Lamp full

The Gospel of St John

Douay-Rheims · Challoner revision

The Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ

according to
St John

Translated out of the Latin Vulgate
at the English College of Rheims, 1582
revised by Bishop Richard Challoner, 1749–1752

Begin at Chapter I  →

What this is

Unlike the other three in almost every respect: a different set of events, a longer ministry with several Passovers, long discourses in place of parables, and a geography that keeps returning to Jerusalem rather than circling Galilee.

The translation

The Douay-Rheims: the Catholic English Bible, translated out of the Latin Vulgate at the English College of Rheims in 1582 and revised by Bishop Richard Challoner between 1749 and 1752. The Rheims New Testament was in print twenty-nine years before the King James Version, whose translators had it on the desk. The fuller history is on the title page of St Luke.

What is on the facing leaf

Challoner’s own summary of each chapter, marked as his; a map of the places that chapter names, drawn from the Levant; the people in it who can be found in some source other than this book; and, where there is one, a plain statement of what is not known.

How full the notes are

Thinner here than on St Luke, which was annotated chapter by chapter. The map, the argument and the people are complete; the notes are not, and an empty heading is better than invented filler.

Text: the Douay-Rheims Bible in Bishop Challoner’s revision, public domain, from Project Gutenberg, set unaltered — 21 chapters and 879 verses, checked for gaps. The summary at the head of each chapter is Challoner’s own and is labelled as his; every other note was written for this edition. Map: Galilee and Judea, from Natural Earth 10m land, lakes and rivers, public domain, with coordinates from the Pleiades gazetteer (CC-BY), each one seeded with an approximate position and checked against it. A place is pinned only where the identification is settled.