Catholic English Bibles

Most histories of the English Bible follow the Protestant line from Tyndale to the King James Version and its revisions. Running alongside it is a second tradition, with its own translators, its own debates and its own constraints. Catholic English Bibles differ from Protestant ones in three main ways: they contain more books, they are approved by bishops, and many of them are shaped by the needs of the liturgy, where the Bible is read aloud at Mass.

This article follows that tradition from the sixteenth century to the present, and describes what each translation set out to do.

Douay-Rheims: a Bible from exile

In the reign of Elizabeth I, Catholic scholars who had left England founded an English college at Douai in Flanders, later moved for a time to Reims. Under William Allen, its founder, the Oxford scholar Gregory Martin translated the Bible into English. The New Testament was printed at Reims in 1582; the Old Testament appeared at Douai in 1609–10, just before the King James Version.

The Douay-Rheims was translated from the Latin Vulgate, not from the Hebrew and Greek. Its makers did not think this a weakness. The Council of Trent had declared the Vulgate authentic for public use, and the preface to the Rheims New Testament argued that the Latin was older than most surviving Greek manuscripts and free of the corruptions they attributed to heretics. Martin kept many Latin words, sometimes barely anglicised, such as “azymes” for unleavened bread and “parasceve” for the day of preparation, on the principle that sacred terms should not be replaced by everyday ones. The New Testament came with extensive notes defending Catholic teaching against Protestant translations.

Its influence reached further than its readers. The King James translators consulted the Rheims New Testament, and some of its Latinate vocabulary passed into the King James New Testament. Historians differ on how large that debt is, but that there is one is generally accepted.

Challoner’s revision

By the eighteenth century the original Douay-Rheims was hard to read. Between 1749 and 1752 Richard Challoner, a bishop and vicar apostolic in London, revised it so thoroughly that it was almost a new translation. He modernised the English, removed many of the strangest Latinisms, and often moved closer to the King James Version’s wording. Challoner’s text, not the original, is what is sold today as “the Douay-Rheims Bible,” and it was the standard English Catholic Bible for two centuries.

Challoner’s revision keeps the Vulgate’s readings, and comparison shows the difference that makes. In Genesis 3:15 the Vulgate has a feminine pronoun, and the Douay-Rheims (Challoner) reads:

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.

The Hebrew has a masculine pronoun, and translations from the Hebrew follow it, as in the World English Bible:

I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel.

The difference mattered to devotion as well as to scholarship, because the Latin reading was long associated with the Virgin Mary. Modern Catholic translations made from the Hebrew follow the masculine reading, usually with a note.

The twentieth century: Confraternity and Knox

In the United States, the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine sponsored a revision of the Challoner New Testament, still from the Latin, published in 1941. When Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) encouraged Catholic scholars to translate from the original languages, the Confraternity’s Old Testament project switched to the Hebrew, and its books appeared in instalments from 1952. That work became the basis of the New American Bible.

In England, Ronald Knox produced a single-handed translation from the Vulgate (New Testament 1945, Old Testament 1949), in a fluent literary English that was approved for use in England and Wales. It was the last major Catholic translation made from the Latin.

The Second Vatican Council’s constitution Dei Verbum (1965) confirmed the new direction: translations should be made “especially from the original texts,” and could be produced in cooperation with other Christians where circumstances allowed.

The Jerusalem Bible family

The Jerusalem Bible (1966), edited by Alexander Jones, brought to English the scholarship of the French Bible de Jérusalem, produced by the Dominican École Biblique in Jerusalem. Its notes and introductions were translated from the French; the translators were meant to work from the Hebrew and Greek, with the French as a guide, though critics noted places where the French seems to have had the upper hand. J. R. R. Tolkien was among its contributors, translating the book of Jonah. It rendered the divine name as “Yahweh,” was written in lively modern English, and became the Bible read at Mass across much of the English-speaking world outside North America.

The New Jerusalem Bible (1985), edited by Henry Wansbrough, revised it against the second French edition, with more attention to the original languages and some inclusive language for people. Wansbrough also edited the Revised New Jerusalem Bible: its New Testament and Psalms appeared in 2018 and the complete Bible in 2019, published by Darton, Longman and Todd. The RNJB is more formal than its predecessors, aiming at a text suitable for liturgy and study, and among other changes it replaced “Yahweh” with “the Lord.”

The New American Bible and the NABRE

The New American Bible (1970), sponsored by the American bishops and produced by members of the Catholic Biblical Association of America, was the first complete American Catholic Bible translated from the original languages. Its New Testament was revised in 1986 and its Psalms in 1991.

The New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE), published in 2011, revised the Old Testament and kept the 1986 New Testament. The NAB family is the Bible most American Catholics meet, because the lectionary used at Mass in the United States is based on it, and its notes and introductions are often what a parish reader sees. Critics have sometimes found the notes too influenced by historical-critical scholarship; others value them for exactly that reason.

