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David Bentley Hart

The New Testament: A Translation Hardcover – 2 January 2018

by David Bentley Hart (Translator)

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From one of our most celebrated writers on religion, a fresh, bold, and unsettling new translation of the New Testament

“The greatest achievement of Hart’s translation is to restore the urgency of the original. . . . It is beautiful.”—James Mumford, Standpoint

“This translation is a remarkable feat.”—Lucy Beckett, Times Literary Supplement

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?”

Print length

512 pages
Language

English
Publisher

*Yale University Press
Publication date

2 January 2018
Dimensions

23.88 x 16.26 x 4.06 cm
ISBN-10

0300186096
ISBN-13

978-0300186093
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Review

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

About the Author

David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion and a philosopher, writer, and cultural commentator, is a fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. He lives in South Bend, IN.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ *Yale University Press; 1st edition (2 January 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0300186096
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300186093
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 23.88 x 16.26 x 4.06 cm

Customer Reviews:
457 ratings

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David Bentley Hart

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David Bentley Hart is the author of several books, including In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments and The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth.

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Top review from Australia

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You could put JESUS word in a bigger font.

Reviewed in Australia on 17 February 2022

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Dislike: Unnecessary writting at the beginning.
That picture of a horrible cross on the front page insults what JESUS died on.

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Jurusz

Worthy of Tyndale

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 November 2018

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There are not many translations of the NT that are the work of one person; as Hart remarks, such collaborative efforts usually end up as a series of compromises that offend nobody in their bid for homologation (it is worthy of note that the Authorised Version is actually largely the work of that monumental scholar Tyndale, who paid the extreme penalty for his pains!) Hart, like Tyndale, takes his translation very close to the Greek text, and attempts to translate the literal meaning of the Greek words while still preserving an English tone of voice (in that wonderful old tradition of translation of the classics). He doesn't shrink from exposing the textual infelicities of Mark in his rendition by glossing and sweetening, and he refuses to use theologised meanings accepted by tradition. But I wonder to what extent he was able to bring out the very different styles of the Greek texts. Even the best - Luke or the anonymous author of Hebrews - were no great stylists, so perhaps the contrasts in style only really come out in the way the Greek is formed. But essential for a translator, Hart has a keen ear for the cadences of English and his renditions are far from the cloth-eared inadequacies of other attempts which we shall not name. The book is handsomely produced and sits very fittingly next to David Daniell's edition of William Tyndale on my shelf (and interestingly the Tyndale is also a Yale University Press edition). This is a translation I shall treasure.

16 people found this helpful

Tariki

I'll give it foive

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 March 2021

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The translation ends with a long article on how a certain section of the New Testament is in fact "untranslatable" (the prologue to St John's Gospel) Yes, perhaps. We all "translate" for ourselves as we go along, each in our own way - can we then commune with each other, each from our own home (or is it "mansion"?) Yes, I think so.

As far as this translation is concerned, I'm not so sure about "for they imagine that they will be listened to by virtue of their prolixity" from the Sermon on the Mount. Mr Hart, judged on other works, appears to disdain a perfectly appropriate word, well known to those of limited vocabulary, in favour of one that gets me scuttling to the Dictionary. But no matter, I like the man - his writings and what I can make out of his theology.

This translation has a sense of "immediacy" and seeks not to be an abstract representation of some literary fancy embalmed in time. It speaks. Communicates.

I'm more into Buddhology myself having drifted east on my own path. Leaving behind many of the more obscene and ridiculous assertions of the average fundamentalist evangelical. Of course, out east, I've found much of the same so little is gained - except, perhaps, recognition of my own stupidities.

Well, enough waffling. This is a fine translation for those seeking what could be called a "liberal study bible". Mr Hart seems to me quite sane.

Thank you.

2 people found this helpful

B. G. Strand

LITERALLY God's word

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 September 2020

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Bentley Hart's literal translation presents a learned reconstruction to awaken readers to the mystery,uncertainty and surprises of the New Testament world enabling the reader to 'hear' common meanings as our early Greek speaking Christian brothers (and sisters) would have done.Technically a representitve translation rather than explanative ,and all the better for that reason.It reminds me of the JB Phillips version I read during my search before becoming a committed Christian,a modern printed paperback ,without the conventional verse/paragraph pattern or glossary index(thus not a book to use in a formal setting)
Footnotes are simply an attempt to give the reader as much access as possible to the original world in which the text was first written.
For those so inclined there is a 70 page exhaustive postscript

2 people found this helpful

Mrs Brown

Excellent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 April 2018

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This translation has a very different ‘feel’. Extremely interesting to be made aware of the different styles of writing. Makes a refreshing change.

4 people found this helpful

Father P. J. Addison

Another New Translation of NT

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 September 2019

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A precise, challenging translation which helps a good sense of original language and culture

2 people found this helpful

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The New Testament: A Translation Hardcover – 2 January 2018

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