Reviewed by: The New Testament: A Translation by David Bentley Hart Leslie Baynes David Bentley Hart. The New Testament: A Translation, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 616 pp. Introducing his version of the New Testament, David Bentley Hart remarks that he has often found himself retranslating scripture on the fly in the lecture hall because the translation at hand simply could not get the job done. Anyone who has taught the New Testament can empathize with his plight. Hart wants this book to fill the void, to "call attention to features of the Greek original usually invisible" in other English versions (xiv–xv), and for the most part, he succeeds. An epigraph adapted from the Oxyrhynchus fragments of the Gospel of Thomas opens the book: "The Logos says: Lift the rock, and there you will find me. Split the wood, [End Page 217] and there I am". The Logos is a recurring, if enigmatic, character in Hart's work here, and perhaps the most important embodiment of his theory and practice of translation. His version of John 1:1 is the only one I am aware of in English that maintains the Greek word, which carries along with it all of its subtle richness: "In the origin there was the Logos, and the Logos was present with GOD and the Logos was god" (Jn. 1:1). Since Hart enjoys the luxury of answering neither to a committee that might veto his choices, nor to a liturgical community that would hear rather than read the translation, and therefore would not have access to the notes that explain the intricate significations he represents through capital versus lowercase letters, he can get away with this. Certainly such verses fulfill his stated goal of making "the familiar strange" to his audience (xvii) Many readers will find some of the author's word choices a bit too strange, but in almost every instance, he makes a compelling case for his renditions either in the introductory essay, in the footnotes to the body of the New Testament, or in his "Concluding Scientific Postscript," which includes the indispensable "Irregular Glossary." A few examples of these words that pervade the book: what many other translations term "servants" are in fact clearly "slaves." Readers may be surprised to find Jesus consistently called the "Anointed" here rather than the familiar "Christ" or "messiah," but "Anointed" is unimpeachably correct. More disconcerting is Hart's adjective "blissful," which replaces the traditional "blessed," as in "How blissful are the destitute" (Luke 6:20, usually rendered "Blessed are the poor"). This reviewer agrees with Hart's self-deprecating but still "impenitent" statement that the idiosyncratic makarism is his "most insufferable decision" (567). At certain points, however, his translation isn't strange enough; it doesn't lift the rock far enough off the ground to see what lies underneath. Hart notes that for the most part "where an author has written bad Greek (such as one finds throughout the Book of Revelation), I have written bad English" (xviii). In spite of this assertion, his translation of John's apocalypse fails to be bad. It is too smooth, too polysyllabic, and always too clear. It goes wrong in the first verse. The Greek of Revelation 1:1 reads "Apocalypsis Iesou Christou," a phrase supremely easy to capture in a way that preserves its essential, and probably purposeful, ambiguity: "An apocalypse of Jesus Christ." Maintaining the ambiguity is important because the genitive "of Jesus Christ" is prognostic for the whole book, in that the entire revelation, from Alpha to Omega, is both from Jesus and about Jesus. Hart's version, "A revelation from Jesus Christ," flattens out the Greek, reducing it to one dimension. Several other word choices are also puzzling. The mystical living creatures (zōa) of chapter 4 become "animals." The arnion, or lamb, of chapter 5 is overtranslated throughout as "suckling lamb," while the biblion of the same chapter is not a scroll, as the footnote to it rightly notes, but instead, and anachronistically, a "book." Although there are many verses that would exemplify Revelation's bad Greek not becoming Hart's bad English, Rev 18:6 is illustrative. My own truly...