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.
“Fresh translations of familiar texts are useful because they make
us reexamine what we thought we knew. Hart has certainly made me
think more deeply about the centrality of the world’s end to the
entirety of the New Testament. . . . Hart tells us that he wanted
to make this book wild, repellent, ‘just a bit indecent,’ and not
what we expected. He succeeds.”—Garry Wills, New York Review of
Books
“The life of Jesus in the New Testament reaches us via four voices,
four accounts that overlap, diverge, corroborate, and destabilize
one another. . . . By putting us closer to these differences, to
the distinctive sound of each voice. . . . Hart is doing something
important.”—James Parker, Atlantic
“Hart is brilliant. . . . All theologians, and anyone interested in
the New Testament as at least a quasi-classical document, will be
in his debt. . . . Hart’s translation has the great virtue of
reminding us that this text is not safe: if we think it is
familiar, we are in error.”—Victor Lee Austin, New Criterion
“This translation is a remarkable feat. Anyone, however familiar
with the texts, reading it straight through is bound to have gained
a clean, complex and compelling impression of the springtime of the
Church, and the energy, urgency and sense of wonder with which the
evangelists, Paul and the author of the letter to the Hebrews wrote
of the extraordinary person and events, and the meaning of both,
that were their news for the world.”—Lucy Beckett, Times Literary
Supplement
“It will be a long time before I put [Hart’s translation] back on
my shelf. It in particular points up the many deficiencies of the
NIV and the ESV.”—A. N. Wilson, New Statesman
“The greatest achievement of Hart’s translation is to restore the
urgency of the original. . . . Compelling, and it is
beautiful.”—James Mumford, Standpoint
“Hart sets out to unsettle, startle and disturb. In this strange,
disconcerting, radical version of a strange, disconcerting
manifesto of profoundly radical values, his aim is scintillatingly
and sometimes unnervingly achieved.”—Salley Vickers, Literary
Review
“[Hart] has risen to the challenge with a bold determination.”—Dr.
John Court, Church Times
“Disarmingly beautiful in its own way. . . . [Hart] does nothing
less than focus our attention on the urgency of what the Greek text
is telling us, and by doing so focuses our attention on—as Rowan
Williams puts it on the dust-jacket—‘what was and is uncomfortably
new about the New Testament’.”—Stephen Miller, Theology
Winner of the Outstanding Academic Title for 2018 award sponsored
by Choice
“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
“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
“Hart notes that the heart of this good news . . . focuses much
more on the salvation of all than on the condemnation of some. . .
. Nothing like reading the New Testament again, without a filter.
Thank you, David Bentley Hart!”—Frederico Lourenço, classicist,
winner of the Pessoa Prize
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