A new translation of the New Testament...

So what has he done to the New Testament, this bristling one-man band of a Christian literatus? The surprising aim, Hart tells us in his introduction, was to be as bare-bones and—where appropriate—unsqueamishly prosaic as he can. The New Testament, after all, is not a store of ancient wonders like the Hebrew Bible. It’s a grab bag of reportage, rumor, folk memory, and on-the-hoof mysticism produced by regular people, everyday babblers and clunkers, under the pressure of a supremely irregular event—namely, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So that, says Hart, is what it should sound like. “Again and again,” he insists, “I have elected to produce an almost pitilessly literal translation; many of my departures from received practices are simply my efforts to make the original text as visible as possible through the palimpsest of its translation … Where an author has written bad Greek … I have written bad English.” Herein lies the fascination of this thing: its deliberate, one might say defiant, rawness and lowbrow-ness, as produced by a decidedly overcooked highbrow.

My hunch is that those who will best profit from this work are serious students of the Bible: theologians, seminarians, clergy with a sermon to prepare, and, most of all, New Testament exegetes (for whom the cant phrase “target audience” is, in this instance, only partly metaphorical). My own review copy has been on my desk for less than a month, and I have already consulted it a couple dozen times on questions of interpretation, sometimes concurring, always learning something new.