The New Testament Quotes

“34And summoning the crowd along with his disciples he said to them, “If anyone wishes to come along behind me, let him deny himself utterly and take up his cross and follow me. 35For whoever wishes to save his soul will lose it; but whoever will lose his soul for the sake of me and of the good tidings will save it. 36For what does it profit a man to gain the whole cosmos and to forfeit his soul? 37For what might a man give in exchange for his soul? 38For whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him too will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“Once more, I found myself in a positively uncanny world in some ways, conceptually quite unlike our own, in which—contrary to certain theological and cultural developments of later centuries—the partition between the natural and the supernatural, like that between the physical and the spiritual, simply did not yet exist. It was a world in which numinous intelligences, in the form of stars, were visible to the eye in the sky at night, in which the heavens above were occupied by spiritual potentates of questionable character, in which angels ruled the nations of the earth as local gods, in which demons prowled the empty places, in which spirit and breath and wind were all one thing (at once transcendent and materially palpable), and in which the entire cosmos was for many an eternal divine order and for many others a darkened prison house soon to be destroyed and replaced by a redeemed creation. And above it all, literally seated on high in an empyrean beyond the turning heavens, was God in his true dwelling place, in light inaccessible, from whom humanity was separated by a gulf at once spatial and spiritual. In that world, the highest divine reality was always near at hand—just there, above the stars, or just there at the rapidly approaching end of days—and yet also always beyond reach. And yet, as strange as that world now seems to us, what would have seemed far stranger to the people of that time was the extraordinary claim that the God who reigned on high, over this entire order of light and darkness, with all its radiant hierarchies of spirits and powers and its abysmal mysteries of demonic malice, had appeared in the form of a slave and died as a criminal, only then to be raised up and revealed as the Lord of all things. Whether one believes it or not, the very announcement of such a conviction in that world, in that age, was as singular an anomaly within the normal course of things, and within the ordinary frame of human history and culture, as there has ever been. I doubt any of us has ever understood it nearly as well as we imagine.”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“To translate a text is to be conducted into its mysteries in a way that no mere act of reading—however conscientious or frequent—makes possible. At the very least, a translator is obliged to confront the words on the page not merely as meanings to be received, but as problems to be solved; and this demands an attentiveness to detail for which most of us never quite have the time.”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament

“Most of us would find Christians truly cast in the New Testament mold fairly obnoxious: civically reprobate, ideologically unsound, economically destructive, politically irresponsible, socially discreditable, and really just a bit indecent. Or, if not that, we would at least be bemused by the sheer, unembellished, unremitting otherworldliness of their understanding of the gospel. We are quite accustomed, after all, to thinking of Christianity as a fairly commonsensical creed as regards the practicalities of life.”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament

