Even if one were to concede to this point, that doesn't change the fact that the Douay-Rheims goes much much further into error when it includes in its Bible the following:
- Matthew 17:21 (The Douay-Rheims Bible, with all of its excessive commentary, fails to mention to the reader that this verse is a duplicate of Mark 9:29)
-Matthew 18:11 (The Douay-Rheims Bible, with its copious commentary, fails to mention that this verse was manifestly borrowed by copyists from Luke 19:10)
- Mark 4:23 and Mark 7:16 (The Douay-Rheims Bible, even with its Bishop Challoner commentary, fails to mention that these two verses are missing in many of the most ancient extant manuscripts)
- Mark 16:9-20 (The oldest Greek manuscripts do not contain this "longer ending")
- Luke 23:17 (The Douay-Rheims Bible again fails to mention that this verse is a duplicate of Matthew 24:40 and is not included in the oldest Greek manuscripts)
[etc]

I am not sure what you think you are proving by collecting passages in which the Douay-Rheims differs from "oldest Greek manuscripts".

The sample I checked from your list (and presumably all of them) are perfectly fine translations of the Vulgate. The Douay-Rheims is a translation of the Vulgate, rather than of the critical consensus on Greek manuscripts.  That is exactly why we want to use it.

You are like a person trying to tell us what a horrible hammer we have because it can't cut wood.  We don't want a saw.  We want a tool to use for hammering nails.  Our hammer is perfect.  Telling us all the ways in which it is not a saw is rather silly.

It's obvious that you are making up numbers (i.e. facts) and I am glad that you admitted this. Also, there is no need to censor truth by writing the following:
"Stupidity snipped by moderator."
I don't laugh at or insult people who disagree with me, I kindly ask that you would extend to me the same courtesy.
Now I will easily refute some of the false assumptions stated here by others:

False. Popes have used Roman Catholic Bibles  translating it as "highly favored one" for decades. Are all of these Popes in error, along with any Roman Catholic who uses a Bible other than Douay-Rheims?
Apparently, you are not familiar with Liturgiam Authenticam which requires the usage of ancient texts that have proven to be much older than any of the texts St. Jerome used to complete the Vulgate. I have not installed the principle. The "Kyrie" (the only language other than Latin in TLM) is not considered "mere vernacular" like the languages which exist today. That's because the original New Testament docuмents were written in Greek and so the TLM can easily use Greek wording because it is using the exact language in which the NT was written. No other language can claim the same importance, not even Hebrew or Aramaic, because the NT was not written even in those languages.Even if one were to concede to this point, that doesn't change the fact that the Douay-Rheims goes much much further into error when it includes in its Bible the following:
- Matthew 17:21 (The Douay-Rheims Bible, with all of its excessive commentary, fails to mention to the reader that this verse is a duplicate of Mark 9:29)
-Matthew 18:11 (The Douay-Rheims Bible, with its copious commentary, fails to mention that this verse was manifestly borrowed by copyists from Luke 19:10)
- Mark 4:23 and Mark 7:16 (The Douay-Rheims Bible, even with its Bishop Challoner commentary, fails to mention that these two verses are missing in many of the most ancient extant manuscripts)

- Mark 16:9-20 (The oldest Greek manuscripts do not contain this "longer ending")
- Luke 23:17 (The Douay-Rheims Bible again fails to mention that this verse is a duplicate of Matthew 24:40 and is not included in the oldest Greek manuscripts)
- John 5:3-4 (Here is where the Vulgate is in "serious error" when compared to the ancient Greek manuscripts. Verse 4 is missing from all of the earliest Greek manuscripts and St. Jerome "added" the end of verse 3 to the Vulgate. Whether or not this was a genuine error or not, I will give St. Jerome the benefit of the doubt)
- John 7:53-8:11 (The oldest Greek manuscripts do not contain this story)
- John 21 (The oldest Greek manuscripts do not contain this final chapter)
- Acts 8:37 (The oldest manuscripts of Acts do not include this verse. Again, why does the Douay-Rheims Bible commentary fail to mention this to the readers?)
Of course these facts were not known at the time the Douay-Rheims Bible was published (1582; 1609-1610) or even when Bishop Richard Challoner made his commentary on the Douay-Rheims Bible from 1749-1752. However, since these facts are known today, any re-printing of the Douay-Rheims Bible (Challoner revision or not) should make the reader aware of them.
Other errors include:
- Mark 8 only contains 38 verses, yet the Douay-Rheims Bible errs by placing Mark 9:1 in Mark 8 as Mark 8:39
- Acts 15:34 (The oldest manuscripts of Acts do not contain this verse)
- Acts 24:6-8 (Not only is verse 7 not in the oldest Greek manuscripts but also the end of verse 6 and the beginning of verse 8 are also not included in the oldest Greek manuscripts.
- Acts 28:29 (This verse is not found in any of the oldest Greek manuscripts)
- Romans 16:24 (This verse is also not found in any of the oldest Greek manuscripts)
- 1 John 5:7-8 (The "comma" contained in this passage first appeared in the Vulgate manuscripts of the 9th century. St. Jerome did not write it. The earliest known copies of the Vulgate did not contain it, it was only in the "revised" Vulgate where this initially appeared)

