The Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ
according to
St Mark
Translated out of the Latin Vulgate
at the English College of Rheims, 1582
revised by Bishop Richard Challoner, 1749–1752
What this is
The shortest of the four and generally held to be the earliest. It moves fast — the word “immediately” carries much of the narrative — explains Jewish custom as it goes, which suggests it was not written for Jewish readers, and ends in a way nobody has settled.
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.