The New Testament - (translated by) David Bentley Hart

Growing up as a regular church-goer, I don’t recall being unaware that the English bible was translated from a much earlier text. Certainly if you’d asked me from the age of, say, ten and up what language the bible was originally written in, I would have said something in the ballpark of correct. Yet despite this knowledge, it is easy to feel in your bones something fundamentally unchangeable in the verses you grew up hearing, as if they were phrased precisely that way form the moment of their conception. This is particularly true of the King James bible, whose thee-thou pronouns and archaic phrasings ring with an unmistakably biblical air.

But however we feel about them, these are works of translation, and suffer the same limitations as any translated work. Compromise and distortion are, to some level, inevitable. Such is true of the King James bible, in which its authors’ decisions to translate pneuma as “ghost” rather than the much more accurate “breath” have fundamentally colored perceptions of dogma for billions of people, among other items. The Revised Standard Version, though hewing closer to the original text, has its own issues, and more modern translations have relied on a committee structure that flattens style across books and imparts a sameness to the prose that makes for easier reading, but obscures the true magpie origins of the new testament as it was first compiled.

David Bentley Hart sought to address these shortcomings in his own translation of the New Testament, which adopts as its guiding principle to be unswayed by doctrine or tradition and instead depict a “pitilessly literal” interpretation of the original prose. The result is a startling and engaging work, full of linguistic peculiarities and quirks that enrich the historical nature of New Testament. The differences in style (and also in some cases the deliberate cribbing) between the gospels gives a sense of oral histories, and the tortured grammar employed in some epistles and Revelations underscores that these were not erudite scholars, but simple people compelled to share their understanding of the world.

There seems little to say about the book’s contents, well known as they are. The style is, by its very nature, a bit off-putting at times, and there are some passages that simply sound wrong to me even though I don’t dispute their greater accuracy. “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36) will always remain with me, even if the text would be more accurately read as “for what does it profit a man to gain the whole cosmos and to forfeit his soul?“ However, the rawness of Hart’s translation lends the book its own power, and there is at times a poetry that arrives from its very crudeness.

This is an important work of scholarship, and a good version of the New Testament for those who have some familiarity with the text but want to wade through it in its entirety for the first time.

Orthodoxy - G.K. Chesterton

I picked up G.K. Chesterton’s celebrated work of Christian apology Orthodoxy hot off the heels of the incredible The Man Who Was Thursday. Orthodoxy is a much different sort of work, which was no surprise, but it thrums with the same gleeful energy. In its pages, Chesterton offers a primer, not for conversion generally, but for his conversion, explaining the many ways that Christianity came to him as the answers to questions he didn’t even quite realize he was asking. The result is the slightly meandering but always amusing meanderings of a fleet mind.

Chesterton positions Christianity almost as an inevitability of thought. His arguments are often well-reasoned, though some of them feel kind of spurious. I was particularly unconvinced by his reasoning that miracles have been proven because they have been reported, and skepticism of these reports comes from intellectual bigotry, and not, say, a perennially unfulfilled request for slightly more evidence. He compares this to a court ignoring eye-witness testimony because the witness was only a peasant, ignoring the fact that in said trial, there is at least the indisputable fact of a dead body to discuss. The skeptic wants to see not only that the miracle was divine, but that it actually happened in the first place.

Nevertheless, Chesterton is a great thinker, and it’s a pleasure to read his thoughts. I can’t say I was converted, but I was certainly entertained.

Gilead - Marilynne Robinson

Gilead is technically an epistolary novel, though it doesn’t feel like one in the traditional sense. The conceit is that John Ames, a 76 year old reverend in the town of Gilead, Iowa, is recounting his life in a long, fairly digressive letter to his seven year old son. He also recounts the story of his grandfather, a one-eyed firebrand preacher whose vision of Jesus in chains drove him to the abolition movement during the civil war. This figure and his legacy is the focus of much of the early novel, but Ames’ attention eventually drifts to another figure, John Ames Boughton, his best friend’s prodigal son and his own namesake. The result is interesting, since Ames’ letter to his son become the means through which he examines and resolves his complicated feelings towards this divisive figure.

The prose is elegant and believably voiced, containing the frequent digressions into scripture and ruminations on life and faith you’d expect from a man who’d spent most of his life writing sermons. This is a nice effect, as it allows Robinson to draw on rich symbolism in a manner that never feels forced.

The book’s plot is slight, a meandering mix of past and present, which works for the overall subject matter. A larger denouement would likely have felt contrived.

In all, I enjoyed the book and will likely pick up her previous novel at some point in the future.