The Knox Version

In the high-ceilinged library of an English manor house one rainy day this fall, a bony, white-haired priest in an oversized clerical collar pecked away at a portable typewriter. From time to time he paused to knock the ashes out of his pipe against the fireplace or consult one of the fat books stacked on the massive antique table before him. At last he stood up, pulled the paper from his typewriter and closed his reference books with a ceremonious bang. His nine-year labor was finished. Monsignor Ronald Knox had completed his translation of the Catholic Bible.

Last week the first volume (19 books) of Knox's Old Testament was published in the U.S. (Sheed & Ward; $7). Volume II will be out next year (his New Testament was published in 1944). Some Catholic authorities have long regretted that the job of re-translating the Vulgate* had not been given to Cardinal Newman. In Monsignor Knox they found another master of scholarship and prose.

Without Impediment. "Anyone who writes Latin poetry at the age of twelve is bound to end up doing something like translating the Bible," said a Knox acquaintance recently. From his Eton days, Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, now 60, has been noted for his witty, agile mind. The sixth child of the Anglican Bishop of Manchester (both his grandfathers were also Protestant divines), he grew up in what his autobiography calls "that form of Protestant piety which the modern world half regrets, half derides as 'old-fashioned.' "

When he was 15, Knox began to take up religion seriously on his own. A friend came down with typhoid and, feeling that he must somehow help, Knox lived on bread & butter for six weeks. When the friend died, Knox prayed for him 15 minutes daily "with my hands held above the level of my head, which is not as easy as it sounds." At 17, he vowed himself to celibacy: "The uppermost thought in my mind was not that of virginity ... I must have 'power to attend to the Lord without impediment.'"

In 1912, after winning almost every attainable honor at Oxford, Knox, then only 24, became Anglican chaplain of Oxford's Trinity College. He seemed to be having a wonderful time--preaching, talking, and turning out books. But his soul was not at peace. "Authority played a large part in my belief," he later explained. In September 1917, after resigning his Oxford chaplaincy, he joined the Roman Catholic Church.

In less than a decade, he was back again at Oxford, as Catholic chaplain of the university. He held famous weekly teas in the huge, hotel-like Old Palace, where he stuffed undergraduates with good talk and anchovy toast. He became a cherished regular among the witty debaters of the Oxford Union. To eke out his meager chaplaincy allotment he began to produce smoothly written detective novels--a total of six in ten years. (He was once asked if the title page of his Bible would refer to him as "Ronald Knox, author of The Viaduct Murder"')

"And the Light Began." In 1939, Knox was assigned by his archbishop to translate the Bible. He retired to a friend's house in the country and set to work on a lonely, eight-hour-day, six-day-a-week schedule. In three years he had completed the New Testament and went right to work on the Old--turning out an average 24 verses a day, though sometimes he struggled all morning to get a verse just the way he wanted it.

Translator Knox is unconcerned about the Bible as "literature." He paid scant attention to the rich, rhythmic prose of the King James version. He worked directly from the Latin, Hebrew and Greek texts, hoping to get the sense across and letting the poetry fall where it might. But he avoided using a specifically modern idiom because it would soon be obsolete again; his aim was to achieve a kind of timeless English.

Novelist Evelyn Waugh has said of his friend's translation: "It is unquestioned that for the past 300 years the Authorized Version has been the greatest single formative influence in English prose style. But that time is over . . . When the Bible ceases, as it is ceasing, to be accepted as a sacred text, it will not long survive for its fine writing. It seems to me probable that in a hundred years' time the only Englishmen who know their Bibles will be Catholics. And they will know it in Msgr. Knox's version."

If Waugh is right, Catholic Christians of 2048 will learn about the Creation in these words: God, at the beginning of time, created heaven and earth. Earth was still an empty waste, and darkness hung over the deep; but already, over its waters, brooded the Spirit of God. Then God said, Let there be light; and the light began .. .

*The Scriptures translated into Latin by St. Jerome in the 4th Century from Greek and Hebrew texts.

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