- Romans 16:7 (The oldest manuscripts contain the female name "Junia" and that was a common woman's name at that time. The Douay-Rheims Bible incorrectly has the name as "Junias" and there is no evidence for "Junias" being a man's name at that time)

Since the Douay-Rheims Bible comments on none of these things, one can understand why an encyclical like "Divino Afflante Spiritu" was both needed and successfully written.

My, what a litany of sophistry and error!

Have you noticed that most of your critiques of the alleged errors of the Douay Rheims translation -citing your own words- pertain to COMMENTARIES on that translation, and not the translation itself?

If I would like to see commentaries in the Knox Bible where they do not appear, would I be justified in attributing these omissions as “errors in the translation?”

Obviously not, yet you do not refrain from doing so.

Excising this subjective, gratuitous, arbitrary, and unjustified criticism from your litany doesn’t leave much left of your criticism.

Secondly, is your continued (and erroneous) claim that the modern translations are more reliable because of their greater fidelity to more ancient Greek manuscripts than were available to St. Jerome:

You fail to recognize, on the one hand, that whatever manuscripts/artifacts may have been discovered since the completion of the Vulgate, there is no guarantee as to their inspiration (I.e., So far as I am aware, the oldest existing complete Greek Bibles date only from the 10th-11th century. Everything else is fragments which themselves may or may not have been contained within approved translations (and if they would in any way present a challenge to Catholic dogma, you can be sure of their dubious orthodoxy).

In other words, it is indisputable that St Jerome was able to translate from much earlier complete and approved books then extant that any Johnny-come-lately playing around with fragments of disputed or questionable orthodoxy, legitimacy, and authenticity.

Matthew already made that point.

Thirdly, I am not sure why you would reference Liturgiam Authenticuм, which deals with liturgical texts, and not principles of scriptural translation or exegesis.  I note this is the second time you have made this error (I.e., trying to invent a liturgical principle, and then apply it out of context to scripture, by analogy).

Incidentally, quoting a modernist docuмent from a modernist pope is probably not going to be the most persuasive argument to make to those who are not modernists.

As regards your claim that the mixing of the Kyrie in Greek with the Latin of the TLM does not represent an example of mixing languages in the liturgy, what can I say (what need I say)?

I did, however, notice the subtle shift you made in an attempt to create wiggle room (moving from your previous erroneous principle that it was not permitted to mix languages in translating -a position you were forced to abandon in the face of precisely such examples in both the liturgy and scripture- to your new position that it is not permitted to mix sacred and vulgar languages).

But that clumsy attempt again suffers from trying to cram a (false) liturgical principle into a discussion on scriptural translation.

"Full of Grace" is in fact the correct translation.  These idiots fail to take into account that a lot of common terms became highly-specialized theological terms in the early Church.  Take for example the term presbyter from the Greek.  Literally, in its original colloquial meaning, it means an old man or an elder.  But elder also connotes rank and superiority.  So it became applied in the early Church to "spiritual superiors", i.e. priests.  Yet some insist on translating it as "elder".  Similarly, episcopos in Greek LITERALLY means "overseer" or "superior", but it was used in a technical theological way to refer only to consecrated bishops.

Same thing with the term charis in Greek, the root word of kecharitomene "full of grace".  Note the root word "charit-", related to "charis" and "charitos", i.e. "charity".  Already in the Epistles of St. Paul, "charity" is used for the theological virtue ... along with faith and hope.  While colloquially meaning "favor", it meant, when applied theologically, the "favor of God", i.e. being in the state of grace.  And the perfect passive tense of the verbal "kecharitomene" in Greek indicates completion and perfection.  Consequenly, full of grace or "perfected in grace" is INDEED the correct translation ... despite what these modern idiots tell you.  St. Jerome knew this.  He could speak both Greek and Latin fluently, and he was fully aware of the theological significance of the root word "charis".

