The New Testament: A Translation

by David Bentley Hart

almost all modern translations of the text have been produced not by single scholars with their own particular visions of the texts but by committees. The inevitable consequence of this 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. This becomes, in effect, a process of natural selection, in which novel approaches to the text are generally the first to perish, and only the tried and trusted survive. And this can result in the exclusion not only of extravagantly conjectural readings, but often of the most straightforwardly literal as well.

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 (it would be almost impossible, for instance, to exaggerate how consequential the Latin Vulgate’s inept rendering of a single verse, Romans 5:12, proved for the development of the Western Christian understanding of original sin).

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.

Where difficult words or syntactical uncertainties or grammatical obscurities appear in the Greek, the solutions favored by earlier translators are generally carried over by their successors, even where there may be more plausible or more interesting alternatives.

the language of most of the canon is anything but extraordinary. Paul’s letters possess an elemental power born out of the passion of his faith and the marvel of what he believes has been revealed to him, and his prose occasionally flowers into a plain but startling lyricism; but his Greek is generally rough, sometimes inept, and occasionally incoherent. The Gospel of Mark contains obvious solecisms and is awkwardly written throughout. The prose of the Gospel of Matthew is rarely better than ponderous. Even the Gospel of John, perhaps the most structurally and symbolically sophisticated religious text to have come down to us from late antiquity, is written in a Greek that is grammatically correct but syntactically almost childish (or perhaps I should say, “remarkably limpid”), and—unless its author was some late first-century precursor of Gertrude Stein—its stylistic limitations suggest an author whose command of the language did not exceed mere functional competence.

Then, of course, the book of Revelation, the last New Testament text to be accepted into the canon—it was not firmly established there throughout the Christian world until the early fifth century—is, if judged purely by the normal standards of literary style and good taste, almost unremittingly atrocious. And, in the most refined pagan critics of the new faith in late antiquity, the stylistic coarseness of Christian literature often provoked the purest kind of patrician contempt.

Therein lies the perennial appeal of the venerable early modern theological fantasy that the Apostle Paul inveighed against something called “works-righteousness” in favor of a purely extrinsic “justification” by grace—which, alas, he did not. He rejected only the notion that one might be “shown righteous” by “works” of the Mosaic Law—that is, ritual “observances” like circumcision or keeping kosher—but he also quite clearly insisted, as did Christ, that all will be judged in the end according to their deeds (Romans 2:1–16 and 4:10–12; 1 Corinthians 3:12–15; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Philippians 2:16; and so on).

The Gospels, the epistles, Acts, Revelation—all of them are relentless torrents of exorbitance and extremism: commands to become as perfect as God in his heaven and to live as insouciantly as the lilies

in their field; condemnations of a roving eye as equivalent to adultery and of evil thoughts toward another as equivalent to murder; injunctions to sell all one’s possessions and to give the proceeds to the poor, and demands that one hate one’s parents for the Kingdom’s sake and leave the dead to bury the dead. This extremism is not merely an occasional hyperbolic presence in the texts or an infrequent intonation sounded only in their most urgent moments; it is their entire cultural and spiritual atmosphere.

Without question, there are texts in the New Testament that condemn an idolatrous obsession with wealth, and that might be taken as saying nothing more than that. At least, 1 Timothy 6:17–19 is often cited as an example of this—though (see below) it probably should not be. If one confines oneself to such passages, it is possible to imagine that the earliest church thought it sufficient, in order to avoid trying to serve both God and Mammon, simply to have the right attitude toward riches. But, if this really were all the New Testament had to say on the matter, then one would expect those texts to be balanced out by others affirming the essential benignity of riches honestly procured and well used. And this is precisely what one does not find. Instead, they are balanced out by still more uncompromising comminations of wealth in and of itself.

