In the early twentieth century with the blessings of most of the English bishops, Msgr. Ronald Knox embarked on an entirely new English translation of the Vulgate Bible
In his On Englishing the Bible, Msgr. Knox explains how he carried out the mandate given to him by the English hierarchy. He aimed at a Bible that was understandable to modern audiences and yet rooted in Catholic tradition and “written in timeless English”. He wanted a Bible that did not merely translate the original but made it read as if an Englishman had written it.
His three aims were: accuracy, intelligibility, and readability. He was loyal to these principles without sacrificing the rhetorical power of the original and while deliberately keeping a few of the well loved archaisms in the text. He preferred lucidity to poetry, but as one of the finest literary craftsmen of 20th century England he avoided falling into banality.
This was particularly so in his unique respect for the Hebrew Acrostics (starting successive verses with successive letters of the alphabet). Here Monsignor Knox respects the 22 letters of the Hebrew original but starts his verses with successive letters of the English alphabet, usually leaving off X, Y, and Z and one other letter, often Q.
In Lamentations 1, 2, and 4 he completely follows the English order and uses the letters A-V; and in Lamentations 3 he adheres to the tripled Hebrew verses (66 verses) and uses AAA-VVV, i.e. three A verses, then three B verses, etc.
The result is unique. The Knox Bible is a faithful translation of the Clementine Vulgate, the Latin Bible that was the Catholic Church’s official Bible for nearly 1,600 years; and yet Knox was careful to cross check his translation against the Hebrew and Greek texts. In readability and scholarship it firmly belongs to the age of modern Bibles.
Fr. Cormac Burke who has studied the Knox translation extensively says this may have particular application to the Pauline epistles, and that in the Old Testament the Wisdom books are particularly expressive. He points to Psalm 118 as a tour de force and praises the solemn force of Knox’s rendering of the Major Prophets.
Pope Pius XII, in a note that he sent to Msgr. Knox shortly before Knox died, called his translation “a praiseworthy achievement ... a monument of many years of patient study and toil.” Novelist and Knox’s fellow convert Evelyn Waugh predicted that in a hundred years’ time the only Biblically-literate Englishmen will be those who are Catholic, and that they will know it through the Knox translation. The Ven. Fulton Sheen notably favoured the Knox Bible as the source for his Biblical quotes.