Abstract
This review of David Bentley Hart's New Testament makes use of a methodological lens from the field of translation studies, that is, the translation brief. The translation brief is an agreement between the client and the translator that sets forth the essential rubrics of the project and how it will best serve the client. My review of Hart's New Testament proceeds in a similar way, identifying the translator, the purpose of the translation, the type of translation, and the audience. In addition, I offer an assessment of the effectiveness and affectiveness of his work.
Introduction
David Bentley Hart begins his translation of the New Testament with a statement that must seem obvious to many: “To write yet another translation of the New Testament is probably something of a foolish venture. No matter what one produces … it will provoke consternation” (Hart 2019, xiii). He then proceeds to explain in his introduction, “The Purpose of This Translation,” why and how he has chosen to do exactly that.
This review of Hart's New Testament will make use of a methodological lens from the field of translation studies, that is, the translation brief. Building on the work of skopos theorists Reiss and Vermeer (1984) and the terminology of Fraser (1996), translation scholar Christiane Nord has proposed and used this term to refer to a document that describes how the translation assignment is to be carried out, defining who translates what for whom and why. The translation brief, as discussed by Nord, is an agreement between the client and the translator that sets forth the essential rubrics of the project and how it will best serve the client. 1 My review of Hart's New Testament will proceed in a similar way, identifying the translator, the purpose of the translation, the type of translation, and the audience. In addition, I want to offer an assessment of the effectiveness and affectiveness of his work. 2
The translation team
In the case of Hart's new translation, there is no team; there is one translator: Hart himself. He does tell us, however, that the idea of undertaking the project was not entirely his: “The idea of undertaking a complete translation of my own would probably not have occurred to me without the prompting of an indispensable editor at Yale University Press” (xv). In the terms of the brief, then, Hart's New Testament, we can surmise, is in response to an expressed academic need from the academic press.
Throughout the long history of Bible translation, a one-translator project is far more uncommon than one done by a team. Hart, however, defends this translation effort as a one-man enterprise, because, in his words, the “inevitable consequence” of a translation produced by committees or teams is that “many of the most important decisions are negotiated accommodations, achieved by general agreement, and favoring only those solutions that prove the least offensive to everyone involved” (xiv). As a single translator, as Hart wrote, one does not have to deal with “the anodyne blandness and imprecision of ‘diplomatic’ accord” (xv).
Hart, as a scholar of religion and patristics, a philosopher, a cultural commentator, feels well equipped to have taken on this task. In fact, he introduces his version of the New Testament by remarking that he often found himself “retranslating” passages of the New Testament for students in the lecture hall because whatever translation he had on hand was simply inadequate. Hart criticizes existing translations for obscuring (sometimes intentionally) aspects that in his view are important for a good understanding of the text. He blames this on the linguistic, theological, or translational biases of the translators.
Goal: Skopos
Such a remark and positioning of his own credentials shifts this review into the second part of the translation brief: the purpose and goal of his translation.
Hart does not mince his words when providing readers a description of his purpose and aim. In the introduction, his frustration with existing translations is obvious: They have failed to provide readers with a worthy translation of the New Testament. He himself must now do just that. Here is one description of his purpose: The project would not have appealed to me at all … if it had been only a matter of repeating the efforts of past translators in a slightly different combination of words. But the prospect of writing a version that would be by my lights as scrupulously faithful as I could make it, that would not merely reiterate conventional readings of the text, and that would allow me to call attention to features of the Greek original usually invisible in English versions proved irresistible. After all, most modern readers are separated from the New Testament not only by those obvious differences in language, culture, and intellectual formation … but also … by the doctrinal expectations that have shaped the decisions of translators for centuries. (xv)
In these sentences, Hart has left us with enough of his purpose to complete the skopos section of the translation brief. That section might be written up in the following way, for example:
Hart will not repeat the efforts of past translators by simply utilizing a slightly different combination of words. (This is certainly a worthy goal, and one I will return to later.) He will produce a translation that is as scrupulously faithful as he can make it. The translation will not, further, merely reiterate conventional readings of the text. Hart will call attention to features of the Greek original usually invisible in English versions.
Being able to undertake a new translation of the New Testament with these goals in mind “proved irresistible” to Hart.
