As mentioned in the threads above, the KNIME Athena Connector currently works only with the Athena JDBC v2 driver (without the AWS SDK).
If you are using a newer Simba driver or the “with SDK” variant, this will lead to the errors.
Could you check which exact driver JAR you have installed?
If it’s not a v2 without SDK driver, please download and register that version instead, as described in the above threads.
We’re aware of this limitation, and there is an internal ticket to track this: AP-21705.