Ronald Knox

Ronald Arbuthnott Knox ( born February 17, 1888 in Kibworth Beauchamp ( Leicester); † August 24, 1957 in Mells ( Somerset ) ) was a British theologian, priest, satirist, and mystery writer.

Life and work

The son of Anglican clergyman Edmund Arbuthnott Knox (later Bishop of Manchester ) discovered during his student days at Oxford passion for crime fiction and introduced by a 1911 Gryphon Club held satirical speech called " Sherlockian Reading" on the way. Knox applied the methods of historical-critical exegesis of the Bible to the " canon" of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and thus began a reading practice that seeks to today for the solution of contradictions between the individual stories and their proper chronology. The speech was published in 1928 in his Essays in Satire under the title Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.

In addition, he wrote his first detective novels such as The Viaduct Murder, 1925 (Eng. The murder of the viaduct ), The Three taps. A detective story without a moral, 1927 (Eng. The three gas taps ) and The Footsteps at the Lock, 1928 (Eng. footprints at the lock ).

In 1929 he tried his hand as a member of the Detection Club with his Ten Rules for fair detective novel (Father Knox's Decalogue ) establish rules for the detective novel, published in the preface to the book he edited Best Detective Stories of 1928-1929. These rules, however, were not felt by all members of the club as a serious, sometimes they were also believed to be a joke.

The most important achievements of the 1917 converted to the Roman Catholic Church, " Father Knox " are in the field of theology. In 1939 he left Oxford and moved back into the more remote Shropshire, to pursue a new translation of the Bible based on the Vulgate ( by drawing on the Hebrew and Greek original text ). His New Testament was published in 1945, the Old Testament in 1949. Due to its translation work Knox finally wrote three volumes of commentary on the Gospels, the Epistles of the Apostle Paul of Tarsus, Acts of the Apostles and the Apocalypse ( 1953-1956 ).

Knox is considered the most influential Catholic apologist of his generation in the UK.