Monsignor Knox’s Unrighteous Bible

Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888-1957)—convert from Anglicanism, Catholic chaplain at Oxford, etc.—spent a good portion of the 1930s and ‘40s producing a new English translation of the Bible—or, more specifically, producing a new English translation of the Vulgate, while checking the Vulgate’s Latin against the original Hebrew and Greek. Though Knox’s Bible enjoyed widespread use during only the 20-odd years between World War II and Vatican II, his work is stylistically excellent. Knox aimed to translate Scripture into fluent English, adjusting his style to suit the genre of each Biblical book, and paraphrasing Latin, Hebrew, and Greek idioms that jarred his fine-tuned Anglophone Sprachgefühl. Even where Knox’s own word-choices jar the reader—even where one disagrees with them—they are interesting. Knox’s translation recently replaced the Douay-Rheims as the New Advent website’s English Bible, and has been reprinted as a hefty hardback by Baronius Press. It is a great read.

I said Knox’s word-choices are interesting; the process by which he made those choices is both interesting and instructive. The Baronius edition of the Knox Bible ships with a booklet called On Englishing the Bible, a reprint of eight papers, articles, and texts of talks that Knox collected in 1949, and in which he explained the rationale behind his translations.

Whether despite, or because of, the fact that I am no scholar of Biblical languages, Knox’s comments on the word “righteousness” especially impressed me. The Bible, he says, is usually translated by a committee, and the committee members observe certain conventions to keep their work mutually consistent. Knox reasons that the compilers of the King James Version “evidently did something of that kind with a word like dikaiosune in the New Testament, or tsedeq in the Old”:

What they did was to resuscitate a more or less obsolete word, “right-wiseness,” recondition it as “righteousness,” and use that all through the Bible as the equivalent of the tsedeq-dikaiosune idea. It served well enough; but this wooden rendering, constantly recurring in all sorts of different contexts, has resulted all through the Authorized Version in a certain flatness, a certain want of grip. [1]

There is, Knox says, no possibility of exact word-for-word equivalence between any two languages; a word in one language inevitably has context-dependent shades of meaning that will not overlap perfectly with the shades of meaning of its nearest equivalent(s) in another language. “Tsedeq or dikaiosune can mean, when used of a man, innocence, or honesty, or uprightness, or charitableness, or dutifulness, or (very commonly) the fact of being in God’s good books,” he says (and the obsolescence of that last idiom—“being in [someone’s] good books”—a mere 65 years after he wrote it only strengthens his argument, highlighting what a subtle and slippery thing a language is). “Used of God, it [i.e., tsedeq or dikaiosune] can mean the justice which punishes the sinner, or, quite as often, the faithfulness which protects the good; it can mean, also, the approval with which God looks upon those who are in his good books.” Therefore,

Only a meaningless token-word, like righteousness, can pretend to cover all these meanings. To use such a token-word is to abrogate your duty as a translator. Your duty as a translator is to think up the right expression, though it may have to be a paraphrase, which will give the reader the exact shade of meaning here and here and here. [2]

So, (almost) as completely as certain filmmakers have ruined certain songs for me, Monsignor Knox has ruined that “meaningless token-word,” righteousness.

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Incidentally, the word “righteousness” occurs 291 times in the King James Version, and 137 times in the New American Bible (Revised Edition).

And it occurs 263 times in the Revised Standard Version (Catholic Edition), my favorite translation, which I find more readable than Knox.

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[1] Ronald Knox, “Thoughts on Bible Translation,” in On Englishing the Bible (London: Baronius Press Ltd., 2012), 6.

[2] Ibid., 7.