KJV's borrowing from 1582 Rheims NT

In the thread entitled "Danger of a Bible with no copyight",

Are the established facts no sound proof according to KJV-only advocates?

Of course, nothing can be proved to those who choose to close their eyes to the truth or to stick their heads in the sand. Those who have examined the actual evidence know that the well-established assertion that the makers of the KJV borrowed a number of renderings from the 1582 Roman Catholic Rheims New Testament is true.

Is the first-hand testimony or statement from a KJV translator "dubios" evidence?

Ward Allen maintained that "the Rheims New Testament furnished to the Synoptic Gospels and Epistles in the A. V. as many revised readings as any other version" (Translating the N. T. Epistles, p. xxv). Allen and Jacobs claimed that the KJV translators "in revising the text of the synoptic Gospels in the Bishops' Bible, owe about one-fourth of their revisions, each, to the Genevan and Rheims New Testaments" (Coming of the King James Gospels, p. 29). About 1 Peter 1:20, Allen noted: “The A. V. shows most markedly here the influence of the Rheims Bible, from which it adopts the verb in composition, the reference of the adverbial modifier to the predicate, the verb manifest, and the prepositional phrase for you” (Translating for King James, p. 18). Concerning 1 Peter 4:9, Allen suggested that “this translation in the A. V. joins the first part of the sentence from the Rheims Bible to the final phrase of the Protestant translations” (p. 30). Allen also observed: "At Col. 2:18, he [KJV translator John Bois] explains that the [KJV] translators were relying upon the example of the Rheims Bible" (pp. 10, 62-63).

Thus, the first-hand testimony of a KJV translator acknowledged or confirmed that the KJV was influenced by and borrowed from the Rheims.

James Carleton noted: "One cannot but be struck by the large number of words which have come into the Authorized Version from the Vulgate through the medium of the Rhemish New Testament" (Part of Rheims in the Making of the English Bible, p. 32). In his book, Carleton gave charts or comparisons in which he gave the rendering of the early Bibles and then the different rendering of the Rheims and KJV.

 

Your assertions are false. I did not use the updated 1749 Douay-Rheims version in my comparison as you incorrectly claim. You jumped to a wrong conclusion.

I had the text of the 1582 Rheims New Testament as found in The English Hexapla of the New Testament Scriptures and in The New Testament Octapla. I now also have a copy of a reprint of "The Original and True Rheims New Testament of Anno Domini 1582" that includes the marginal notes of the Rheims. Thus, I have the original text of the 1582 edition of the Roman Catholic Rheims New Testament to check, not the later revised 1749 edition.

Just because the letters are typed as they would be used in today's English letters in present KJV editions for the 1582 Rheims and the 1611 edition of the KJV so that today's readers cannot understand them does not show that the 1582 text and 1611 text was not being followed.

 

Actually it was and is not asserted that any of those renderings or words were not used in a pre-1611 English Bible at some other verse or verses than the one given.

The point was whether the 1582 Rheims was the likely source for that rendering followed in the 1611 edition of the KJV in the specific verse cited.

It is most likely that the KJV translators obtained their knowledge of the Rheims New Testament from a book by William Fulke which compared the Rheims N. T. side by side with the Bishops'.

In his introduction to a 1911 facsimile reprint of the 1611, A. W. Pollard maintained that "probably every reviser of the New Testament for the edition of 1611" possessed a copy of Fulke's book that "was regarded as a standard work on the Protestant side" (p. 23). John Greider observed that “This work [by Fulke] was studied by the translators of the 1611 Bible” (English Bible Translations, p. 316). Peter Thuesen pointed out: “William Fulke’s popular 1589 annotated edition of the Rheims New Testament, though intended as an antidote to popery, in reality had served as the vehicle by which some of the Rhemists’ Latinisms entered the vocabulary of the King James Bible” (In Discordance, p. 62). David Norton noted that KJV translator William Branthwaite had a copy of “Fulke’s parallel edition of the Rheims and Bishops” in his personal library (KJB: Short History, p. 64). Norton also pointed out that the Bodleian Library in 1605 had a copy of Fulke’s edition of the Rheims and Bishops’ New Testaments (Ibid.). Even KJV-only author Gail Riplinger confirmed that the KJV translators had Fulke’s book with these verse comparisons, but she in effect ignored the evidence that they followed some of the renderings of the Rheims (In Awe, p. 536).

 

The first rule given the makers of the KJV stated: “The ordinary Bible read in the church, commonly called the Bishops’ Bible, to be followed, and as little altered as the original will permit.”

