Religion: The Knox Version

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"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 .. .