This Douay-Rheims Translation was revised and diligently compared with the Latin Vulgate by Bishop Richard Challoner (A.D. 1749-1752). The Old Testament was first published by the English College at Douay (A.D. 1609-1610). The New Testament was first published by the English College at Rheims (A.D. 1582). Challoner is also credited with the annotations included in this revision.

The early Douay-Rheims Bible achieved little recognition among English-speaking Catholics until it was substantially revised by Challoner. His revisions borrowed heavily from the King James Version (himself being a convert from Protestantism, and thus familiar with its style) whose translators had borrowed a few terms from the original Rheims NT of 1582. Challoner not only addressed the odd prose and the Latinisms, but produced a version which, while still called the Douay-Rheims, was little like it.

This Challoner version, officially approved by the Church, remained the Bible of the majority of English-speaking Catholics well into the 20th century. It was first published in America in 1790 by Mathew Carey of Philadelphia. Several American editions followed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominently among them an edition published in 1899 by the John Murphy Company of Baltimore.