The KJV translators were given copies of the 1602 edition of the Bishops’ Bible as their starting point or starting English text. David Norton observed: “The KJB of 1611 reproduces peculiarities of the Bishops’ Bible, some of which are found only in the 1602 printings” (Textual History of the KJB, p. 35). Norton asserted: “That the KJB was printed from an annotated Bishops’ Bible--possibly from Bod1602--is almost certain from the presence of the peculiarities and errors that come directly from the printed 1602 text” (KJB: a Short History, p. 106). Norton wrote: “Several times a Bishops’ Bible mistake creeps apparently unnoticed into the KJB text” (p. 130).

The KJV translators themselves suggested that they were borrowing or keeping many renderings from the pre-1611 English Bibles.

In their preface to the 1611 edition of the KJV, the KJV translators asserted: "Truly (good Christian Reader) we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new Translation, not yet to make a bad one a good one, . . . but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one."

 

In his introduction to a modern-spelling edition of Tyndale's New Testament, David Daniell noted:

When James I gave his Bible revisers the huge
Bishops' Bible as their foundation, which meant
that the Vulgate-based Rheims version would be
attractive to them, he ensured that a wash of Latinity
would be spread over Tyndale's English. The
result, and we must assume, the intention, was to
create a safer distance between the Scriptures and
the people. Though in the general working vocabulary
there were more Latinate terms in use by 1611, Latin
words and constructions have, as they had then, the
ring of Establishment authority, which is not the same
as the Koine Greek that Tyndale was translating for the
first time (p. xxiv).


Daniell wrote: "For King James to lay down as the foundation of his new version the most Latinate of recent indigenous Bibles was unfortunate indeed, and destroyed the chance of the new version being in the best modern English" (p. xiii). Daniell pointed out: “Those scholars were tied by having, at the King’s command, to base their work on the ill-done, backward-looking, heavily Latinate Bishops’ Bible of 1568 partly because it had no marginal notes” (William Tyndale, p. 344). Daniell also observed: "Appeal to Latin, so characteristic of the Authorised Version, tends to flatten differences, and make one special kind of language for everything, something a little antiquated, a little removed, and feeling therefore, for the New Testament, rather artificially holy" (p. 139).

David Lawton asserted: “The style of the King James Bible was meant to align the reading of the Bible with the worship of the Church of England; and its slightly old-fashioned language was meant to express the great antiquity of that Church” (Faith, p. 81). In an introduction to an Oxford World’s Classics edition of the KJV, Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett wrote: “Unlike Tyndale, who had translated the koine Greek of the New Testament into a direct and forceful contemporary vernacular, the language of the new translation [the KJV] was often deliberately archaic and Latinized” (p. xxviii).


The Catholic Rheims New Testament had some influence on the vocabulary of the KJV in that some of its many Latinisms were adopted (Ancestry of Our English Bible, p. 267). Daniell wrote: "Another, more serious, push toward Latinity came from the influence on the [KJV] panels of the extremely Latinate Roman Catholic translation from Rheims" (Tyndale's N. T., p. xiii).

David Norton asserted that “Rheims’s prime contribution to the KJB was an added sprinkle of latinate vocabulary in the NT” (KJB: a Short History, p. 32).

Charles Butterworth noted: "There are instances where the Rheims New Testament reads differently from all the preceding versions and yet has been followed later by similar readings in the King James Bible, indicating that the translators of 1611 by no means ignored the work that was done in 1582" (Literary Lineage of the KJV, p. 195).

Darlow and Moule wrote: “This Rheims New Testament exerted a very considerable influence on the version of 1611, transmitting to it not only an extensive vocabulary, but also numerous distinctive phrases and turns of expression” (Historical Catalogue, p. 96). Darlow and Moule noted that “the Rheims New Testament, though not mentioned--contributed appreciably to the changes introduced” (p. 134).

Wally Beebe's Bus Workers Edition of the Open Bible noted: "The New Testament part of this [Rheims] Bible was extensively used by the King James revisers" (p. 1221).


J. R. Dore wrote: "A very considerable number of the Rhemish renderings, which they introduced for the first time, were adopted by the revisers of King James's Bible of 1611" (Old Bibles, p. 303). Butterworth observed that the Rheims version "recalled the thought of the [KJV] translators to the Latin structure of the sentences, which they sometimes preferred to the Greek for clarity's sake, thus reverting to the pattern of Wycliffe or the Coverdale Latin-English Testaments, and forsaking the foundation laid by Tyndale" (Literary Lineage of the KJV, p. 237). In an introductory article on "The English Bible" in The Interpeter's Bible, Allen Wikgren also noted that the Rheims "exerted a considerable influence upon the King James revision, in which many of its Latinisms were adopted" (Vol. I, p. 93). Herbert May confirmed that "some of its [the Rheims] phrases were used by the King James Version translators" (Our English Bible in the Making, p. 47). In his 1808 answer to the reprinting of Ward’s 1688 book Errata of the Protestant Bible, Edward Ryan referred to the KJV translators “adopting the Romish Version in very many instances” and to their making corrections “agreeably to the popish construction“ (Analysis, pp. 5-6).

