# Is the King James Bible Catholic? No, and Here Are the Bibles Catholics Use

Source: https://christianpure.com/learn/king-james-vs-catholic-bible-comparison/
Publisher: Christian Pure (https://christianpure.com/)
Published: 2024-05-25
Updated: 2026-11-07

No, the King James Bible is a Protestant translation, made for the Church of England in 1611. Catholics use translations the Church has approved: in the United States the New American Bible (NABRE) at Mass, and also the RSV and NRSV Catholic Editions, the Douay-Rheims and the Jerusalem Bible. A Catholic Bible has 73 books, and most King James printings have 66.

Still, the two Bibles are closer kin than that answer suggests, because each has borrowed from the other. The King James translators used the Catholic Rheims New Testament, and more than a century later Bishop Challoner revised the Douay-Rheims largely from the King James. The Douay-Rheims, the older Catholic Bible in English, was translated from a different text, Jerome's Latin Vulgate, and so a handful of verses that bear on Catholic belief read differently in it. On most pages, though, a Catholic and a Protestant reading side by side would find nearly the same words.

## What Bible do Catholics use?

There is no single Catholic Bible, but Church law asks two things of any translation Catholics publish: approval from the Holy See or a conference of bishops, and notes. In the words of canon 825, translations into modern languages must be "approved by the same authority and provided with necessary and sufficient annotations." That is why a Catholic edition comes with footnotes.

The bishops of the United States keep a list of the translations they have approved since 1983: the New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE), the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition and its updated edition, the Good News Translation, and several Psalters and New Testaments. They add that any translation with proper Church approval, "namely, by the Apostolic See or a local ordinary prior to 1983, or by the Apostolic See or an episcopal conference following 1983", "may be used by the Catholic faithful for private prayer and study."

That clause covers two older Catholic Bibles found in many homes. The 1899 American edition of the Douay-Rheims, which prints Bishop Challoner's revised text, carries the approbation of Cardinal James Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, dated 1 September 1899; he approved it as "an accurate reprint of the Rheims and Douay edition with Dr. Challoner's Notes." The RSV Catholic Edition carries an imprimatur from Bishop Peter W. Bartholome of Saint Cloud, Minnesota, dated 11 May 1966. Both were approved by a local bishop before 1983, so both may be used.

At Mass, American parishes read from the New American Bible, the translation the bishops sponsor. Its revised edition, the NABRE, came out in March 2011. A further revision, to be called the Catholic American Bible, is due in 2027: the bishops approved it for liturgical use in November 2024 by 216 votes to 4, and it will replace the text in the present Lectionary, the book of readings used at Mass.

Other countries make their own choice, and in England and Wales a new Lectionary using the English Standard Version–Catholic Edition came into use on the First Sunday of Advent 2024. For English-speaking Catholics the Douay-Rheims was the standard Bible from the 1580s until the twentieth century, when the Jerusalem Bible of 1966 overtook it in popularity, followed by the NABRE and the NRSV Catholic Edition.

|  | King James Version | Douay-Rheims (Challoner) | NABRE |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Made by | 47 scholars for King James I | Gregory Martin and fellow exiles; revised by Bishop Richard Challoner | Catholic Biblical Association scholars |
| First published | 1611 | 1582 and 1609–10; Challoner revision 1749–52 | 1970; revised 2011 |
| Translated from | Hebrew and Greek | Latin Vulgate | Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek |
| Tobit, Judith, Maccabees and the rest | Printed in 1611 as Apocrypha; later dropped | Included as Scripture | Included as Scripture |
| Approval | The Crown and the Church of England | Cardinal Gibbons, 1899 (US edition) | The US bishops, 2010 |

The first King James Bible held 80 books, with Wisdom and thirteen others printed between the Testaments. See where they stood.