We even have examples of this in modern English.  So, for instance, the word "grace" is used colloquially to mean "elegance" or "beauty".  But if you read a Catholic text about the "grace of God", you're obviously using a specialized theological term and not the colloquial meaning.  That would be like someone a thousand years in the future, after English has ceased to be spoken, digging up an old Catholic book written in English and trying to translate "grace of God" as the "elegance and beauty of God".  Same thing these buffoons are doing.

I took 4 years of Latin and 3 of Greek in High School, double-majored in Greek and in Latin at Loyola U. in Chicago (got a scholarship there to study these), and completed the Ph.D. courework in Greek and Latin (with Patristic emphasis) at The Catholic University of America in D.C.  I taught Latin at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary.  I in fact intended to write my dissertation precisely on the theological use of colloquial terms in the early Church.  But then life took a different turn for me ...

Outstanding post!

I wanted to write my dissertation on the subject because I saw how much people's faith was being damaged by this kind of idiotic sophistry.  And there's also the underlying hubris of "St. Jerome was just an idiot compared to me" tone that's always there.  No, these Fathers were brilliant men who were much closer to the Church and to its theological language (in Greek and Latin) than we ever will be.

Indeed! Just read the biography of St. Jerome, who translated the Vulgate.

WHICH BIBLE
SHOULD YOU READ?

The Importance of the
Latin Vulgate Bible

To begin, the Douay-Rheims Bible is
an absolutely faithful translation into Eng-
lish of the Latin Vulgate Bible, which
St. Jerome (342-420) translated into Latin
from the original languages. The Vulgate
quickly became the only Bible universally
used in the Western Church, or the Latin
Rite (by far the largest rite of the Catholic
Church, spread virtually worldwide). St.
Jerome, who was one of the four Great
Western Fathers of the Catholic Church,
was a man raised up by God to translate
the Holy Bible into the common Latin of
his day.
He was Greek-speaking from birth, and
being an educated man, he also knew
Latin perfectly, speaking it as we do Eng-
lish; he also knew Hebrew and Aramaic
nearly as well (he studied Hebrew, e.g.,
from approximately age 26 as a penance).
He even learned Chaldaic just so he could
check the translation of the Book of Daniel
(the only biblical book written in that lan-
guage), which he had commissioned some-
one else to translate for him. He lived at
Bethlehem and was near enough to the
Rabbinical school at Caesarea-Philipi that
he could consult with one of the learned
Rabbis, who agreed to help him with his
Hebrew—though rendering such help was
actually forbidden in Jєωιѕн custom. He
became so good at translating Hebrew that
at the age of 70 or so he translated the
book of Tobias in one night. Besides being
a towering linguistic genius, he was also a
great Saint, and he had access to ancient
Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of the 2nd
and 3rd centuries which have since perished
and are no longer available to scholars today.
St. Jerome’s translation, moreover, was
(wherever possible) a careful, word-for-
word rendering of the original texts into
Latin. To quote one writer, “His sources
being both numerous and ancient, his
knowledge of the languages a living knowl-
edge, his scholarship consummate, he was
a far better judge of the true shade of
meaning of a particular word than any
modern scholar . . .” (Ronald D. Lambert,
Experiment in Heresy, Triumph Mag.,
March, 1968). Or, one might add, than any
modern scholar could ever hope to be!
Truly, God raised up for the Church this
great, great man, that He might, through
him, give us a faithful rendering of His
Divine Word into Latin—which was, until
only 200 years ago, the universal language
of all Western Christendom and which is
still today the official language of the
Catholic Church. Latin, moreover, as with
Greek, is still taught in most major colleges
and universities in the Western World,
which makes the Vulgate easily accessible
to scholars throughout the world yet today.
St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate Bible has
been read and honored by the Western
Church for almost 1600 years! It was
declared by the Council of Trent (1545-
1564) to be the official (literally “authen-
tic”) version of the canonical Scriptures,
that is, the Bible of the Catholic Church.
Hear what that Sacred Council decreed:
“Moreover, the same Holy Council . . .
ordains and declares that the old Latin
Vulgate Edition, which, in use for so many
hundred years, has been approved by the
Church, be in public lectures, disputations,
sermons and expositions held as authentic,
and that no one [may] dare or presume
under any pretext whatsoever to reject it.”
(Fourth Session, April 8, 1546).

Read this little booklet, "What Bible Should You Read?" by Thomas A. Nelson.