The lectionary and the NABRE are not identical, which has long been a source of confusion. In November 2024 the American bishops approved a revised New Testament for liturgical use, by 216 votes to 4, and in 2025 they announced that the new edition would be called The Catholic American Bible, intended as a common text for Mass, the Liturgy of the Hours and private reading. Its release has been announced for 2027.

RSV-CE, RSV-2CE and ESV-CE

Catholic editions of Protestant translations have also flourished, a sign of the ecumenical climate after the Council.

The Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (New Testament 1965, complete 1966) was prepared by the Catholic Biblical Association of Great Britain. It made a small number of changes to the RSV New Testament, listed in an appendix, such as “full of grace” in Luke 1:28 and “brethren” for the brothers of Jesus, and arranged the deuterocanonical books in their Catholic positions. In 2006 Ignatius Press published the RSV Second Catholic Edition (RSV-2CE), which removed archaic “thee” and “thou” and made further changes, partly with the liturgy in mind.

The English Standard Version, Catholic Edition (ESV-CE) adapted the ESV, itself a revision of the RSV, for Catholic use. It was prepared under the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India and the Bible appeared there in 2018; an Indian lectionary based on it followed in 2020. The bishops of England and Wales and of Scotland then adopted the ESV-CE for a new lectionary, which came into use from Advent 2024, replacing the Jerusalem Bible that had been read in their churches for over half a century. Some welcomed a more formal text; others regretted the loss of the Jerusalem Bible’s familiar wording or questioned the choice of a translation originally made by evangelical Protestants.

Liturgiam authenticam and lectionaries

A Bible read at Mass is not just a book; it is part of the liturgy, and the Catholic Church regulates it. In 2001 the Congregation for Divine Worship issued the instruction Liturgiam authenticam, which set out principles for liturgical translation. It called for close fidelity to the original wording rather than free paraphrase, for a sacred style distinct from everyday speech, for the traditional Latin Vulgate’s successor, the Nova Vulgata, to be consulted as an aid, and for caution about inclusive-language changes that might alter the sense of the text.

The instruction affected Scripture translation as well as prayers. Translations had to be revised before they could be approved for lectionaries, and some popular Bibles were not used at Mass in their published form. The Canadian lectionary based on the NRSV, for example, needed modifications before approval. In 2017 Pope Francis’s motu proprio Magnum principium gave bishops’ conferences greater responsibility for liturgical translations, though the principle of faithful translation remained.

The result is that a Catholic in Chicago, one in Toronto and one in London may hear noticeably different English at Mass, each approved by their own bishops.

The deuterocanonical books

Every Catholic Bible includes seven books not found in the Protestant Old Testament: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees, along with longer forms of Esther and Daniel. Catholics call them deuterocanonical, “of the second canon,” a term that refers to the later settling of their status, not to lesser authority. The Council of Trent defined them as Scripture in 1546. Protestant tradition usually calls them the Apocrypha.

Catholic Bibles print these books among the others, not in a separate section: Tobit and Judith after Nehemiah, Wisdom and Sirach after the Song of Songs, and Baruch after Lamentations. How different traditions count and arrange them is explained in Why some Bibles have more books.

Approval and notes

Catholic Bibles carry an imprimatur, a bishop’s declaration that the book is free of doctrinal error, and canon law asks that Catholic editions include suitable notes. This is one reason Catholic Bibles have long been study Bibles of a kind. The imprimatur is not a judgment on the translation’s quality or style, and it does not mean the bishop agrees with every note.

Comparing traditions

Open Word Bible is not a Catholic, Protestant or Jewish translation; it does not seek ecclesiastical approval, and it uses existing translations, including those described here, for comparison only, never as the basis of its wording. It translates the New Testament from the SBL Greek New Testament and the Old Testament from the Westminster Leningrad Codex, so its Old Testament currently follows the Hebrew canon. Where a verse has been read differently in different traditions, as Genesis 3:15 has, its reasoning record for that sentence sets out the evidence and the decision. Its drafts are AI-assisted and remain unreviewed until named human reviewers approve them. The text is dedicated to the public domain under CC0.

Sources

• Metzger, Bruce M. The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001.
• Pope, Hugh. English Versions of the Bible. Revised by Sebastian Bullough. St. Louis: B. Herder, 1952.
• Fogarty, Gerald P. American Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A History from the Early Republic to Vatican II. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989.
• Pius XII. Divino Afflante Spiritu. Encyclical, 30 September 1943.
• Second Vatican Council. Dei Verbum. Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, 18 November 1965.
• Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Liturgiam authenticam. Instruction, 28 March 2001.
• Francis. Magnum principium. Apostolic letter motu proprio, 3 September 2017.
• “Preface to the New American Bible, Revised Edition.” Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011.
• Wansbrough, Henry, ed. The Revised New Jerusalem Bible: Study Edition. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2019.
• Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article quotes the Douay-Rheims (Challoner revision), which is also in the public domain.