The Old Testament in English

In 1936, Ronald Knox was requested by the Catholic hierarchies of England and Wales to undertake a new translation of the Vulgate with use of contemporary language and in light of Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. When the New Testament was published in 1945, it was not intended to replace the Rheims version but to be used alongside it, as Bernard Griffin, the Archbishop of Westminster, noted in the preface. With the release of Knox's version of the Old Testament in 1950, the popularity of translations based on the Vulgate waned as Church authorities promoted the use of Bibles based primarily on Hebrew and Greek texts following the 1943 encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu. The Knox Bible was, however, one of the approved vernacular versions of the Bible used in the Lectionary readings for Mass from 1965 to the early 1970s, along with the Confraternity Bible.