Christ clearly means what he says when quoting the prophet: He has been anointed by God’s Spirit to preach good tidings to the poor (Luke 4:18). To the prosperous, the tidings he bears are decidedly grim: “But alas for you who are rich, for you have your comfort. Alas for you who are now replete, for you will be hungry. Alas for those now laughing, for you will mourn and lament” (Luke 6:24–25). As Abraham tells Dives in Hades, “You received your good things during your life . . . and now . . . you are in torment” (Luke 16:25).

he explicitly forbids storing up earthly wealth—not merely storing it up too obsessively—and allows instead only the hoarding of the treasures of heaven (Matthew 6:19–20). He tells all who would follow him (as he tells the rich young ruler) to sell all their possessions and give the proceeds away as alms, thereby supplying that same heavenly treasury (Luke 12:33), and explicitly states that “no one of you who does not bid farewell to all his own possessions can be my disciple” (Luke 14:33). It is truly amazing how rarely Christians seem to notice that these counsels are stated, quite decidedly, as commands. Certainly the texts are not in any way unclear on the matter. After all, as Mary says, part of the saving promise of the gospel is that the Lord “has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:53).

What is most important to recognize is that all these pronouncements on wealth and poverty belong to a moral sensibility that saturates the pages of the New Testament. It is there, for instance, in the epistles’ condemnations of πλεονέξια (pleonexia) (often translated as “greed” but really meaning all acquisitive desire),

in the Pastoral Epistles’ condemnation of αἰσχροκερδής (aischrokerdēs) (often translated as “greed for base gain” but really referring to the sordidness...

(James 5:1–6). Now, perhaps we can read this as a dire warning issued only to those wealthy persons who have acted unjustly toward their employees and who live too self-indulgently. But the rest of the letter does not encourage us to do so. Earlier in the epistle, James has already asserted that, while the “poor brother” should exult in how God has lifted him up, the “rich man” (who, it seems, scarcely merits the name of “brother”) should rejoice in being “made low” or “impoverished,” as otherwise he will wither and vanish away like a wildflower scorched by the sun (1:9–11). He has also gone on to remind his readers that God has “chosen the destitute within the cosmos, as rich in faithfulness and as heirs of the Kingdom he has promised to those who love him,” while the rich, by contrast, must be recognized as oppressors and persecutors and blasphemers of Christ’s holy name (2:5–7).

This, in all likelihood, explains why the early Christians were (in the strictly technical sense) communists, as the book of Acts quite explicitly states.

we are told the first converts in Jerusalem after the resurrection, as the price of becoming Christians, sold all their property and possessions and distributed the proceeds to those in need, and then fed themselves by sharing their resources in common meals (Acts 2:43–46). Barnabas, on becoming a Christian, sold his field and handed over

all the money to the Apostles (Acts 4:35)—though Ananias and Sapphira did not follow suit, with somewhat unfortunate consequences. To be a follower of “The Way” was to renounce every claim to private property and to consent to communal ownership of everything (Acts 4:32).

verse 18 goes further and tells them not only to make themselves rich in good works, but also to become—well, here the customary translations are along the lines of “generous” (εὐμεταδότους [evmetadotous]) and “sharing” (κοινωνικούς [koinōnikous]), but the better renderings would be something like “persons readily distributing” their goods, in the former case, and something like “communalists” or “persons having all their possessions in common,” in the latter. (A property that is koinōnikon is something held in common or corporately, and therefore a person who is koinōnikos is certainly not just someone who occasionally makes donations at his own discretion.) Only thus, says verse 19, can the wealthy now “store up” a good foundation for the age that is coming, and reach out to take hold of “the life that is real.” And this would seem to have been the social philosophy of the early church in general. When Christianity arrived in Edessa (to take a very local but very revealing case, more or less at random), its adherents promptly became a kind of mendicant order, apparently owning nothing much at all. In the words of that very early manual of Christian life, The Didache, a Christian must never claim that anything is his own property, but must own all things communally with his brethren (4:9–12).

during the first several centuries of the church, it was widely known that there was a great variety of differing versions of biblical texts, and this seemed to perturb no one very much.

it was many centuries before what we regard as the New Testament canon gained universal acceptance; in many places, books we do not now tend to regard as canonical were treated as sacred scripture, while other books that we assume to be part of Christian scripture were either unknown or rejected as dubious.

