Fresh translations of familiar texts are useful because they make us reexamine what we thought we knew. Hart has certainly made me think more deeply about the centrality of the worlds end to the entirety of the New Testament. . . . Hart tells us that he wanted to make this book wild, repellent, just a bit indecent, and not what we expected. He succeeds.Garry Wills, New York Review of Books
The life of Jesus in the New Testament reaches us via four voices, four accounts that overlap, diverge, corroborate, and destabilize one another. . . . By putting us closer to these differences, to the distinctive sound of each voice. . . . Hart is doing something important.James Parker, Atlantic
Hart is brilliant. . . . All theologians, and anyone interested in the New Testament as at least a quasi-classical document, will be in his debt. . . . Harts translation has the great virtue of reminding us that this text is not safe: if we think it is familiar, we are in error.Victor Lee Austin, New Criterion
This translation is a remarkable feat. Anyone, however familiar with the texts, reading it straight through is bound to have gained a clean, complex and compelling impression of the springtime of the Church, and the energy, urgency and sense of wonder with which the evangelists, Paul and the author of the letter to the Hebrews wrote of the extraordinary person and events, and the meaning of both, that were their news for the world.Lucy Beckett, Times Literary Supplement
It will be a long time before I put [ Harts translation] back on my shelf. It in particular points up the many deficiencies of the NIV and the ESV.A. N. Wilson, New Statesman
The greatest achievement of Harts translation is to restore the urgency of the original. . . . Compelling, and it is beautiful.James Mumford, Standpoint
Hart sets out to unsettle, startle and disturb. In this strange, disconcerting, radical version of a strange, disconcerting manifesto of profoundly radical values, his aim is scintillatingly and sometimes unnervingly achieved.Salley Vickers, Literary Review
[ Hart] has risen to the challenge with a bold determination.Dr. John Court, Church Times
Disarmingly beautiful in its own way. . . . [ Hart] does nothing less than focus our attention on the urgency of what the Greek text is telling us, and by doing so focuses our attention onas Rowan Williams puts it on the dust-jacketwhat was and is uncomfortably new about the New Testament.Stephen Miller, Theology
Winner of the Outstanding Academic Title for 2018 award sponsored by Choice
This scrupulous, knotty, learned rendering of some of the most familiar texts of our culture makes us see with new clarity just what was and is uncomfortably new about the New Testament.Rowan Williams, theologian and poet, Cambridge
In this age of committee-generated translations of the Bible, a fresh and pointedly different translation of the New Testament by a single scholar is a remarkable achievement. Harts approach is intentionally provocative, and strong reactions are sure to follow. Let the games begin.John P. Meier, author of A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus
David Harts translation of the New Testament is a theological and ecclesial event of the first magnitude. By providing, for the first time, a literal English translation of the Greek (and demonstrating that the most literal can be the most strikingly beautiful rendering) Hart has shown, after 500 years, that the core of Reformation theology is un-Biblical and that certain currents of Latin theology are dubious or inadequate. This new version, which should become the standard one for scholarly use, also makes it clearer that, while doctrinal liberalism is wishful thinking, credal Christianity only emerged from a plausible but subtle reading of sometimes teasingly ambivalent texts. Harts brilliant postscript amounts to a call for a more genuinely Biblical orthodoxy: universalist, synergic, participatory, cosmic, gnostic (in a non-heterodox sense) and communitarian.John Milbank, University of Nottingham
In its simplicity and freshness David Harts New Testament translation will sound as strange and wondrous to twenty-first-century, English-language speakers as the Greek of the New Testament sounded to first-century speakers of Greek.Robert Louis Wilken, author of The First Thousand Years
Hart notes that the heart of this good news . . . focuses much more on the salvation of all than on the condemnation of some. . . . Nothing like reading the New Testament again, without a filter. Thank you, David Bentley Hart!Frederico Lourenēo, classicist, winner of the Pessoa Prize
