The New Testament: A Translation

David Bentley Hart's 2017 translation of the New Testament represents a significant intervention in biblical scholarship that bears directly on theological discourse about the nature and reality of God. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher, approaches the Greek text with the explicit aim of recovering what he considers the radical strangeness and urgency of the original documents, stripping away centuries of interpretive tradition that have domesticated their message.

Hart's translation methodology deliberately eschews the smoothing tendencies of committee translations and functional equivalence approaches. Instead, he opts for a rigorous literalism that preserves the grammatical peculiarities, stylistic variations, and conceptual difficulties of the Greek texts. This approach serves his broader theological agenda: to present the New Testament's vision of God as fundamentally alien to both ancient philosophy and modern sensibilities. Where traditional translations often harmonize apparent contradictions or soften harsh pronouncements, Hart maintains textual tensions that he argues are essential to understanding early Christian proclamation about God's nature and demands.

The work engages critically with what Hart perceives as the theological complacency of mainstream Christianity, particularly its accommodation to capitalist economics and nationalist politics. His rendering of passages concerning wealth and poverty proves especially provocative, translating terms typically softened in English versions with stark literalness that emphasizes the New Testament's economic radicalism. This connects directly to Hart's understanding of God as one who overturns human systems of power and value.

Hart's extensive notes function as a running theological commentary, addressing translation decisions while articulating his vision of early Christianity's metaphysical claims. He presents the New Testament God as simultaneously more transcendent and more immanent than traditional Western theology suggests, drawing on patristic sources and his expertise in ancient philosophy to illuminate concepts often obscured by conventional translation choices.

The translation's significance for the God debate lies in its insistence that authentic engagement with Christian claims about God requires confronting the original texts' destabilizing force. Hart challenges both secular dismissals of biblical faith and comfortable religious orthodoxies, arguing that the New Testament presents a vision of divine reality that remains genuinely scandalous to human reason and social order. His work thus serves not merely as a translation but as a theological argument about how the question of God should be approached through Christianity's founding texts.