He makes it clear that he is not bound by any prevailing theory of translation or any overriding theological position. This allows him not to succumb to “negotiated accommodations” in deciding how to translate the text, so that he does not need to favor “only those solutions that prove the least offensive to everyone involved” in such committees (xiv). What Hart claims to do is to give the reader a translation that is not biased in any linguistic or theological way. His translation will bring us as close as we can get to the original. But the question is whether this claim is realistic, and whether in the end he is not giving us just another “biased” translation—only this time a translation according to the insights of David Bentley Hart.
He is careful to remind us, however, that even though he “can pretend to be free of intellectual prejudices,” he can only assure us that he has “made every effort not to allow them to interpose themselves between” the text and him, even when the result has “displeased” him (xvi). He admits, as we will likely agree, that “in the end it may not be entirely possible to write a translation of scripture not shaped by later theological and doctrinal history. Even so, this is what I have attempted” (xvi).
His work is less revisionist and more “reconstructive,” he states (xvi). This is his principal aim: “to help awaken readers to mysteries and uncertainties and surprises in the NT documents that often lie wholly hidden from view beneath layers of received hermeneutical and theological tradition” (xvi–xvii). He aims to make “the familiar strange, novel, and perhaps newly compelling” (xvii).
Hart warns us in his introduction that readers will be somewhat taken aback by the absence of many terms we are accustomed to finding in the New Testament; for example, “eternal,” “forever,” “redemption,” “justification,” “repentance,” “predestination,” “world,” “hell” (xvii). Other “very different terms” will be used in their places. Though his translation is not the first to avoid traditional jargon, his goal is certainly worthy of any Bible translation project, that is, wanting to release it from the usual confines of traditional language. Examples from Hart's New Testament will attest to his success in achieving this goal or not.
Type of translation
Hart himself describes his translation as “not a literary translation … much less a rendering for liturgical use. If it conforms … to any current school of translation theory, it is certainly that of ‘formal,’ rather than ‘dynamic,’ equivalence” (xvii). His use of the continuum of “formal versus dynamic” as a “current school of translation theory” is certainly shortsighted and reflects limited, if not simply popular, categories of translation theory.
From the field of translation studies, Hart's description of his translation as “formal” can be nuanced by two translation scholars: Lawrence Venuti and Christiane Nord. Using Venuti's description, Hart's New Testament can be described as a “foreignizing” text, one that places “enthnodeviant pressure on the cultural value [in order] to register the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad” (Venuti 2008, 20). 3 Hart's intention to make “the familiar strange, novel, and perhaps newly compelling” clearly fits this category.
Further, Nord's typology of translation type and function suggests that Hart's New Testament can be categorized as “documentary,” that is, a translation that “serves as a document of a source culture communication between the author and the source text” recipient (Nord 2005), and, more precisely, is “exoticizing,” the purpose of which is to reproduce the form, content, and situation of the source text with little attention to its acceptability and accessibility to the audience.
A few more examples of Hart's descriptions of his translation will suffice: I have elected to produce an almost pitilessly literal translation … to make the original text as visible as possible. Where the Greek of the original is maladroit, broken, or impenetrable (as it is with some consistency in Paul's letters), so is the English of my translation; where an author has written bad Greek (such as one finds throughout the book of Revelation), I have written bad English. (xvii–xviii)
For example, Hart retains sudden shifts of tense in the original Greek, as in his use of the “historical present.” I would agree with him that “the effect [is] somewhat enchanting … as if a person standing among friends is relating a story” (xix), almost breathlessly bouncing back and forth between present and past. But it can also easily be disruptive.
Further, he translates many words from the Greek with what he calls their “literal” meaning in English: Christos is “Anointed,” rather than “Christ” or “Messiah”; diabolos is not the anglicized Persian word “devil,” but “Slanderer”; ekklesia is “assembly” rather than “church.” Though admirable, these are not entirely new, certainly not strange or novel, as Hart warns in his introduction.
Hart does provide his readers with thorough footnotes, elucidating the correct understanding of the Greek text and defending decisively his renderings. These footnotes are, in my opinion, the most valuable takeaways of this translation. They range from textual to exegetical, citing other Greek authors and offering alternative renderings.
