Ronald Knox
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Ronald Arbuthnott Knox (February 171888-August 241957) was an English theologian and crime writer.
Life
He was born in Leicestershire, England into an Anglican family, and was educated at Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1910, he became a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. He was appointed chaplain in 1912 but left in 1917 when he converted to Roman Catholicism. He was one of the four Knox brothers (with E. V. Knox, Dillwyn Knox and Wilfred Knox) written about in a joint biography by Penelope Fitzgerald, his niece.
Ronald Knox was a member of the academic staff at St Edmund's College, Ware, Hertfordshire between 1919 and 1926. While a Roman Catholic chaplain at the University of Oxford (1926-1939) and as domestic prelate to the Pope 1936, he wrote classic detective stories. He also wrote and broadcast on Christianity and other subjects.
Monsignor Knox singlehandedly translated the St. Jerome Latin Vulgate Bible into English. His works on religious themes include: Some Loose Stones (1913), Reunion All Round (1914), The Spiritual Aeneid (1918), The Belief of Catholics (1927), Caliban in Grub Street (1930), Heaven and Charing Cross (1935), Let Dons Delight (1939), and Captive Flames (1940).
Monsignor Knox's Roman Catholicism caused his father to cut him out of his will. This did not make much difference, however, as Knox earned a good income from his detective novels.
An essay in Knox's Essays in Satire (1928), "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes", was the first of the genre of mock-serious critical writings on Sherlock Holmes and mock-historical studies in which the existence of Holmes, Watson, et al. is assumed. Oddly, the later works commonly go to much greater lengths to present a coherent case than did their model, which was meant only as a satire on certain trends in literary scholarship.
Knox was led to the Catholic Church by the English writer G.K. Chesterton, before Chesterton himself became Catholic. Later, when Chesterton converted to Catholicism, he in turn was influenced by Knox. Knox delivered the homily for Chesterton's Requiem in Westminster Cathedral.
In 1953 he visited the Oxfords in Zanzibar and the Actons in Rhodesia. It was on this trip that he began his translation of the Imitation of Christ and, upon his return to Mells, his translation of Thérèse de Lisieux's Autobiography of a Soul. He also began a work of apologetics intended to reach a wider than the student audience of his Belief of Catholics (1927). But all his activities were curtailed by his sudden and serious illness early in 1957. At the invitation of his old friend, Harold Macmillan, he stayed at 10 Downing Street while in London to consult a specialist. The doctor confirmed the verdict of incurable cancer. At Ronald's death on August 24, 1957, his body was brought to Westminster Cathedral. Bishop Craven said the requiem at which Father Martin D'Arcy, S.J., preached the panegyric. Burial was in the churchyard of St Andrew's Church, Mells.
Knox seems to have formed a strong attachment to one of his students, Harold Macmillan, later Prime Minister of the UK.
Radio hoax
In 1926, for one of his regular BBC radio programmes, Knox broadcast a pretended live report of revolution sweeping across London. In addition to live reports of persons being lynched, his broadcast cleverly mixed supposed band music from the Savoy Hotel with the hotel's purported destruction by trench mortars. Because the broadcast occurred on a snowy weekend, much of the UK was unable to get the newspaper until days later, and a minor panic ensued. A 2005 BBC report on the broadcast suggests that the innovative style of Knox's programme may have influenced Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, and also foreshadowed it in its consequences. The script of the broadcast is reprinted in Essays in Satire (1928).
Bible Version
Ronald Knox also published a Catholic version of the Bible, known as the Knox Version [link].
Ronald Knox was requested by the Catholic hierarchy of England in 1936 to undertake a new translation of the bible with use of contemporary language of the time and in light of Hebrew and Greek manuscript. When the New Testament came out it 1945 this version was not intended to replace the Rheims Version but to be use alongside with it, as Bernard Griffin, the Archbishop of Westminster said in the preface of the bible.
By the release of the Old Testament in 1950 the popularity of this translation was hampered as the church allowed biblical translations based in the original languages but was still used in the liturgy until the end of the 1960's. It is one of approved bibles used in the lectionary and mass in the United States between the period of 1965 to 1970 along with the Confraternity Bible, Douai Bible, Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition and the Jerusalem Bible.
The style of the translation is in idiomatic English and much freer in renderings of passages than the Douai version.
See Knox's Translation of the Vulgate, Modern English Bible translations.
Autobiography
- A Spiritual Aeneid (1918)
Novels
- The Viaduct Murder (1925)
- The Three Taps (1927)
- The Footsteps at the Lock (1928)
- The Body in the Silo (1933)
- Double Cross Purposes
- Still Dead (1934)
Reference
The life of Ronald Knox was written by the distinguished English author, Evelyn Waugh.
External links
- [Detective Fiction Resource Site] Ronald Knox Bibliography
- [BBC report on Knox's 1926 revolution broadcast]
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