There is pleasure in turning oneself over to David Bentley Hart: he is brilliant, polemical, vigorous; his prose is aptly described as virtuosic; his insights seem never to end. Even when he is being pedantic, he is interestingly pedantic, as in this footnote in Galatians: βPaulβs syntax here is even more vagrant than usual.β βVagrantβ is the surprisingly perfect word.
Hart succeeds in making the New Testament strange again.
His new translation of the New Testament aims to be, first of all, linguistically provocative. Jesus βChristβ makes no appearance here. Taking his place is a character called βthe Anointed.β The Anointed has come not into the world but into the cosmos. There are no Jews here, and not only in the difficult passages of Johnβs gospel where βthe Jewsβ in traditional translations are the enemies of Jesus (Hart concurs with current scholarship in lamenting that translation); Paul calls himself βa Judaean man . . . trained in the Law.β No one here is βuncircumcisedβ: men are either circumcised or with foreskins. It is not βthe letterβ that killeth; rather, βscripture slays but spirit makes alive.β With self-described mulish stubbornness, Hart pursues an English translation that is βpitilessly literal.β He succeeds in making the New Testament strange again.
We find a breathless quality that races across the authors of the various parts of the New Testament. The gospel writers give us a jumble of tenses present and past that most translators smooth over. (The jumble is