Many thanks to Chris for another great guest post.
One of the pleasant surprises coming out of the recent
Catholic Bible Taxonomy post was spending time
with some less familiar translations during the Office of Readings in Morning
Prayer. This week, let's take a closer look at a little “school edition” of the
Knox Bible.
Although Timothy chose him to be the patron of this blog, I
confess I am late to the school of Knox myself. I’ve been impressed by the
isolated readings Timothy shares each week, and found his essays on Scripture
translation quite compelling in “On Englishing the Bible.” Also, raised
Protestant and trained in an academic seminary, all of my experience of
Scripture has been from translations directly from the original languages. The
“Vulgate Tradition” is still quite new to me. In fact, simply coming to value
the Vulgate as anything other than an inferior and corrupted Latin translation
of inspired Scripture was perhaps the largest hurdle I had to leap in order to
become Catholic as an adult. Before, a Bible translating a translation was automatically suspect, especially
given the many points of divergence between the Latin Vulgate and later textual
discoveries in the original languages. Now, however, I was looking forward to
spending some regular time in this translation.
Although Baronius Press has recently acquired the
rights to this translation and makes it available in a very attractive
hardcover, the price was a bit steep for me, so I took to Ebay to see what else
I might find. Oddly, given how prevalent this text was in English liturgy until
well after the Jerusalem Bible was published in 1966, it is still very hard to
find in an affordable single volume. I was about to give in and purchase from
Baronius, when I located this terrific little volume in the UK, listed not as a
Knox Bible but as a “lectionary” for use in the “traditional mass.” Since
Timothy hadn’t come across it before, I offered to “unbox” it together here.
It’s a handy “school edition,” essentially a British student
edition from 1960 reprinting the 1955 one-volume edition that came out after
Knox published his final tome. The book itself is quite attractive and
surprisingly compact. After reprinting the 1954 foreword from Cardinal Griffin
for the original single-volume edition, it contains the full text of the Knox
translation in two columns with translation footnotes at the bottom. The notes
are printed in a miniscule font, making them hard to read in dim light during
morning prayer, but they are there and they no doubt kept the size - and price
- of the student edition down.
As for the translation itself, having spent a few weeks with it
now, I admit I’m not the fan of Knox I thought I’d be (sorry Timothy). Full
disclosure: I copy edit technical and corporate writing for a living. That
means I spend my days making passive voice active and every weak verb strong. I
set right every inverted sentence, and unsplit every split infinitive (i.e. “To
boldly go…”) Unfortunately, that means older writing just smashes up against my
editorial screens whether I want it to or not. Also unfortunate, I entered Knox
through the prophets in the Office of Readings this month, specifically Amos
and Hosea (Osee) which I understand are often his weakest, most obscure work.
This surprises me, given Knox’s own dual guiding principles:
●
"To break away from the literal order of
sentences" - "Not to ask, 'How shall I make this foreigner talk
English?' but 'What would an English man have said to express this?'"
●
"To use no word, no phrase, and as far as possible
no turn of sentence, which would not have passed as decent literary English on
the seventeenth century, and would not pass as decent literary English
to-day." - "In a word, what you want is neither sixteenth-century
English not twentieth-century English, but timeless English." ("Thoughts
on Bible Translation" from On
Englishing the Bible)
Clearly, as Timothy recently pointed out, Knox is capable of
sublime prose. But there’s nothing timeless
about his treatment of the prophets. To my ears, they read like Lord Byron
aping King James English. Sentences are inside out. Subjects and objects are
easily confused. There’s an artificial use of second person archaic pronouns.
As a result, I can’t help but think of Knox as the “Yoda Bible.” Read some of
the following samples with your inner Jedi master voice, and you’ll see what I
mean.
Osee 13:1-3 Spoke
Ephraim, all Israel trembled at his word: how else came they, for Baal's
worship, to barter away life itself? And they are busy yet over their sinning;
melt down silver of theirs to fashion models of yonder images, craftsman
copying craftsman's design! And of such models they say, The man who would do
sacrifice has but to kiss these calves. Fades the memory of them, light as
early mist or morning dew, light as chaff on the threshing-floor, smoke from
the chimney, when high blows the wind!
Um, what?
Gen 1:1 God, at the
beginning of time, created heaven and earth.
Is 7:14 Sign you ask
none, but sign the Lord will give you. Maid shall be with child, and shall bear
a son, that shall be called Emmanuel.
Jer 20:7 Lord, thou hast
sent me on a fool's errand; if I played a fool's part, a strength greater than
mine overmastered me; morn to night, what a laughingstock am I, every man's
nay-word!
Jn 1:1 At the beginning
of time the Word already was; and God had the Word abiding with him, and the
Word was God.