Benson Bobrick also observed; "From the Rheims New Testament, the translators saw fit to borrow a number of Latinate words" (Wide as the Waters, p. 244). Samuel Fisk also acknowledged that the Rheims had "an influence upon the King James Version" (Calvinistic Paths, p. 74).

 

None of my comparisons were based on the later 1700's version of the Rheims. Your supposed answer is based on a false claim or wrong conclusion on your part.

The KJV translators had the text of the 1582 Rheims New Testament in William Fulke's book so that any suggestion that they did not have it would be incorrect.

John Bois, who had been a translator of the Apcroypha, was also one of the committee of revision that went over the work of the translators at Stationers' Hall. His notes that were found come from some of the revision group meetings.
Gustavus S. Paine noted that "Bois's notes. run from Romans through the Apocalypse [Revelation]" (Men Behind the KJV, p. 115). Ward Allen observed that "Bois's company at Cambridge finished its translation of the Apocrypha so early that Bois was able to assist another company in its work" (Translating for King James, p. 7).

Scrivener had made mention that it was known that John Bois had made some notes concerning the making of the KJV, but it was only in the mid-1900's that those notes were discovered.

 

If the renderings in my booklet are found in the Bibles listed, how are the listings errors?

I noted in my booklet Could the 1611 KJV Have Been Better: "one obvious reason for these examples is to indicate the likely source of the renderings" (p. 29).

I also wrote: "It may be possible that there was another source for some of them, but it is known that some KJV translators had Fulke's book that included the text of the 1582 Rheims" (p. 29).

 

Even KJV defender Edward Hills acknowledged that the 1582 Douai Version influenced the KJV “slightly” (Believing Bible Study, p. 64).

KJV-only author Jack Moorman also admitted that “a few phrases and single words” in the KJV were taken from the Rheims (Forever Settled, p. 188).

 

In his book edited by D. A. Waite, H. D. Williams asserted: “Under no circumstances should a version which is not based upon the Received Texts be used as an example” (Word-for-Word Translating, p. 230).

Were the KJV translators wrong to consult and make any use of the 1582 Rheims that was not based on the Received Text as an example or as a source for some renderings?

In the introductory articles in Hendrickson’s reprint of the 1611, Alfred Pollard maintained that “the exiled Jesuit, Gregory Martin, must be recognized as one of the builders of the [1611] version of the Bible” (p. 28).

 

You seem to be trying to misrepresent what I stated since I did not say "must have." You refer to my booklet, but then you ignore my statements in it.

I noted in my booklet Could the 1611 KJV Have Been Better: "one obvious reason for these examples is to indicate the likely source of the renderings" (p. 29).

I also wrote: "It may be possible that there was another source for some of them, but it is known that some KJV translators had Fulke's book that included the text of the 1582 Rheims" (p. 29).

There is stronger evidence that the KJV translators made use of or borrowed renderings from the 1582 Rheims New Testament than from the 1539 Taverner's.

It is not known that the KJV translators assembled all the printed editions of Tyndale's and of other pre-1611 English Bibles. They may have had only one printed edition of each of the six pre-1611 English Bibles (Tyndale's, Coverdale's, Matthew's, Whitchurch's [Great], Geneva, Bishops'] mentioned in the rules for the making of the KJV.

You merely show possible other sources in a few cases, but those possible sources do not actually prove that the 1582 Rheims could not still be the actual source since it is clear that the Rheims was the source of some KJV NT renderings.

Are you trying to claim that the KJV translators did not borrow or follow any renderings found in the 1582 Roman Catholic Rheims New Testament?

 

I didn't dismiss any data. I merely questioned your claim that that data disproves my point that the KJV borrowed some renderings from the 1582 Rheims.

I clearly stated that "It may be possible that there was another source for some of them, but it is known that some KJV translators had Fulke's book that included the text of the 1582 Rheims" (p. 29).

My point that the KJV translators made use of or borrowed some renderings from the 1582 Roman Catholic Rheims New Testament still stands.

Are you trying to claim that the KJV translators did not borrow or follow any renderings found in the 1582 Roman Catholic Rheims New Testament?