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“The earlier Catholic Bible in English, the Douay-Rheims, was published in 1589 (NT) and 1611 (OT).”

That version ceased printing around 1635. The KJV owes far more to the Tyndale and Coverdale translations from the mid 1500s. The DR Bible used today is the one largely based off the KJV, with Catholic theology added (1750).

“But in the Middle Ages, Europeans who could read, read Latin.”

Yet there was a huge demand for Bibles in English and German. How could that be, if folks only read Latin?

If you were educated, you have to learn Latin. Trouble is by that time it was a “dead” language.

Dante’s Divine Comedy was very controversial because he wrote in what was called “His own Romance” which later became Italian. It was viewed as vulgar since giving literature to the masses (read, middle class artisans and merchants) was not considered good by the nobles.

That is part of the reason for the instance of using all Latin by many Catholics. What is funny is that if you read about why Jerome did what he did, he was attempting to translate the Bible into a language that most people in the Empire spoke. Vulgar (common) Latin.

He did ok, but even early on people pointed out his errors. Augustine and Jerome didn’t like each other, and Augustine had a very dim view of the Vulgate and preferred other texts. Their letters back and forth make me wonder what their FReeper names would have been.

“The earlier Catholic Bible in English, the Douay-Rheims, was published in 1589 (NT) and 1611 (OT).”

That version ceased printing around 1635.

That's funny. I have one. Yes, it was made from one of the old copies. Keep in mind that possession of the Catholic version would be potentially considered treasonous (which is why it was the Douay-Rheims, and not the Oxford-Cambridge or somesuch), and the project was pretty expensive, which is why it took an extra 20 years to finish the Old Testament. That combination doomed widespread availability.

Yet there was a huge demand for Bibles in English and German. How could that be, if folks only read Latin?

I don't know how "huge" the demand was. In England, the Crown ordered purchases of it (which decreased the price to publish). In the very early years of printing, a large book like a Bible would cost so much to typeset that only the very rich could afford it, which is why they were often encrusted with jewels. One of the first items printed by the German Catholic Gutenberg was the Gutenberg Bible (in Latin, of course), in 1455 or so. Before that he warmed up his presses letting people know of the plenary indulgence offered for repelling the Turks in Cyprus.

We still have trouble coming up with decent translations of Holy Scripture, and it is not something to be undertaken lightly.I had heard about an Eskimo language that has no word for "lamb", so the rendering was "small white creature that looks like a caribou". That's problematic. English, even with its huge vocabulary, does not have all of the constructions that either Greek or Latin have. The lack of the Greek "Middle Voice" is evident when any English Bible describes the resurrection ("raised himself from the dead", "is raised from the dead" etc.) The septuagint traditionally required 70 scholars to do it right. The Crown bankrolled a serious operation to do a serious job and largely succeeded (though there are problems for a modern English reader who doesn't know the KJV meanings of words like "prevent " in KJV English.) The ancient Russians actually made symbols to represent words that did not have an exact match, to avoid error.

It is more important to get the language right than to publish in every possible language.