Though I am not a practising Christian, I remain fascinated by religions and how they came to be. In particular, I'm very interested in the history of that diverse collection of documents we call the Bible: how those documents were selected, who wrote them, when they were written, how it was decided to include or exclude them, and what those varied authors had to say.

This new translation of the New Testament by David Bentley Hart is truly interesting, because he has attempted what he calls a 'pitilessly literal' translation from the original Greek (you know that all of the New Testament was originally written in Greek, don't you?). In doing this, he says that he has attempted to provide as thin a layer of translation as possible between the modern reader and the original authors of these documents. He carefully documents his treatment of certain words and phrases and explains why he has chosen to translate them in a particular way.

Lest I give you the wrong impression, Hart is a committed Christian, who believes the writings of the Bible were divinely inspired, but that this "must involve an acknowledgement that God speaks through human beings, in all their historical, cultural and personal contingency."

In many cases, though, Hart's literal translation, insisting on focusing on what the actual words of the original Greek say, rather than on what the layers of theological teachings over the centuries demand that it *should* say, demonstrates that much of the latter interpretation is misplaced. For example, there is nothing in the original Greek which supports the concept of original sin, or that of eternal torment in Hell for sinners. Nor was the Apostle Paul the stiff mysogynist some have made him out to be (indeed my respect for Paul has been increased greatly by reading Hart's translation of Paul's letters—you actually begin to get a sense of him as an actual person). There's one passage in one of Paul's letters, a couple of paragraphs condemning women, which Hart demonstrates convincingly is a later, clumsy insertion into Paul's writing, interrupting a logical argument he is setting out about an entirely different issue.

Certainly those Christians who insist that every word of the New Testament is the literal voice of God, but then want to lean on unlikely readings of the text to make it agree with a particular theological stance they hold, will not like Hart's translation. I, though, found it extremely interesting and refreshing.

Hart's foreword, his footnotes about his translation decisions, and his long 'Concluding Scientific Postcript' are worth the price of the book alone. ( )

The second edition of David Bentley Hart’s critically acclaimed New Testament translation. David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament, first published in 2017, was hailed as a “remarkable feat” and as a “strange, disconcerting, radical version of a strange, disconcerting manifesto of profoundly radical values.” In this second edition, which includes a powerful new preface and more than a thousand changes to the text, Hart’s purpose remains the same: to render the original Greek texts faithfully, free of doctrine and theology, awakening readers to the uncanniness that often lies hidden beneath doctrinal layers.

Through his startling translation, with its raw, unfinished quality, Hart reveals a world conceptually quite unlike our own. “It was a world,” he writes, “in which the heavens above were occupied by celestial spiritual potentates of questionable character, in which angels ruled the nations of the earth as local gods, in which demons prowled the empty places, . . . and in which the entire cosmos was for many an eternal divine order and for many others a darkened prison house.” He challenges readers to imagine it anew: a God who reigned on high, appearing in the form of a slave and dying as a criminal, only then to be raised up and revealed as the Lord of all things."


“In [David Bentley Hart’s] 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. . . . We are delivered a text pulsing with contemporary urgency.Jen" (nifer Kurdyla, America)

Translation is a challenging exercise, especially translating a work, like the New Testament, which has uncommon vocabulary and stylistic conventions. Translators need to make choices that balance many different concerns: comprehensibility to modern readers, fidelity to the voices of the original authors, overall stylistic constraints, translation choice of tricky words, phrases, and passages, etc.

An additional challenge comes when translating a well analyzed text like the New Testament. Translation choices that may have originally been fairly neutral have gained layers of doctrinal meaning that were not always there in the original text. A similar but not quite identical influence on the translated text is that translators may choose to resolve ambiguity by choosing the option that is most consistent with the doctrinal position they hold. In neither of these cases is the translator intentionally biasing the text. However, the overall effect is that the modern reader comes away with an impression that is notably different than those with the language and context of the original hearers and readers of the text.

No translation can ever reproduce what a New Testament text would mean to the original audience. However, in this translation Hart aims to recapture some of the ambiguity of the original text as well as letting the varying voices of the authors show more clearly. To achieve this, he aimed for a literal translation that does not apply stylistic conventions or attempt to modernize sentence structure or text for easier understanding. When translating difficult terms and phrases, he attempts, as much as possible, to try to capture the meaning (or lack of highly specific meaning) that it would have had for the original reader.

I cannot speak to the linguistic quality of this as a translation since I have no knowledge of ancient languages. However, I can say that the translation meets its overall goal of demonstrating how many of the ideas that seem incontrovertible in common translations have much more nuance or ambiguity when different translation choices are made. Does that mean those translations are wrong and this one is right? Not really (Although it's hard to say this one is or isn't right since it mainly makes interpretation more fuzzy rather than pointing to a different interpretation.) Rather, it points to how important it is to understand how complex the problem of translation is (especially for those who choose to make significant life choices based on a text).

Overall, if you are interested in using multiple translations to try to triangulate the meanings in the New Testament texts, I recommend adding this to your list of tools. ( )