In addition to his footnotes, Hart also includes a “Concluding Scientific Postscript,” which is a glossary in which he offers his own renderings of nineteen terms “for the curious” (537), with ample evidence from the New Testament and early church fathers. This glossary includes such complex words as aionios, gehenna, logos, erga, anthropos, kosmos, metanoia, pneuma, and makarios. In most of his cases, after several paragraphs or even pages, he concludes with something like, “there is no single English word that captures the essence of the Greek word.” Contexts determine his renderings, and he provides those contextual details in appropriate footnotes.
Hart aims to represent as closely as possible the registry and style of each book, trying to get his English to reflect the “fairly distinguished and erudite style” of the Letter to the Hebrews; the “urbane, unspectacular, but mostly graceful” prose of Acts; the “refined form of Greek” we have in the first letter attributed to Peter; the “generally rough, sometimes inept, and occasionally incoherent” Greek of Paul's letters; the “ponderous” Gospel of Matthew; the “grammatically correct but syntactically almost childish” Greek of the Gospel of John; and the “awkwardly written” Gospel of Mark.
Hart defends his style passionately: These NT texts are not merely exercises in rhetoric or examples of literary virtuosity. Rather, he writes, “They are chiefly the devout and urgent attempts of often rather ordinary persons to communicate something ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ that transcends any language, but that demands to be spoken in whatever words one can marshal” (xxii).
In contrast to the “Jewish Bible,” which, Hart argues, “represents the concentrated literary genius of an ancient and amazingly rich culture,” the New Testament is a “somewhat unsystematically compiled and pragmatically edited compendium of ‘important documentation’ … [that] draws one in by the intensity, purity, and perhaps frequent naïveté of its language” (xxii).
Two final comments about Hart's style, both of which concern his choice of formatting, a consideration of the publication of any Bible translation: First, he begins every verse with a capital letter. I did not find any justification for this typographical practice, but I must say I found it disruptive and even confusing. Often when reading, I read through the punctuation that ended one verse (whether a comma or semi-colon or period) and assumed I was beginning a new sentence with the next verse. That means, many times I had to back up to read it again. This did not have a very positive effect on my reading. Second, and more positively, Hart does not include any section headings or mark a subsequent chapter except with a simple “
Goal: Audience
Hart does not give us much detail about the type of audiences he has in mind, but more about the effect he wants to have on whomever chooses to pick up his translation and read it. He wants to free readers from all the errors of past English translations, “all the standard English translations” that render “impenetrable” many of the concepts and presuppositions upon which the books of the New Testament are built. These translations, he says, “effectively hide … things of absolutely vital significance for understanding how the texts’ authors thought” (xiv). His translation, in contrast to those, intends to create an access into the very thoughts of the biblical authors, into the “black box” of the authors’ minds.
So, concerning his audience in our translation brief, it may be best to mark the audience of Hart's translation as any reader who wants to engage with a reconstruction of the first-century biblical world, through the eyes of multiple “authors,” and who wants to be startled and challenged with readings otherwise hidden. Examples from Hart's translation will determine whether he has provided such an entry.
His concern for the audience goes beyond this intellectual goal. He states quite clearly that he equally intends to awaken a more realistic and vital, even life-changing, response to the NT books and the earliest Christians. It is as if he wants us as modern readers of these ancient texts to breathe in their radical nature, the unsettling and earth-shattering words of Jesus, the urgency of the earliest writers, calling hearers and readers to act quickly and decisively because time is of the utmost essence, to live as the NT language requires, as “strangers and sojourners on the earth, to belong to a Kingdom truly not of this world” (xxxii). How can any one of us argue with his aim?
Translation issues: Examples from Hart's New Testament
To test the effective and affective qualities, select examples from Hart's translation will be reviewed. I readily admit that these examples are my choice, taken rather randomly from various places in the canon and removed from any fuller literary context. In all fairness, the entirety of Hart's translation should be read and reread, but hopefully these few examples will suffice.
