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.