Eph 1:3-14 (One sentence
in the Greek!) Blessed be that God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who
has blessed us, in Christ, with every spiritual blessing, higher than heaven
itself. He has chosen us out, in Christ, before the foundation of the world, to
be saints, to be blameless in his sight, for love of him; marking us out
beforehand (so his will decreed) to be his adopted children through Jesus
Christ. Thus he would manifest the splendour of that grace by which he has
taken us into his favour in the person of his beloved Son. It is in him and
through his blood that we enjoy redemption, the forgiveness of our sins. So
rich is God's grace, that he had overflowed upon us in a full stream of wisdom
and discernment, to make known to us the hidden purpose of his will. It was his
loving design, centred in Christ, to give history its fulfillment by resuming
everything in him, all that is in heaven, all that is on earth, summed up in
him. In him it was our lot to be called, singled out beforehand to suit his
purpose (for it is he who is at work everywhere, carrying out the designs of
his will); we were to manifest his glory, we who were the first to set our hope
in Christ; in him you too were called, when you listened to the preaching of
the truth, that gospel which is your salvation. In him you too learned to
believe, and had the seal set on your faith by the promised gift of the Holy
Spirit; a pledge of the inheritance which is ours, to redeem it for us and
bring us into possession of it, and so manifest God's glory.
Especially when reading alongside a second, modern translation
from the original languages, however, Knox is valuable for highlighting the
many places where the Latin Vulgate differs from the Hebrew or Greek. For
instance, in the third vision of Amos 7:7-9, God reveals himself to the prophet
inspecting the walls of Samaria with a tool in hand. Relying on the Latin
Vulgate, Knox renders this tool a “trowel,” which suggests that God is in the
process of repairing the city and, symbolically, its broken people.
Amos 7:8-9a Why, Lord, I
said, a plasterer's trowel! Ay, he answered, and here, in full view of Israel's
folk, that trowel I lay aside; cementing they shall have from me no more.
Relying on the Hebrew, however, the RSV-2CE calls this tool a
“plumb line,” the NABRE a “plummet.” The clear implication is that rather than repairing the broken society, God is
evaluating its structural integrity, measuring how much it has shifted on its
foundations or buckled, before demolishing
it! Clearly the latter brings the Divine judgment of the prophetic vision
to the foreground, where the former speaks to his steadfast love. To a
Protestant, that’s nothing less than the corruption of the inspired Word. To a
Catholic, on the other hand, it’s an example of how the inspired Word blossoms
into multiple nuances of meaning.
This is the challenge of the Vulgate and, by extension, Knox.
The Latin may not always capture what was originally written, but it does often preserve what was understood, especially when the Old Testament it translates is the
Greek Septuagint and not the Torah in its Hebrew form. After all, it’s the
Greek Old Testament that the apostle Paul quotes in his epistles to his Greek
speaking churches, not the Hebrew. So even the first generation of apostolic Christians
did not rely on the modern purists’s elevated view of the Bible in its original
languages. For the Catholic, that’s a help, not a hindrance, since it allows us
to tease more shades of meaning out of inspired texts. When it comes to faith,
like the scholar of the law who stood up to test him, Jesus continues to ask
the Church: “What is written in the law (i.e. Sacred Scripture)? How do you
read it (Sacred Tradition)?” (Lk 10:26)
Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot to like about the
translation, and I think reading it from a more affordable used vintage copy
like this is the way to go. I can forgive more of the archaisms that way
because they are packaged with an “old book” scent. The student edition
includes various Biblical maps which, in their period ink style, remind me a
bit of Tolkien’s endpaper maps for the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings.
Similarly, there’s an interesting glimpse of pre-Vatican II
feast days in a table of liturgical feasts in the back that seems strikingly
Anglican now (e.g. St. David, St. George, Whit Monday).
As with all old
books, especially old Bibles, their
value grows with the lives they have touched before reaching our hands. Though
I hate written notes in Bibles, I was delighted to see this inscription on the
endpaper:
I have no idea who Davey and Rose are, but there’s a novel
hidden in that sentence. Was this a sister writing to a brother in seminary? A
pious girlfriend making a gift to her fashionably agnostic scholar boyfriend? A
scandalous Anglican-Catholic romance? Are they perhaps a sweet aging couple
today, somewhere south of London? Who knows? Thanks to Knox’s period and prose,
I imagine Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger transported into a Graham Greene
novel.
Do you read the Knox Bible? Why or why not? And the next time
you do, please remember to pray for Rose and Davey.
Christopher Buckley holds an M.A. in Religion from the Claremont School of Theology. He began as a United Methodist and passed through the Episcopal Church before being confirmed into the Catholic Church as an adult. He lives and works in Seattle with his wife and two children, and blogs occasionally at StoryWiseGuy.com. Connect with him on Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Flickr, and LinkedIn, and Bible.com.