My first example is described by Hart himself in this way: “There may perhaps be no passage in the New Testament more resistant to simple translation into another tongue than the first eighteen verses—the prologue—of the Gospel of John” (533). In his postscript, he waxes eloquent about the elegance of these verses, filled with ambiguities that are invisible anywhere except in the original Greek. He then says, I am aware of no respectable English translation in which these verses do not appear in more or less the same form they are given in the King James Version: “1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2The same was in the beginning with God. 3All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” (533–34)
So I turned to his translation of John's prologue, expecting to find something strikingly novel, especially after reading through his five pages of building anticipation. There I read: “1In the origin there was the Logos, and the Logos was present with
Perhaps the novelty lies not in his word choices but in his use of capitalization of the names for God. Hart has decided to use “
My second example is what Hart calls a sort of “acid test”: Judas (Jude) 1.19, a verse, in his words, whose meaning “is startlingly clear in the Greek but which no collaborative translation I know of translates in any but the vaguest and most periphrastic manner” (xiv). Here is that verse in its immediate context in Hart's New Testament: 17But, beloved ones, recall the words previously spoken by the Apostles of our Lord Jesus the Anointed, 18For they told you, “In the last time there will be scoffers, following after their own desires for impious things.” 19These are those who cause divisions, psychical men, not possessing spirit.
In a footnote, he then draws the distinction between psyche and pneuma (“soul” and “spirit”) that has suffered from the verse's “long history of often vague and misleading translations” (495). He chose the rather curious “psychical men” for psychikoi. Further, he does not capitalize “spirit” (as is often the case in English translations) but simply describes the men as not having any spirit. Again, a reader must read the footnote to take advantage of the nuance in his translation.
For the sake of contrast, here are some of the translations that Hart describes as “vague and misleading”: “worldly people, devoid of the Spirit” (NRSV, RSV, ESV); “who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit” (NIV and similar in GNB); and “They think only about this life, and they don't have God's Spirit” (CEV). Is Hart's rendering all that novel?
My third and final example is also one verse, primarily because Hart isolates it in his introduction as a glaring example of how “the relation between Christian theology and scriptural translation has a long and complicated history; theology has not only influenced translation, but particular translations have had enormous consequences for the development of theology” (xv). The Latin Vulgate's “inept rendering of a single verse, Romans 5.12, [led to] the development of the Western Christian understanding of original sin” (xv). I was curious, therefore, to jump to this verse to see how, finally, I the reader can plunge through the layers of misguided Christian interpretational history and read what the author of this verse had in mind. I found these words: “Therefore, just as sin entered into the cosmos through one man, and death through sin, so also death pervaded all humanity, whereupon all sinned.”
Hart rightly states that the words ἐφ᾽ ᾧ, from the phrase ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον at the end of Rom 5.12, have been misinterpreted throughout the history of the Western church. Augustine took the Latin translation of these words (in quo) as a reference to Adam (“through whom all sinned”), with the result that the sin of Adam affected all people who descended from him. Hart explains that his own rendering corrects “one of the most consequential mistranslations in Christian history” in a footnote that runs two half-pages. But, in fact, Hart is far from alone in correcting this reading, as we can see from the many modern versions that do not have the traditional misinterpretation of ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον. 4 I do not intend to work through his exegesis of the Greek text. My point is to show again that in the running text, Hart's translation does not jump off the page as being all that novel; one must go down to the footnote to engage his thinking on the matter. Again, this teaching moment works well for the private reading. It does not work for any public reading.
Hart intends to reproduce the style of the authors in the New Testament: good English for good Greek; bad English for bad Greek. One of his examples of bad Greek is the “awkwardly written” style of Mark (xxi). So, in order to assess whether he has reproduced that awkward style in his own translation, here are three brief sections from that Gospel.
Mark 4.35-41 35And on that day, when evening had come, he says to them, “Let us cross over to the far shore.” 36And dismissing the crowd they take him, as he was in the boat, and other boats were with him. 37And a great windstorm arose, and the waves broke into the boat, so that now the boat was filling. 38And he was sleeping on the pillow in the stern. And they rouse him and say to him, “Teacher, does it not matter to you that we are perishing?” 39And, being woken, he rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Be silent, quell yourself!” And the wind fell and a great calm came about. 40And he said to them, “Why are you so afraid? How is it you do not have faith?” 41And they were afraid, enormously afraid, and said to one another, “Who then is this man, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
Mark 7.1-5 1And the Pharisees and some of the scribes coming out from Jerusalem gather about him. 2And seeing that some of his disciples eat loaves of bread with impure (that is, unwashed) hands—3For the Pharisees and the Judaeans as a whole do not eat unless they wash their hands all the way up the length of the forearm, upholding the tradition of the elders, 4And coming from the marketplace they do not eat unless they make their ablutions; and there is much else to uphold that they have inherited: washing goblets, both carven and copper, [and couches] …—5And the Pharisees and the scribes inquired of him, “Why do your disciples not walk in accord with the tradition of the elders, but instead eat bread with impure hands?”
