is considered the better text.

Other Bibles have gone directly to the Hebrew and Greek texts, bypassing any errors or bias that Jerome may have inserted in his translation.

In Genesis 3:1, the serpent’s question in Hebrew says neither “Why” or “Did”. The Hebrew text does not word questions that way. Some scholars think that the Hebrew words af ki (literal meaning of* af*: even, indeed, also; literal meaning of ki: for, that, because, etc.) that introduce the serpent’s words are used to introduce a rhetorical question that can only be answered in light of a previous situation, for example, Did God really tell you…?

Others think that there really is no question. They suggest that the serpent makes a false statement in v.1 that the woman interrupts to correct in v.2:

"1. The snake was clever, more than all the animals of the field which YHWH God had made, and it said to the Woman, "Even when God said you may not eat from any tree of the Garden – "

1. but the Woman said to the snake, "From the fruit of the trees of the Garden we may eat,
2. but from the fruit of the Tree which is in the middle of the Garden, God said, ‘You shall not eat from it and you shall not touch it, otherwise you will die.’"
   Of course it works way better without verse numbers – and that’s okay, because there were no verse numbers in the Hebrew, or the original Latin translations.

Hebrew had no question marks. No quotation marks. No capital letters. More than one interpretation is supported by the text.

As for the section in Genesis 3:6, “her husband with her” the word “with her” (immah) is right there in the Hebrew. Im means “with, beside”; the -ah suffix means “her.”

One might ask why Jerome left it out, not why anyone else put it in.

Since you mentioned the Nova Vulgata, and I never miss a chance to put in a plug for it, consider how the various translations render the meeting of Isaac and Rachel. Some have Isaac going out into the field to “meditate.” Some have him going out into the field to “walk” or “ease nature.” But the Nova Vulgata looks at the different Hebrew words and translates that Isaac went out into the fields to “mourn” or “lament.” In the notes, the Nova Vulgata points out that Isaac was mourning the death of his mother. The text (not the notes) goes on to say how Rachel comforted Isaac on the loss of his mother. Read the entire passage, and I think you’ll agree with me that the Nova Vulgata is the only one that got it right. Incidentally, the Nova Vulgata translates the “Garden of Eden” as the “Paradise of Eden,” retains “full of grace” in the Angelic Salutation, renders Isaiah as “the virgin shall conceive,” etc.

People sometimes ask why the Nova Vulgata? It’s not the Vulgate, so it doesn’t have any historical value. So why read it? My answer is that the Nova Vulgata is simply the best translation we have available right now. It’s not the best possible translation, but it’s better than any of the others we currently have. And it’s the official translation of the Latin Rite.

Learn Latin and give it a try!

 

[mmortal03]

The Church has made statements since then that the original language texts that we now have available for scholars are much more reliable and accessible than the texts that were available when they made that argument about translating from the Vulgate for the Douay Rheims.

Please produce such a statement.

I think it is in Divino Afflante Spiritu, but I can’t remember for sure after so many of these discussions. I think I remember DAS saying something about the original languages finally being dependable enough, however, it might be in one of the other encyclicals.

 

[porthos11]

I think it is in Divino Afflante Spiritu, but I can’t remember for sure after so many of these discussions. I think I remember DAS saying something about the original languages finally being dependable enough, however, it might be in one of the other encyclicals.

It is indeed in Divino Afflante Spiritu, where the Pope (paragraph 15) attaches the “stigma of levity and sloth” to those scholars who do not exert effort to work from the original languages.

Paragraph 21. Working from the original languages does not detract from the authenticity of the Vulgate, free from doctrinal and moral error. Moreover, the Vulgate is only “official” for the Latin Church. Every educated Catholic knows there are more Catholics than the Latin Church.

The Vulgate may not have moral or doctrinal error, and probably neither does the DR. But they do have TRANSLATION errors, and that means they are no longer as close as possible to the best critical texts. Therefore, the DR is not suitable for me as a study Bible.

Just take the “horns” example posted earlier. We know what Jerome meant. But “horns” is NOT a synonym for “rays of light.” “Horns” is therefore a TRANSLATION error, although not a moral or doctrinal one.

Another is “she” will crush the serpent’s head. It’s not a doctrinal error, yet it remains an inaccurate translation. The original has “he”. I don’t like the DR based on this verse alone, even though it is used to point to our Lady’s role, which I do accept wholeheartedly. The proper translation is “he”; “it” is also somewhat acceptable.

I don’t care how uncomfortable a translation is with regards to “not supporting Catholic doctrine”. For as long as a translation is faithful to the best original language editions, I will pick that one over the DR or KJV. For as long as a translation remains faithful to the originals, it will always be reconcilable with Catholic teaching. For me, the Catholic Bible most closely matching the originals is still the RSV-CE, followed by the New American Bible (except for those blasted Psalms). Yes, the RSV has its quirks, but the DR has more translation quirks which I just can’t stand, right there with the KJV.