From one of our most celebrated writers on religion comes this fresh, bold, and unsettling new translation of the New Testament
David Bentley Hart undertook this new translation of the New Testament in the spirit of “etsi doctrina non daretur,” “as if doctrine is not given.” Reproducing the texts’ often fragmentary formulations without augmentation or correction, he has produced a pitilessly literal translation, one that captures the texts’ impenetrability and unfinished quality while awakening readers to an uncanniness that often lies hidden beneath doctrinal layers.
The early Christians’ sometimes raw, astonished, and halting prose challenges the idea that the New Testament affirms the kind of people we are. Hart reminds us that they were a company of extremists, radical in their rejection of the values and priorities of society not only at its most degenerate, but often at its most reasonable and decent. “To live as the New Testament language requires,” he writes, “Christians would have to become strangers and sojourners on the earth, to have here no enduring city, to belong to a Kingdom truly not of this world. And we surely cannot do that, can we?”
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Review
“This necessary, brilliantly presented translation reads like taking a biblical studies class with a provocative professor.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The book sets out to be pro¬vocative and succeeds. . . . [Hart] conveys exceptionally well the urgency of the New Testament. The message itself is of supreme and burning importance, and the authors were in a hurry to get it out, and Hart lets us feel this ‘from the inside.’”—Paul Mankowski, First Things
“Hart’s translation is neither reductionist nor revisionist. In his hands, the words of Jesus and his followers produce not shivers of mere approximation, but rather shivers of awe at the clarity, poignancy, and simplicity of this complex treatise. Hart maintains a splendid rhythm and frankness throughout . . . We are delivered a text pulsing with contemporary urgency—as prompts for action, rather than mere obligation or dogma.”—Jennifer Kurdyla, America
“Readers will experience here a fresh and at times startling reacquaintance with the New Testament text . . . Equally valuable is Hart’s long and eloquent introduction.”—Donald Senior, CP, Bible Today
“In its simplicity and freshness David Hart’s New Testament translation will sound as strange and wondrous to twenty-first-century, English-language speakers as the Greek of the New Testament sounded to first-century speakers of Greek.”—Robert Louis Wilken, author of The First Thousand Years
“This scrupulous, knotty, learned rendering of some of the most familiar texts of our culture makes us see with new clarity just what was and is uncomfortably new about the New Testament.”—Rowan Williams, theologian and poet, Cambridge
“In this age of committee-generated translations of the Bible, a fresh and pointedly different translation of the New Testament by a single scholar is a remarkable achievement. Hart's approach is intentionally provocative, and strong reactions are sure to follow. Let the games begin.”—John P. Meier, author of A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus
"David Hart's translation of the New Testament is a theological and ecclesial event of the first magnitude. By providing, for the first time, a literal English translation of the Greek (and demonstrating that the most literal can be the most strikingly beautiful rendering) Hart has shown, after 500 years, that the core of Reformation theology is un-Biblical and that certain currents of Latin theology are dubious or inadequate. This new version, which should become the standard one for scholarly use, also makes it clearer that, while doctrinal liberalism is wishful thinking, credal Christianity only emerged from a plausible but subtle reading of sometimes teasingly ambivalent texts. Hart's brilliant postscript amounts to a call for a more genuinely Biblical orthodoxy: universalist, synergic, participatory, cosmic, gnostic (in a non-heterodox sense) and communitarian."—John Milbank, University of Nottingham
“Hart notes that the heart of this good news . . . focuses much more on the salvation of all than on the condemnation of some. . . . Nothing like reading the New Testament again, without a filter. Thank you, David Bentley Hart!”—Frederico Lourenço
About the Author
David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion, and a philosopher, writer, and cultural commentator. He is a fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study and has held positions at the University of Virginia, Duke University, and Providence College. He lives in South Bend, IN.
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