[See the 1611 King James on a shelf](https://christianpure.com/bible-bookshelf/?bible=kjv&book=wis&from=king-james-vs-catholic-bible-comparison)

## Why is the King James Bible not Catholic?

It was a Church of England project from the start, begun in 1604 when a conference of churchmen asked the new king for a revised English Bible. By 30 June that year James had approved 54 revisers, and the records show that 47 took part, in six companies working at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge. Richard Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, oversaw them and "established doctrinal conventions for the translators." Their base text was the Bishops' Bible of 1568, corrected where needed against the Bibles of Tyndale, Matthew and Coverdale, the Great Bible and the Geneva Bible. The king, as Joe Paprocki notes for Busted Halo, told the translators to keep their work "in harmony with the theology of the Church of England."

The translators knew the Catholic translation too. According to Cambridge University Library's 2011 exhibition on the making of the King James Bible, the Rheims New Testament of 1582 "was not specified in the instructions, but was undoubtedly used as well." The Douai Old Testament, which came out in 1609 and 1610, was too late to be used.

The 1611 King James did contain the books Catholics call deuterocanonical, and a company of Cambridge scholars worked on them. In 1615 George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury and himself one of the translators, decreed a year in prison for any printer who bound and sold a Bible without them. The Church of England's Articles of Religion set out the standing it gave them: the Church reads them "for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine."

Most later printings left them out, and the Bible scholar Bruce Metzger gave two reasons why. These books are almost as long as the New Testament, so Bibles without them cost less to print and bind; and "Chiefly, however, it was for doctrinal considerations." The British and Foreign Bible Society stopped distributing Bibles that contained them in 1826–27, and the American Bible Society did the same by April 1828. The Westminster Confession of 1646 gives the Reformed position plainly: these books "are no part of the canon of the Scripture."

Catholics hold them to be Scripture, and the Council of Trent named them in its list of the sacred books on 8 April 1546. The Catechism counts 46 books in the Old Testament and 27 in the New, 73 in all. Take away Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and the two books of Maccabees, along with parts of Esther and Daniel, and you have the 66 books of most King James printings. Those seven books, and [the reasons the Reformers set them apart](https://christianpure.com/learn/missing-books-protestant-removal-bible/), account for the whole gap [between 73 books and 66](https://christianpure.com/learn/catholic-protestant-bible-comparison/).

## Where do the King James and Catholic Bibles word verses differently?

Most verses read much alike, and the differences that bear on Catholic belief fall in a few places, usually because of the text each translator worked from: the Douay-Rheims from Jerome's Latin, the King James and the NABRE from the Hebrew and Greek.

| Verse | King James | Douay-Rheims | NABRE |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Luke 1:28 | "Hail, thou that art highly favoured" | "Hail, full of grace" | "Hail, favored one!" |
| Matthew 3:2 | "Repent ye" | "Do penance" | "Repent" |
| Genesis 3:15 | "it shall bruise thy head" | "she shall crush thy head" | "They will strike at your head" |
| James 5:14 | "call for the elders of the church" | "bring in the priests of the church" | "summon the presbyters of the church" |

Take the angel's greeting in Luke. The Douay-Rheims follows the Latin, and its "full of grace" is the wording Catholics pray in the Hail Mary, whose Latin opens "Ave, María, grátia plena." The NABRE, working from the Greek, says "favored one", close to the King James. The Catechism keeps the older words when it explains the prayer: "Full of grace, the Lord is with thee."

In Matthew the Douay-Rheims has John the Baptist preach "Do penance", again from the Latin, and here the Catholic NABRE sides with the King James.

Genesis 3:15 is the verse Christians have long read as the first promise of a redeemer. The King James and the NABRE make the woman's offspring the one who strikes the serpent's head. The Douay-Rheims follows the Vulgate's "she", and the NABRE's own footnote explains the difference: "Another interpretive translation is ipsa, “she,” and is reflected in Jerome’s Vulgate. “She” was thought to refer to Mary, the mother of the messiah."

