Douay-Rheims, 400th anniversary

Rorate Cæli ^ | 6/18/2010

[dsc]

“which helps explain why it tried to prevent commoners from getting access to Scripture.”

Stuff and nonsense.

It’s amazing how delicate the truth is, and how hardy are malicious fabrications.

[blackpacific]

Here is how G. K. Chesterton put it in his stunning book “Orthodoxy”:

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen
into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy,
humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting
as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to
be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses,
seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude
having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.
The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse;
yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along
one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right,
so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand
the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers
to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving
to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly.
The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted
the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would
have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians.
It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century,
to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be
a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let
the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own.
It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob.
To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration
which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the
historic path of Christendom—that would indeed have been simple.
It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at
which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into
any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed
have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been
one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies
thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate,
the wild truth reeling but erect.

[bibletruth]

Correct - I would never consider owning a Douay-Rheims. It is only a translation from the Latin (and some greek, etc).

The King James bible is not mutilated, as evidenced by my c.1878 and c.1887 and c.1899 King James Bibles, which is complete and is not missing any books nor key passages.

Tell me what key passage it is missing?

The King James Bible translators was translated by men who were experts in Hebrew, Greek, and the target language, e.g., English, French, German, Spanish, etc. In order to have a perfect translation, the translators must be experts in Hebrew, Greek, and the target language.

The Douay-Rheims translators were experts in Latin. What target language, I don't know... Their skills paled by comparison to those King James Bible translators.

[blackpacific]

Try this:
http://www.thelostbooks.com/missing.htm