Baronius Press has just brought out an attractive edition of the Knox Bible—the English translation of the Bible done single-handedly by the famous Catholic apologist Msgr. Ronald Knox between 1936 and 1945. This is a gilt-edged, leather-bound edition with two colored ribbons; its verse numbers are in the margins for greater readability. The Knox Bible will make a fine gift for any Bible collector, and because it is a very English rendering of the Sacred text, this is a Bible that is likely to be read again and again by all who call that language their mother tongue.
The translation itself is a remarkable achievement. As early as the second half of the 19th century, many English bishops and English readers had become very interested in a new Catholic translation of the Latin Vulgate which could remedy the deficiencies of the highly Latinate Douai and Challoner versions. What would such a translation look like, and how much more readable would it be, if it were rendered not as a word-by-word copy of St. Jerome’s text—often failing to capture the sense of the idioms used—but as a literate Englishman would write the same thing? Early on it was hoped that the great Newman himself would undertake the work, but he never got to it. The Bishops of England and Wales assigned the task to Knox in 1936.
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