James 5:14 is the passage Catholics read as the root of the Anointing of the Sick. Translators render the Greek word as "elders" or "presbyters"; the Douay-Rheims chose "priests". The Catechism itself quotes the verse as "call for the elders [presbyters] of the Church" and adds: "Tradition has recognized in this rite one of the seven sacraments."

## Can Catholics read the King James Bible?

Yes, they can, because canon 825 governs who may publish a Bible, not what a Catholic may read. Joe Paprocki, a catechist who answered the question for Busted Halo, puts it plainly: "The Church doesn't forbid Catholics from having any version of the Bible on their bookshelf." He still recommends a Catholic Bible, for a practical reason: the King James lacks the deuterocanonical books, and readings from them come up in the Lectionary through the year. Nor does a King James Bible carry the approved notes canon 825 asks of a Catholic edition.

The Church has hoped, too, for translations all Christians can share. In 1965 the Second Vatican Council said that if translations are "produced in cooperation with the separated brethren as well, all Christians will be able to use them," and non-Catholic scholars worked on the Old Testament of the New American Bible. Britannica adds that among English Catholics the King James was "widely accepted" from the 18th century.

## Is the New King James Version Catholic?

The New King James Version is not a Catholic Bible either. It is a modern revision in the King James line, commissioned by the publisher Thomas Nelson in 1975 and published complete in 1982. Thomas Nelson says more than 130 scholars worked on it over seven years, in "a careful, line-by-line translation from the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic texts." It is not on the US bishops' list of approved translations.

## Is there a Catholic version of the King James Bible?

Not under that name, but two Catholic Bibles descend partly from it. When Bishop Richard Challoner revised the Douay-Rheims between 1749 and 1752, he "largely worked from the King James Version," in Britannica's words; Cardinal Newman judged that his changes "almost amounted to a new translation." Challoner's text is the Douay-Rheims most Catholics have read since.

The second is the Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version. The RSV of 1952 describes itself as a revision of the American Standard Version, "which was a revision of the King James Version, published in 1611." The Catholic Edition appeared in 1965 and 1966. The Holy See's International Theological Commission used that edition for every Bible reference in its 2007 document on infants who die without baptism.

## Which is older, the Catholic Bible or the King James Bible?

The Catholic translation came first: the Rheims New Testament appeared in 1582, "nearly thirty years before the Anglican 'Authorized Version'", as the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, and the Douay Old Testament in 1609 and 1610, a year or two ahead of the King James in 1611.

Neither was the first English Bible, though. The Wycliffite Bibles of the late fourteenth century came long before both, followed in the sixteenth century by Tyndale's partial translation and the Great Bible that Henry VIII authorized in 1538. And behind the Douay-Rheims stands a far older Bible, the Latin Vulgate that Jerome made at the end of the fourth century. When the Council of Trent settled "which out of all the Latin editions" in circulation should be "held as authentic", it chose the Vulgate for the Church's public reading and preaching.

Both Bibles carry the angel's greeting to Mary. Catholics pray it in the Douay-Rheims words, "Hail, full of grace," and a King James reader finds it in Luke as "Hail, thou that art highly favoured" (Luke 1:28): the same greeting to the same Mary, in two kinds of English.

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## Related reading

- [Christian History: The Council Of Trent in full: Session IV (4)](https://christianpure.com/learn/council-of-trent-session-4-canonical-scriptures/)
- [What Bibles Do Baptists Prefer To Read?](https://christianpure.com/learn/baptists-preferred-bibles/)
- [Anglican vs Catholic: Why the Church of England Is Not Roman Catholic](https://christianpure.com/learn/anglicans-catholics-differences/)
- [Why is The Catholic Lord's Prayer Different?](https://christianpure.com/learn/catholic-protestant-lords-prayer/)
- [The growth and development of the Armenian biblical canon](https://christianpure.com/learn/armenian-biblical-canon/)

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