The Holy Bible Douay-Rheims Version

With Challoner Revisions 1749-52
1899 Edition of the John Murphy Company

IMPRIMATUR:
James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, September 1, 1899.

Pope Damasus assembled the first list of books of the Bible at the Roman Council in 382 A.D. He commissioned St.  Jerome to translate the original Greek and Hebrew texts into Latin, which became known as the Latin Vulgate Bible and was declared by the Church to be the only authentic and official version, in 1546.

The DR New Testament was first published by the English College at Rheims in 1582 A.D.  The DR Old Testament was first published by the English College at Douay in 1609 A.D.  The first King James Version was not published until 1611.  This online DRV contains all 73 books, including the seven Deutero-Canonical books (erroneously called Apocrypha by Protestants).  These seven books were included in the 1611 KJV, but not in later KJV Bibles. 

St. Jerome considered the seven Deutero-Canonical books to be NOT inspired by God, but he was commissioned by Pope Damasus to translate all 73 books into Latin. Pope Damasus considered the 7 DC books to be inspired by God. Later in 1946, after the finding of the dead-sea scrolls, it was discovered that these 7 DC books were used by the Jews in Alexandria, even in their services. This verifies that Pope Damasus was correct.

It is interesting to note that the Palestinian Jews did not accept the 7 DC books for their version of Holy Scriptures and neither did they accept any of the New Testament. Unfortunately, the Protestants base their Bible on this version which comes from a people who did not accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah.

The whole Douay-Rheims Bible was revised and diligently compared with the Latin Vulgate by Bishop Richard Challoner in 1749-1752 A.D.  The notes included in the text were written by Dr. Challoner.

The DR Bible was photographically reproduced from the 1899 edition of the John Murphy Company, Baltimore, Maryland, by Tan Books in 1971.  Eventually, this edition was optically scanned to produce a large text file which this publisher used for creating this website, with the aid of text-processing software.

One important goal of this project was to preserve the original text "as is", without making any changes in the wording, because the original text had the Imprimatur of James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, dated Sept 1st 1899. 

The text file was checked quite thoroughly by software written by the publisher for punctuation errors and verses out of order.  The index was humanly checked for misspelled words and the corrections were made to the text.  However, some spelling errors may still be present in the text.  Many verses were out of order in the original file.  These have been corrected. 

Every effort was made to ensure that this online version is an exact match to the original printed version.  No words were added or ommitted from the text, except for correcting errors caused by the scanning process.  No words were rearranged.  No verse numbers were changed, except in the case of Psalm 9. 

Psalm 9 originally contained 21 verses and there were 2 versions of Psalm 10, numbering 1-18 and 1-8.  This obviously caused a conflict, so it was decided to put the first Psalm 10 in the last part of Psalm 9 and renumber the verses 22-39.  Thus, I retained the same numbering for all the Psalms as all the Douay Rheims Bibles. Note, in the Protestant Bibles the numbering of Psalms 10 through 146 differs by one.

The search engine and indexer were created using sophisticated algorithms and software engineering to ensure quick response even for dial-up 56K modems.