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Fall 2020 · Vol. 49 No. 2 · pp. 200–202 

Book Review

The New Testament: A Translation

David Bentley Hart. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 577 pages.

Reviewed by Gordon Zerbe

In the end even the most conscientious translations tend, at certain crucial junctures, to use language determined as much by theological and dogmatic tradition as by the ‘plain’ meaning of the words on the page. And in some extreme cases doctrinal or theological or moral ideologies drive translators to distort the text to a discreditable degree. Certain popular translations, like The New International Version and The English Standard Version, are notorious examples of this. These may represent the honest zeal of devout translators to communicate what they imagine to be the ‘correct’ theology of scripture, but the preposterous liberties taken to accomplish this end often verge on a kind of pious fraudulence. (Hart, xv-xvi)

This recent translation by David Bentley Hart (Eastern Orthodox theologian and scholar), despite its own limitations (and unconscious ideological biases), is a must-read for anyone who wants to get a handle on the original sense of the New Testament. It has the virtue of trying to make American English speak koinē Greek, instead of trying to make the Greek of the biblical writers speak [Christian] English (though he doesn’t use that turn of phrase). His own phrasing is that he has produced “an almost piteously literal translation” (xvii). And the prefatory “Introduction” along with the “Concluding Scientific Postscript,” which together explain his approach to his translation, are great bonuses for the price of admission. Appropriately, the latter begins with “An Exemplary Case of the Untranslatable,” on John 1:1-3. In many cases, trying to translate a foreign language (then or now) into English often involves the attempt to translate the untranslatable.

The value of a translation by an individual from a university press is that (despite its potential idiosyncrasy) it can innovatively break out of conservative translation conventions (and the lure of the marketplace; Bible translating is by now big business). Thus, I applaud a translation that highlights linguistic, cultural, and social distance and difference. We are now so accustomed to the New Testament in our own vocabulary (and thus, apparently, “concepts”), that we are rarely aware of the patent foreignness of the New Testament that our translations cover up. Like the sloppy tourist, we think we know what the locals think before we get there, and we don’t have the patience to seek to see things in their own framework, in their vocabulary. Granted, the premise of the translatability {201} of the gospel into any human tongue is a significant Christian conviction, and one that I share; but I often wish that we would assume the massive untrustworthiness of all translations while promoting fluency with the original languages and text among all practitioners (as is the case in the Islamic tradition).

Here are some commonplace Christian words that Hart’s translation avoids: “church, eternal, forever, redemption, justification, repentance, predestination, world, hell,” and even “Christ.” “Judean” appears instead of “Jew”; “foreskins” instead of “uncircumcision” (yes, that’s the actual term Paul uses for non-Judeans/Jews).

Much of this is laudable, and Hart’s translation of Paul’s writings is brilliant, challenging many of the received readings of the Lutheran-Reformed theological traditions while also revealing the text’s elliptical ambiguity in many places. But all sorts of arbitrariness also result. For instance, while he appropriately “translates” christos as “the Anointed [One]” instead of transliterating as “Christ” (following the Latin convention), he follows convention in transliterating apostolos as “apostle” while avoiding the more appropriate translation “envoy-emissary.” And he can’t help but retain a good deal of the occurrences of angelos with the transliteration “angel,” even though the word simply means “messenger-herald.” He continues to follow received translation tradition in rendering psychē as “soul” and pneuma as “S/spirit” even though both words refer to forms of “breath-breathing-wind,” the movement of air (often used metaphorically as an aspect of the “life-force” or “mental faculty” of humans). “Spirit” is technically not a translation; it’s simply the transliteration of the Latin word for “breath-breathing” that became commonplace in Western Christianity. Speakers of Greek were simply more metaphorical in their use of language than the typically more abstract use of words in evolving western European languages.

While Hart makes great progress in avoiding doctrinal-theological bias, he can’t help but show bias in economic premises, for instance by translating the original “those at the table” (trapezistai) as “bankers” (Matt 25:27; cf. Luke 19:23), when the connotation of the word would be much better rendered with something like “moneylenders.” The former term carries an aura of legitimacy, the latter does not. “Banks” in our modern sense simply didn’t exist in that world; but unscrupulous “moneylenders” were everywhere.

There is something lost and misleading in any attempt at translation. But I would push even beyond where Hart goes: the translation of texts or words without an accompanying cultural fluency is also meaningless and misleading. The danger of many courses in biblical Greek and Hebrew is that one is forced to memorize ancient Hebrew and Greek words with {202} a single English word equivalent, giving the illusion that somehow the conceptual and social worlds of ancient and modern easily overlap. After a few decades of work with the dead language we call koinē Greek, I have become even less confident in our ability to translate adequately, which for me is to try to make our English speak some semblance of ancient Greek. The best solution is simply to compare constantly across multiple translations available, and to develop fluency in the cultural, social, conceptual, and political worlds of the New Testament.

Gordon Zerbe
Professor of New Testament
Canadian Mennonite University, Winnipeg, MB

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