Mark 12.28-34 28And one of the scribes, approaching, hearing them debating and perceiving that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is first among all?” 29Jesus answered: “The first is: ‘Hear, Israel, the Lord our God is One Lord, 30And you shall love the Lord your God out of your whole heart and out of your whole soul and out of your whole reason and out of your whole strength.’ 31The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is not another commandment greater than these.” 32And the scribe said to him, “Well said, teacher, you speak the truth in saying that there is One and there is no other beside him; 33And to love him out of the whole heart and out of the whole understanding and out of the whole of one's strength, and to love the neighbor as oneself, is more than all holocausts and sacrifices.” 34And Jesus, seeing that he answered wisely, said to him, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.” And no one dared interrogate him anymore.
In his introduction, when discussing the variety of styles one encounters in the Greek text, Hart states that “the author of the first letter attributed to Peter was clearly an educated person whose primary language was a fairly refined form of Greek, while the author of the second letter wrote in a somewhat bombastic style” (xxi). Again, a primary concern of Hart's skopos is to reflect such variety in his own English translations. So, to assess Hart's own variety, here are two sections from these letters, one from the first and another from the second. I admit that when reading Hart's translation of these letters, I did sense a drastic difference in style and readability.
1 Peter 4.12-19 12Beloved ones, do not be surprised at the cauterizing fire among you—which comes to you as a trial—as though it were something strange that is happening to you; 13Rather, rejoice, inasmuch as you have had communion with the sufferings of the Anointed, so that you may also rejoice exultantly at the revelation of his glory. 14If you are reviled in the name of the Anointed, how blissful you, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. 15For let none of you suffer for being a murderer or a thief or an evildoer, or for being a meddler in the affairs of others—16Yet, if for being a “Christian,” let one not be ashamed, but instead glorify God by this name. 17For it is the time for judgment to commence with the house of God; and, if it starts with us, what will the end be for those who are recalcitrant to God's good tidings? 18For, “If the upright man is just barely saved, where will the impious and sinful man show up?” 19So then indeed, let those suffering according to God's will commit their souls to a faithful creator by doing what is good.
2 Peter 2.4-11 4And if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but rather cast them into Tartarus in bonds of nether darkness, held there for judgment, 5And did not spare the ancient cosmos, but preserved the eighth person, Noah, a herald of justice, having brought a flood upon the cosmos of the impious, 6And by burning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes condemned them to ruin, having provided an illustration for those about to commit impiety, 7And having rescued Lot, a righteous man oppressed by the lascivious conduct of the lawless—8For that righteous man, dwelling with them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by observing and hearing of their lawless deeds—9The Lord knows how to rescue the pious from trials and to keep the unrighteous guarded in confinement for a day of judgment, 10And especially those who follow after flesh in a desire for scandalous pollution, and who hold lordship in contempt—bold, self-willed, they do not tremble when they defame the Glories, 11Whereas angels, who are greater in strength and power, do not bring a defamatory condemnation against them before the Lord.
Concluding comments
From my own reading of Hart's New Testament, I found very little that I would label startlingly fresh or new, certainly not novel or unsettling. To what extent Hart had convinced himself that his was the English translation that corrects centuries of misunderstanding and opens the text honestly and without compromise to readers, it simply did not have the same effect on me.
There were renderings that I did find awkward but perhaps only on the level of acceptable and accessible English. For example, in Revelation, Hart uses several rather uncommon words: for example, “chaplet” (3.11; 4.4, 10; 6.2; 14.14); “thurible” (8.3, 5); “cuirass” (9.9, 17).
I enjoyed and benefited from reading many of Hart's footnotes, cracking open his translation to more scrutiny and analysis. Further, his “Concluding Scientific Postscript” contains useful, if not cogent, details about some of the Greek words with noticeable “semantic weight” that we must reckon with in our work. To take full advantage of Hart's new New Testament, and to appreciate its “foreignness,” I would urge readers to wrestle respectfully with his footnotes and postscript. Together, these are, in my reading, the real value of this work. 5