Spencer New Testament

The Spencer New Testament is a major American Catholic translation of the New Testament, rendered directly from the Greek in the period before the Second Vatican Council. Its scope is limited to the New Testament, and it was prepared from a critical Greek New Testament used as its base text rather than from the Latin Vulgate, which had long served as the customary basis for English-language Catholic Bibles in the Douay-Rheims tradition. In philosophy it is a formal original-language Catholic translation, and it is classed as a fresh translation, having grown out of the earlier Spencer Four Gospels, which served as its predecessor and base translation. Its distinctive feature is precisely this shift away from simply translating the Vulgate, aligning Catholic English scripture with the wider modern practice of working from the original languages, a direction that later Catholic versions would follow more broadly.