Knox Bible

Steven Craig Miller scmiller at www.plantnet.com
Mon Dec 6 13:03:33 EST 1999


To: Dave Scarpino,

<< My brother purchased a copy or The Knox Bible, (3 volume set), of which 
I understand to be a translation of a translation namely the Septuagint. I 
am looking for an opinon on the accuracy of the Knox Translation as 
compared to other more common versions like, KJV or NIV. >>

If I'm not mistaken, I believe that you refer to a translation by Ronald 
Arbuthnott Knox (1888-1957), who published a translation of the Latin 
Vulgate. The NT was published in 1945, the OT in 1949, and the whole Bible 
was published in 1955. Margaret T. Hills writes:

<< Knox ... took orders in the Church of England in 1912 but became a Roman 
Catholic in 1917. Msgr. Knox was an eminent scholar, churchman, preacher, 
literary stylist, and writer of detective stories. His translation of the 
Bible is based on the Latin Vulgate text, and he aimed at a sort of 
timeless English. While his work has delightful literary style, he 
occasionally resorted to paraphrase. The translation of the NT is probably 
more satisfactory from a scholarly point of view, particularly in the 
Epistles, than of the OT >> (1961:396; quoted by Orlinkey & Bratcher, 
1991:151).

Knox had the misfortune to be working on his translation of the Latin 
Vulgate in the years right after Pope Pius XII had issued his historic 
Divino Afflante Spiritu in 1943, which stated that Roman Catholic 
translations "could and should be made from the original biblical texts 
without respect to the Vulgate." Thus in a short time, Knox's translation 
would become obsolete as Roman Catholics switched from using translation of 
the Latin Vulgate to using translations made from the original Greek, 
Hebrew, and Aramaic texts of scripture.

-Steven Craig Miller
Alton, Illinois (USA)
scmiller at www.plantnet.com
Disclaimer: "I'm just a simple house-husband (with no post-grad degree), 
what do I know?"




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