I rarely pay much attention to new translations of the New Testament, since I normally read it in Greek. However, after reading a recent article by David Bentley Hart, I decided I needed to get his translation. I love it! He has an outstanding introduction and an exceedingly useful series of appendices (which he calls the Concluding Scientific Postscript). No one should read his translation without first reading the introduction and, preferably, the appendices as well. The appendices are a bit dense, so if you are not familiar with such material, you may just want to skim it to be generally aware of its content. You can read specific sections as their content is relevant to a verse or passage in the translation. You absolutely must read "A Note on the Prologue of John's Gospel" (pp. 533-37) before beginning the Gospel of John.
The style of this translation is both literal and literary. It is literal in the sense that it sticks very close to the Greek text, to the point of translating what are commonly called “historic present tense” verbs using the English present tense, even though the action is in the past. Hart does not smooth over the vague grammar and incomplete sentences that are not unusual in the writings of Paul, the book of Revelation and occasionally elsewhere in the NT. Hart's footnotes sometimes point out these features.
The translation is literary in the sense that it uses language that sometimes feels archaic, including a number of very high-register words that most readers, even educated ones, will have to look up. One example is “tilth” in 1 Corinthians 3:9, which means 'cultivated land'. A peculiar feature of the translation is not specifically literary but more idiosyncratic, in my view. This is Hart's tendency to make heavy use of the English possessive suffix ('s) on inanimate nouns, where a construction with "of" is much more usual. For example, in Revelation 21:6, we read of "the fountain of life's water" rather than "the fountain of the water of life."
Hart has included quite a few footnotes in this translation, though the number is not overwhelming. They do not appear on every page. Some, though, are quite long. The longer footnotes discuss information that would have been well known to the original writer and his audience, but which is unknown to most modern people. These notes have to do with people's understanding of the spiritual world in which they lived, historic events behind certain statements, and comments in the writings of the early Church Fathers.
I highly recommend this translation to anyone who wants to have a better understanding of what the New Testament says, whether you are a scholar of Greek or you don't know a word of the language. David Bentley Hart reflects the meaning of the Greek text as closely as is possible in a translation, and does not follow the time-worn ruts of convention that have come to obscure the real sense of the text, which is often quite jarring to modern sensibilities, accustomed as they are to two millennia of interpretation and reading certain conventional meanings into the text. Hart's English renderings will open your eyes and make you think.
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This is a treasure....
I have only read a few parts of this Testament so far but I like what I read and the ease of understanding. Gave it 4 stars just because I haven't read it through.
