James Kleist

Who was James Kleist?

James Aloysius Kleist, S.J. was a German-born American Jesuit scholar of Koine Greek and patristic literature.

Kleist was born in the one of the villages which were later merged to form the town of Zabrze in the Kingdom of Prussia. He attended school in Gleiwitz, then Beuthen, and in 1892 entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus at Blyenbeck, after which he was sent to the United States. For a year he taught at St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland, Ohio. Then, for four years, he lectured to the young Jesuits of the Buffalo Mission of the German Province. Missouri. In 1902 Kleist came to Saint Louis, where he worked on revising Kaegi's 1884 Greek primer.

Kleist joined with Joseph Lilly, C.M., to produce a more modern English translation of the Bible than the Douai Bible then in common usage among Catholics. Under their editorship the work was laid to produce to the Kleist-Lilly translation, published posthumously in 1956. It never gained widespread acceptance, though, and was later totally supplanted by the translations produced by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, which culminated in the publication of the New American Bible in 1970.