Spoiler alert [...]: the answer is the Douay Rheims.

It should be pointed out that in Which Bible Should You Read, in the context of criticism of various translations from the Vulgate into English, booklet-author Nelson does not separate the overly Latinate original Douay-Rheims "version" (1610) from its later vernacularized "revision[(s)]", e.g.:
•  by Bp. Richard Challoner (1st--3rd editions: 1749--[ 1751 1752]) of London; or
•  by Abp. Francis Kenrick [‡] of Baltimore.
Readers can thus infer that Nelson considers these "revision[(s)]" to share the strengths or virtues of the Douay-Rheims. [*]

Nelson focuses his critical comparisons on the allegedly Catholic Bibles that do not claim any descent from the Douay-Rheims version, e.g.:
•  New American Bible (1970, 1986);
•  Catholic Revised Standard Version (1966), from whose title it's easy to suspect a cynical rebranding ruse by Protestants (replacing "King James" in an original title by the market-inflating claim "Catholic");
•  Jerusalem Bible (1966). [*]

-------
Note *: Nelson (2001): Which Bible Should You Read, p. xv--xvi (PDF p. 16--17), xvii (PDF p. 18), 9 (PDF p. 32).  Made available by Matthew as downloadable PDF.

Note ‡: There were 2 native Irish Bishops Kenrick in the U.S.A. of the 19th Century.  Born in Dublin as brothers not quite 9 years apart, each entered the priesthood in Ireland.  After eventual immigration to the U.S.A., their labors earned each ultimate elevation to archepiscopal rank, i.e.:
•  Francis Patrick: The elder brother, Bp. of Philadelphia (1830--1851), then Apostolic Delegate & Abp. of Baltimore (1851--1863).  "The chief literary works of Archbishop Kenrick were a new translation of the Bible, with a commentary [....]".
•  Peter Richard: The younger brother, Bp. of St. Louis (Mo.) (≥1840--1847) then Abp. (1847--1893). [‡‡]

Note ‡‡: John J. O'Shea: "Francis Patrick and Peter Richard Kenrick".  The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8.  New York: Robert Appleton Co., 1910.  <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08618a.htm>.  An article that does not mention that Abp. F.P.K.'s revision of the Douay-Rheims was issued by a publisher (John Murphy Co.: 1899) that was situated in his own archepiscopal see, after securing its official Church approbation from one of his successors (James Gibbons: Abp. 1877?1878?--1921, Cardinal 1886--1921), who was the only bishop of Baltimore who was a native of the city.

Well, I prefer to read the Vulgate.

I hope you noticed how carefully I phrased my comment earlier in the the thread.  I said the Douay-Rheims "remains the best choice for English speakers lacking the Latin necessary to read the Vulgate directly."  
8)

If the Douay-Rheims Bible is the best Catholic Bible, then what was the point of Pope Pius XII writing his 1943 encyclical "Divino Afflante Spiritu"?

Pope Leo XIII's Providentissimus Deus opened up the Bible to corrections if science helped interpret certain parts correctly, just as it did with geocentrism replacing it with the false heliocentrism. This of course opened the Bible up to further attack so in 1920 Pope Benedict XV had to put a stop to this in his wonderful Encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus.

Pope Pius XII was a Big Bang, billions of years evolutionist, so he felt it was time to let 'science' interpret the bible 'correctly' once again.

‘3. ‘The first and greatest care of Leo XIII was to set forth the teaching on the truth of the Sacred Books and to defend it from attack. Hence with grave words did he proclaim that there is no error whatsoever if the sacred writer, speaking of things of the physical order “went by what sensibly appeared” [like sunrise and sunset] as the Angelic Doctor says, speaking either “in figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time, and which in many instances are in daily use at this day, even among the most eminent men of science.” --- Divino Afflante Spiritu.

 

---

[1] America: the Jesuit Review, Sept, 1993.



The ‘freeze’ referred to above by Wansbrough had to be that brought about by Benedict XV’s superb encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus that did not try to justify that new heliocentric interpretation of Scripture. But now the Scriptures could once again be put at the mercy of scientific and historical opinion such as millions of years of evolution.

---

If I were his priest, I would give Hank the following penance:

Read this little booklet, "What Bible Should You Read?" by Thomas A. Nelson.

Spoiler alert, hinted at on the very cover: the answer is the DOUAY RHEIMS.

Yeah Seriously! 
The Douay Rheims is the only version of the Bible I read, not because it is the only "correct" version, but because I believe it's the most accurate translation.