the textus receptus; this, in turn, is derived from what is called the Byzantine Text-type, or Majority Text, of the New Testament, the version more or less exclusively reproduced from the ninth century onward in the East, but poorly represented among earlier manuscripts; and it is upon this “received text” that most older traditional translations are based. But not only does this version, to the extent it can be isolated, differ in various places from other, often more ancient and better-attested Greek versions (such as those belonging to the Alexandrian Text-type); even among the various iterations of the “received” version there are numerous differences, some occasionally seriously affecting how a passage is to be understood. And, in many places, it seems more than reasonable to conclude that the Byzantine type incorporates certain conscious alterations of the text, sometimes simply to improve the quality and grammar of its Greek, sometimes more nearly to harmonize the language of its synoptic Gospels, and sometimes discreetly to burnish away an irksome flaw from its surface (such as the accidental ascription to Isaiah of a quotation from Malachi in Mark 1:2, an error found in all earlier forms of the Gospel).

the whole passage looks like a fairly straightforward statement of Trinitarian dogma (or at least two-thirds of it), of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan variety. The average reader would never guess that, in the fourth century, those same verses were employed by all parties in the Trinitarian debates in support of very disparate positions, or that Arians and Eunomians and other opponents of the Nicene settlement interpreted them as evidence against the coequality of God the Father and the divine Son. The truth is that, in Greek, and in the context of late antique Hellenistic metaphysics, the language of the Gospel’s prologue is nowhere near so lucid and unequivocal as the translations make it seem.

the term logos really had, by the time the Gospel was written, acquired a metaphysical significance that “Word” cannot possibly convey;

Many of the early Christian apologists thought of God’s Logos as having been generated just prior to creation, in order to act as God’s artisan of, and archregent in, the created order.

one might even translate καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος as “and [this] god was the Logos.”

this distinction imbues the conclusion of the twentieth chapter with a remarkable theological significance, for it is there that Christ, now risen from the dead, is explicitly addressed as ho theos (by the Apostle Thomas). Even this startling profession, admittedly, left considerable room for argument in the early centuries as to whether the fully divine designation was something conferred upon Christ only after the resurrection, and then perhaps only honorifically, or whether instead it was an eternal truth about Christ that had been made manifest by the resurrection.

standard translations make it impossible for readers who know neither Greek nor the history of late antique metaphysics and theology to understand either what the original text says or what it does not say. Not that there is any perfectly satisfactory way of representing the text’s obscurities in English, since we do not distinguish between articular and inarticular forms in the same way; rather, we have to rely on orthography and typography, using the difference between an uppercase or lowercase g to indicate the distinction between God and [a] god. This, hesitantly, is how I deal with the distinction in my translation of the Gospel’s prologue,

Some other scholars have chosen to render the inarticular form of theos as “a divine being,” but this seems wrong to me on two counts: first, if that were all the evangelist were saying, he could have used the perfectly serviceable Greek word theios; and, second, the text of the Gospel clearly means to assert some kind of continuity of identity between God the Father and his Son the Logos, not merely some sort of association between “God proper” and “a god.”

Late in the fourth century, for instance, Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea, reported that the vast majority of his fellow Christians (at least, in the Greek-speaking East with which he was familiar) assumed that “hell” is not an eternal condition,

Because as Greek speakers they understood the word in discussion did not mean eternal

In the Gospels there are instances where the substantive aiōn and the adjective aiōnios are juxtaposed or associated in a single image or utterance (most directly in Mark 10:30 and Luke 18:30). This obvious parallel in the Greek is invisible in almost every English translation.

New Testament scholars as theologically diverse as Marcus Borg and N. T. Wright have suggested that translators might do well in many or most instances to render aiōnios as “of the age to come”; in fact, in Wright’s own translation of the New Testament he does just this wherever he deems it appropriate (though his resolve inexplicably deserts him at the crucial juncture of Matthew 25:46). I have not quite followed suit. Somewhat more vaguely, perhaps, I have generally rendered aiōnios as “of” or “in” either “that Age” (ekeinos aiōn) or “the Age,” using the unqualified noun alone to suggest a long, if indeterminate, duration, but using the uppercase letter to suggest something of its eschatological or otherworldly resonance. Only in a few cases, where the context warrants, have I used a different rendering.

