Confraternity Bible

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Scepter Publishing's 2006 rerelease of the 1941 Confraternity New Testament

The Confraternity Bible, or the Holy Bible, Confraternity Version, is a blanket title given to various English language Bible translation compilations, which were periodically released by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine starting in 1941 and culminating in, but not completely inclusive of, the release of the 1970 New American Bible.

In 1941, a revision of Richard Challoner's Version of the Rheims New Testament, Edited by Catholic Scholars under the Patronage of the Episcopal Committee of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, and titled "The New Testament, Confraternity Version", was released. In the years to follow, this release was accompanied by subsequent entire-canon Bibles, in various formats, that contained this specific revision of the New Testament, unchanged, along with a hybrid assortment of both untouched books from Challoner's Douay Old Testament, and newly revised Old Testament books from the original languages, as promulgated by Pope Pius XII.

A revision of Challoner's Douay Old Testament was never fully completed, and it is not known how much of it had been completed when work immediately and completely shifted to translation from the original languages following Pope Pius XII's Divino Afflante Spiritu, an encyclical letter issued on September 30, 1943, which stressed the importance of diligent study of the original languages and other cognate languages, so as to arrive at a deeper and fuller knowledge of the meaning of the sacred texts.

Because of the hybrid nature of what would become the various versions of the Confraternity Bible, it has been referred to in the past, more descriptively, as the Challoner-Confraternity, or Douay/Douai-Confraternity, referencing the fact that it was made up of part Old Testament books from the Challoner Douay Old Testament, and also books translated or revised by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine.

The New Testament portion of the Confraternity Bible revised Challoner's translation in several ways:

• It modernized the style of Challoner's eighteenth century English.
• It translated from critical editions of the Latin Vulgate, rather than from the Clementine edition.
• When Greek idioms were literally translated into the Vulgate, it paraphrased the Greek idiom, rather than translating direct from the Latin.
• In general, it was a freer translation than Challoner's, and more paraphrastic.
• It restored the paragraph formatting of the first edition of the Douay-Rheims Bible, which had been removed in the Challoner Revision.

Because it was intended to be used in the liturgy, the translators did not introduce any rendering that would depart from the text of the Vulgate.

The Book of Psalms contained in a Confraternity Bible could be one of three versions: The Douay-Rheims Challoner Psalms, the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) Psalms of 1941, or the CCD "Olinger" Psalms of 1950.

The CCD Psalter of 1941 was based on the "Vulgate" or "Gallican" Latin version of the Psalter, and based on the Douay-Rheims-Challoner version of the Bible. The CCD "Olinger" Psalms, of 1950, were translated by Eberhard Olinger, OSB, and were based on the new Latin version of Pius XII, the "Novum Psalterium", which appeared in 1945. This version of the Psalter also eventually appeared in the 1970 New American Bible.

The new translations of the books from the Old Testament in the Confraternity Bible formed the basis of what would become the 1970 New American Bible, except for the Book of Genesis. The Confraternity version of Genesis was completely revised before the release of the NAB.

The Old Testament books that had been translated anew from the original languages, remained virtually unchanged under the new NAB title, with only relatively minor revising done to normalize the anglicized form of formal names throughout the entire text.

The Challoner-Confraternity version continues to be popular with traditional Catholics.

Scepter Publishers [1] have put the New Testament back into print ISBN 0-933932-77-4.

[edit] External links

• Preface to the Confraternity New Testament at The DCL.