This is the original Douay-Rheims, the first complete English Catholic Bible, presented in a clean, modern reading edition, free to read and share. It is not the Challoner revision that nearly every other “Douay-Rheims” in print and online today reproduces.
The Douay-Rheims was translated from the Latin Vulgate by English Catholic scholars in exile, principally Gregory Martin, with William Allen, Richard Bristow, and Thomas Worthington, at the English Colleges of Rheims and Douay. The New Testament was published at Rheims in 1582; the Old Testament, long delayed for want of funds, followed at Douay in 1609–1610. Together they form the first complete English Catholic Bible.
Nearly two centuries later, Bishop Richard Challoner thoroughly revised the text (1749–1752), modernizing its vocabulary and reshaping its phrasing, often toward the cadences of the King James Bible. Challoner’s revision is the version almost universally sold and posted as “the Douay-Rheims” today. It is a worthy book, but it is a revision: the original translators’ English had by then been substantially rewritten.
This edition returns to that original, set directly from the 1582/1609 printing, so you can read the Rheims-Douay as its translators actually rendered it.
Every chapter is offered in two forms, switchable as you read:
The 1582/1609 text exactly as printed, its original spelling, vocabulary, and word order preserved (only the long-ſ and vv → w normalized for the modern eye).
The same translation with only the spelling and orthography brought up to date: the translators’ own vocabulary, the old pronouns (thou, thee, ye), the -eth/-est verb endings (raineth, mayest), and the Vulgate’s word order all kept intact. It is a gentle modernization, never a re-translation nor a smoothing toward modern Bibles.
New to the older English (thou, -eth, whence, thereof)? A quick guide →
The names may look unfamiliar at first: Moyses, not Moses; Noe, not Noah; Henoch, Elias, Isaias, Ezechias. These are the forms as they stand in the Latin Vulgate, carried for some fifteen centuries in the Church’s liturgy and in the Fathers, and the translators kept them deliberately rather than adopt the Hebrew-derived spellings (Moses, Noah, Enoch, Elijah, Isaiah) that most later English Bibles, Catholic and Protestant alike, took up. We keep them too, in both editions, modernizing only the dead letterforms. It is one of the clearest marks that you are reading the original Douay-Rheims and not a later revision.
The text is transcribed directly from the 1582/1609 facsimile and validated verse by verse against the Clementine Vulgate (the Church’s standard Latin edition, promulgated 1592). The translators’ own apparatus is preserved , the chapter arguments, the marginal glosses, and the chapter-end annotations, and that same Clementine Latin can be shown interlinearly beside each verse. Doctrinally weighted words are kept as the translators chose them, without the later smoothings.
A note on the Latin: the Rheims translators worked from the Vulgate as it stood before the Sixto-Clementine revision, the Rheims New Testament appeared in 1582, a decade before the Clementine edition of 1592, chiefly the Louvain text then current. The Latin shown here interlinearly is that later Clementine edition; it differs from the translators’ base only in minor readings and spelling, the two being substantially the same.
The Douay-Rheims Scripture is in the public domain. This edition, the modern-spelling normalization, the clarifications and glosses, the arrangement of the apparatus, and the typography, is © 2026 Sancta Clara Press, released under CC BY 4.0. The Word is free; the edition is the craft.