“Tartarus” (once, in 2 Peter 2:4), a name drawn from pagan Greek lore referring to a place of postmortem imprisonment and punishment, and most especially to the prison of the Titans, but in the New Testament referring not to some sort of final “hell” of perpetual torment, but solely to the subterranean prison where fallen angels and demonic spirits are held until the day of judgment;

while there is as yet little archaeological evidence supporting the claim, the association of the Ge-Hinnom with the sacrifice of infants to evil gods was well established long before the Christian period.

Mark 9:45–48, where he describes the valley in terms of the description in Isaiah 66:24 of human corpses being consumed by inexterminable worms and inextinguishable fires (neither of which, incidentally, is described as either otherworldly or eternal in nature). Then again, these same images also fit well with Jeremiah’s vision of the Ge-Hinnom gorged with corpses—the “valley of slaughter”—as a result of God’s historical punishment of Jerusalem and of those Israelites who had worshipped false gods and sacrificed their babies, using the king of Babylon as the instrument of his wrath; and, indeed, some very formidable New Testament scholars over the years, noting the seemingly more than incidental echoes of Jeremiah in the teachings of Jesus, have concluded that the language of the gehenna in the synoptic Gospels really referred to the historical “wrath” and “judgment” that many could see descending on Israel in Jesus’s own time (culminating in the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple in AD 70),

(Matthew 5:26; cf. Luke 12:59); the unmerciful slave is “delivered . . . to the inquisitors until he should repay everything owing” (Matthew 18:34); some wicked slaves “will be beaten with many blows” and others “beaten with few blows” (Luke 12:47, 48); “everyone will be salted with fire,” the fire in question being explicitly that of the gehenna, and salting being a common image of purification and preservation—for “salt is good” (Mark 9:49–50). It might also explain why the Greek word used for “punishment” in Matthew 25:46 is κόλασις (kolasis)—which typically refers to remedial punishment—rather than τιμωρία (timōria)—which typically refers to retributive justice (it might not, however, since by late antiquity kolasis had perhaps become somewhat less specific in connotation). And, if one regards Paul’s language as a reliable reflection of the teachings of the apostolic church, one might take 1 Corinthians 3:12–15—which distinguishes not between the saved and the “damned,” but only between those who (their works passing the test of fire) merit rewards in the Age to come and those who (their works failing that test) will instead have to be saved “as by fire”—

These are some passages that one should explain if they are to take a universalist, but not purgatorial view

“the Jews,” the original text is usually referring to the indigenous Temple and synagogue authorities of Judaea, or to Judaeans living outside Judaea, or even to “Judaeans” as opposed to “Galileans” (see, for instance, John 7:1). The Gospel definitely reflects the disenchantment of Jewish Christians in Asia Minor with those they saw as having expelled them from the synagogue,

To be clear, in most contexts in the New Testament, logos can be correctly and satisfactorily rendered as “word,” “utterance,” “teaching,” “story,” “message,” “speech,” or “communication.” In the very special case of the prologue to John’s Gospel, however, any such translation is so inadequate as to produce nothing but a cipher without a key.

Over many centuries logos had come to mean “mind,” “reason,” “rational intellect,” “rational order,” “spirit”; as well as “expression,” “manifestation,” “revelation”; as well as “original principle,” “spiritual principle,” and even “divine principle.” Really, the full spectrum of its philosophical connotations could scarcely be contained in a single book.

in his utter transcendence could not interact directly with or appear immediately within the created order; hence it was only through a “secondary god” or “expressed divine principle” that God made the world and revealed himself in it. It was assumed by many Jewish and then Christian thinkers that the theophanies of the Jewish scriptures were visitations of the Logos, God’s self-expression in his divine intermediary or Son, as Philo called him. To an educated reader of the late first or early second century, the Logos of John’s prologue would clearly have been just this divine principle: at once the Most High God’s manifestation of himself in a secondary divine moment, and also the pervasive and underlying rational power creating, sustaining, and governing the cosmos. For all of which reasons, I have chosen not to translate the word at all in the first chapter of John—or in, more controversially, John 5:38, 10:35; or in, yet more controversially, 1 John 1:1, 10; or in, most controversially of all, Revelation 19:13