“The great theologian Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215 CE) may have been the first—back when the faith had just begun spreading among the more comfortably situated classes in the empire—to apply a reassuring gloss to the raw rhetoric of scripture on wealth and poverty.”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“an association of men and women guided by faith in a world-altering revelation, and hence in values almost absolutely inverse to the recognized social, political, economic, and religious truths not only of their own age, but of almost every age of human culture. The first Christians certainly bore”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“Those voices blend, or at least interweave, in a kind of wildly indiscriminate polyphony, as if an early Baroque vocal trio, an Appalachian band, a couple of Viennese tenors piping twelve-tone Lieder, and a jazz crooner or two were all singing out together; but what all have in common, and what somehow forges a genuine harmony out of all that ecstatic clamor, is the vibrant certainty that history has been invaded by God in Christ in such a way that nothing can stay as it was, and that all terms of human community and conduct have been altered at the deepest of levels.”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“Before embarking on this project, I doubt I ever truly properly appreciated precisely how urgent the various voices of the New Testament authors are, or how profound the provocations of what they were saying”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“Whereas the Jewish Bible represents the concentrated literary genius of an ancient and amazingly rich culture—mythic, epic, lyric, historical, and visionary, in texts assembled over many centuries and then judiciously synthesized, redacted, and polished”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“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.”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“Most of the authors of the New Testament did not write particularly well, even by the forgiving standards of the koinē—that is, “common”—Greek in which they worked.”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“Neither have I rendered the words “baptize” and “baptism” as “immerse” and “immersion,” as certain confessionally partisan critics believe one should, for the simple reason that there is evidence in the New Testament of the word being used for any kind of ritual washing, whether by immersion or not.”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“Thus I have not rendered Χριστός (Christos) by the Anglicized Greek word “Christ” or, for that matter, by the Anglicized Hebrew or Aramaic word “Messiah,” but by the simply literal translation “Anointed”;”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“koinē,”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“And yet, as strange as that world now seems to us, what would have seemed far stranger to the people of that time was the extraordinary claim that the God who reigned on high, over this entire order of light and darkness, with all its radiant hierarchies of spirits and powers and its abysmal mysteries of demonic malice, had appeared in the form of a slave and died as a criminal, only then to be raised up and revealed as the Lord of all things.”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“spirit and breath and wind were all one thing (at once transcendent and materially palpable), and in which the entire cosmos was for many”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“numinous”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“This is all evidence, however, of a deeper truth about these texts: They are not beguiling exercises in suasive rhetoric or feats of literary virtuosity; rather, 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 nevertheless demands to be spoken, now, here, in whatever words one can marshal. (From Hart's Introduction)”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament

“Before embarking on this project, I doubt I ever truly properly appreciated precisely how urgent the various voices of the New Testament authors are, or how profound the provocations of what they were saying were for their own age, and probably remain for every age. Those voices blend, or at least interweave, in a kind of wildly indiscriminate polyphony, as if an early Baroque vocal trio, an Appalachian band, a couple of Viennese tenors piping twelve-tone Lieder, and a jazz crooner or two were all singing out together; but what all have in common, and what somehow forges a genuine harmony out of all that ecstatic clamor, is the vibrant certainty that history has been invaded by God in Christ in such a way that nothing can stay is it was, and that all terms of human community and conduct have been altered at the deepest of levels.”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament

“How blissfulf the destitute, abjectg in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of the heavens; 4How blissful those who mourn, for they shall be aided; 5How blissful the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth; 6How blissful those who hunger and thirst for what is right, for they shall feast; 7How blissful the merciful, for they shall receive mercy; 8How blissful the pure in heart, for they shall see God; 9How blissful the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God; 10How blissful those who have been persecuted for the sake of what is right, for theirs is the Kingdom of the heavens; 11How blissful you when they reproach you, and persecute you and falsely accuse you of every evil for my sake: 12Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in the heavens is great; for thus they persecuted the prophets before you.”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“10For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what has been lost.”
― David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation

“9It was the true light, which illuminates everyone, that was coming into the cosmos. 10He was in the cosmos, and through him the cosmos came to be, and the cosmos did not recognize him. 11He came to those things that were his own, and they who were his own did not accept him. 12But as many as did accept him, to them he gave the power to become GOD’s children—to those having faith in his name, 13Those born not from blood, nor from a man’s desire, but of GOD.”
― Anonymous, The New Testament: A Translation

“8The spirit respiresh where it will, and you hear its sound but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; such is everyone born of the Spirit.”
― Anonymous, The New Testament: A Translation

“Having begun in spirit, are you being finished in flesh?”
― Anonymous, The New Testament: A Translation

“I have been crucified along with the Anointed. 20And I live no longer, but the Anointed lives within me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faithfulness that is of God’s Son, who loves me and delivered himself up on my behalf. 21I do not reject God’s grace; for if vindicationd is by Law then the Anointed died for nothing.”
― Anonymous, The New Testament: A Translation

“He is not a God of the dead, but of the living.”
― Anonymous, The New Testament: A Translation

“6And blissful is he who is not scandalized by me.”
― Anonymous, The New Testament: A Translation

“had been founded upon rock. 26And everyone who hears these sayings of”
― Anonymous, The New Testament: A Translation