MAP — Modular Aggregation of Principles for Bible Translation

It is "la moda" right now to have new translations of books or a whole section of the Bible. Here is an article about a new translation by the Orthodox Theologian David Bentley:

Extracted text from https://www.theatlantic.com:

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QUICK LINKS James Fallows Ta Nehisi Coates Manage subscription A Mind-Bending Translation of the New Testament David Bentley Harts text recaptures the awkward, multivoiced power of the original.

Jason Raish JAMES PARKER JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 ISSUE CULTURE Share Tweet
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The New Testament: A Translation By David Bentley Hart Yale University Press In the beginning was well, what? A clap of the divine hands and a poetic shock wave? Or an itchy node of nothingness inconceivably scratching itself into somethingness? In the beginning was the Word, says the Gospel according to Johna lovely statement of the case, as its always seemed to me. A pre-temporal syllable swelling to utterance in the mouth of the universe, spoken once and heard forever: Gods power chord, if you like. For David Bentley Hart, however, whose mind-bending translation of the New Testament was published in October, the Wordas a worddoes not suffice: He finds it to be a curiously bland and impenetrable designation for the heady concept expressed in the original Greek of the Gospels as Logos. The Chinese word Tao might get at it, Hart tells us, but English has nothing with quite the metaphysical flavor of Logos, the particular sense of a formative moral energy diffusing itself, without diminution, through space and time. So he throws up his hands and leaves it where it is: In the origin there was the Logos

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SUBSCRIBE Its significant, this act of lexical surrender, because if youd bet on anyone to come up with a fancy English word for Logos, itd be David Bentley Hart. Vocabulary is not his problem, unless you think he has too much of it. A scholar, theologian, and cultural commentator, Hart is also a stylist; or rather, the prickly and slightly preening polemical exhibition that is his style is indivisible from his role as a scholarly and theologically oriented cultural commentator. Like G. K. Chesterton, he has one essential argument: that God is the foundation of our being and that every human life therefore has its beginning and its end in eternity. He rehearses this argument in numberless witty variations against whichever non-God ideology happens to slouch beneath his pen: materialism, scientism, consumerism, pornographism And he can sound a Chestertonian note. My chief purpose, he wrote in 2013s The Experience of God, is not to advise atheists on what I think they should believe; I want merely to make sure that they have a clear concept of what it is they claim not to believe.

Where an author has written bad Greek ... I have written bad English. Unlike Chestertonand this is how you know hes an early-21st-century guy, someone with Wi-FiHart is extremely rude. Richard Dawkins, zoologist and tireless tractarian, has an embarrassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning; Sam Harriss The End of Faith is extravagantly callow; and Dan Browns heretical The Da Vinci Code is surely the most lucrative novel ever written by a borderline illiterate. (All this from the first one and a half pages of 2009s Atheist Delusions.) He once proposed, as a thought experiment, that bioethicists such as the late Joseph Fletcher (almost comically vile) be purged from the gene pool: Academic ethicists constitute perhaps the single most useless element in society. If reproduction is not a right but a social function, should any woman be allowed to bring such men into the world?

Yale University Press So what has he done to the New Testament, this bristling one-man band of a Christian literatus? The surprising aim, Hart tells us in his introduction, was to be as bare-bones andwhere appropriateunsqueamishly prosaic as he can. The New Testament, after all, is not a store of ancient wonders like the Hebrew Bible. Its a grab bag of reportage, rumor, folk memory, and on-the-hoof mysticism produced by regular people, everyday babblers and clunkers, under the pressure of a supremely irregular eventnamely, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So that, says Hart, is what it should sound like. Again and again, he insists, I have elected to produce an almost pitilessly literal translation; many of my departures from received practices are simply my efforts to make the original text as visible as possible through the palimpsest of its translation Where an author has written bad Greek I have written bad English. Herein lies the fascination of this thing: its deliberate, one might say defiant, rawness and lowbrow-ness, as produced by a decidedly overcooked highbrow.

Lets zoom in on Mark, the roughest and tersest of the Gospels. (Hippolytus of Rome, in the third century, called Mark stump fingeredpossibly a physical descriptor but more likely, I think, a comment on his prose.) Heres how Monsignor Ronald Knox handled Mark 1:4041 in his 1945 translation: Then a leper came up to him, asking for his aid; he knelt at his feet and said, If it be thy will, thou hast power to make me clean. Jesus was moved with pity; he held out his hand and touched him, and said, It is my will; be thou made clean. Harts version: And a leper comes to him, imploring him and falling to his knees, saying to him, If you wish it, you are able to cleanse me. And, moved inwardly with compassion, he stretched out his hand and touched him, and says to him, I wish it, be clean. Theres a stumbling, almost rustically blundering urgency to this, the verb tenses tripping over one another; beside it the Knox translation feels smoothed out, falsely archaized, too rhetorical. In Hart we can hear more clearly both the lepers challengeheal me!and the quickness and intimacy of Jesuss response.

A more rugged Mark, then, but not exactly bad English. For that, we must go to Harts version of Revelation, a book that is, he opines, if judged purely by the normal standards of literary style and good taste, almost unremittingly atrocious. Indeed his rendering of the first lineA revelation from Jesus the Anointed, which God gave him, to show his slaves what things must occur extremely soonis quite aggressively maladroit. What things must occur extremely soon. The book as a whole, freshly ranty and ungrammatical, seems more of a schizoid pileup than ever. But even amid Revelations welter of imagery, Hart maintains his artistic intent, or at least a radically inspired pedantry. Look what he does with the metallic locusts of Revelation 9, the ones with long, womanly hair and wings that buzz and clatter like a charging army. They had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron, says the King James Version. Hart, fantastically, instead gives them thoraxes like cuirasses of iron. Far more monstrous, far more strange. Its the slurred half-rhyme of thoraxes and cuirasses; its the crunch of the ancient Greek against the prissy medieval French; its the sheer freaking oddness.

Oddness, in fact, might be the signaturethe breakthrough, evenof Harts translation. No committee prose here, no compromises or waterings-down: This is one man in grim submission to the kinks and quirks of the New Testaments authorsto the neurology, as it were, of each books styleand making his own decisions. At the wedding feast at Cana, Harts Jesus addresses Mary, his mother, as madam, for perhaps the first time ever. Dearly beloved, runs the King James Version of 1 Peter 2:11, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims Hart is more immigration-conscious: Beloved ones, I exhort you as sojourners and resident aliens

The sole literary claim I make for my version, writes Hart, is that my mulish stubbornness regarding the idiosyncrasies of the text allowed me to do the police in different voices, so to speak. Thats no small claim, actually, and it takes a little unpacking. The idea of doing the police in different voices is one of the genetic strands of early modernism: You mightnt think it, says the virtuous Betty Higden of her foster son Sloppy in Dickenss Our Mutual Friend, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices. T. S. Eliot took this last linewith its undertone of channelings and polyphonic possessionsas the working title for an early draft of The Waste Land. The life of Jesus in the New Testament reaches us via four voices, four accounts that overlap, diverge, corroborate, and destabilize one another. Its all very contingent and fractured, all very partial and mortal, all rather amazingly modern in technique. By putting us closer to these differences, to the distinctive sound of each voicethe heavy-breathing rush of Mark, or the bureaucratic polish of LukeHart is doing something important.

David Bentley's translation of the New Testament

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