New Testament

Published as the work of a single scholar rather than a committee, David Bentley Hart's rendering of the New Testament is a fresh translation made from the Greek and based on the Greek New Testament. Its stated aim is to recover the strangeness and ambiguity of the original text, and its philosophy is accordingly very literal-literary and deliberately defamiliarizing: rather than rendering the Greek into the polished cadences long familiar from the English biblical tradition, it preserves rough syntax and unresolved meanings where the source leaves them unresolved. Among its distinctive features is a reluctance to smooth many theological terms into familiar doctrinal vocabulary, so that words shaped by centuries of church usage are presented in less settled forms. It thus belongs to a long line of individual translations that stand alongside the major collaborative versions, and it has been read chiefly as a scholarly and literary companion to more conventional English Bibles.