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"David Bentley Hart's mind-bending translation of the New Testament" by James Parker
RCRoy Ciampa · Jan 23, 2018, 2:53 PM · Last modified: Sep 28, 2026, 11:38 AM
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"David Bentley Hart's mind-bending translation of the New Testament" by James Parker
This review gives readers unfamiliar with David Bentley Hart a bit more information about the man and an interesting take on his translation. Here are just a few excerpts to give you an idea 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."
- "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 and – where appropriate – unsqueamishly prosaic as he can."
- ""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."
- "Oddness, in fact, might be the signature – the breakthrough, even – of Hart's 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 Testament's authors – to the neurology, as it were, of each book's style – and making his own decisions."
- ""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."
For all the examples and what they show about this translation, see the article by clicking on the link above.
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Does your description of the gospels imply there is no literary structure to them? Are they 'merely' archives? Also, Mark's Greek, even for an archive, is singular in its word usage, such as εὐθύς. If the skopos is to show odd-sounding English where the Greek is odd-sounding, then Hart may succeed. However, N.T. Wright's critique of the language Hart uses (uncommon/obsolete words), while hyperbolic, does suggest that Hart is not as low-brow in his translation as he suggests. To go back to Mark, though, are we to translate Mark as a palestinian Jew would have heard the transitional εὐθύς? or as an Alexandrian Jew or educated Roman or native Greek speaker? If the former, we might consider Aramaic/Hebrew idiom. If the latter, then 'immediately' seems the best translation, because it is practically meaningless (unless Mark is actually implying that everything happened immediately after the other).
I didn't take DBH (nor James Parker, necessarily) to be making a comment about whether or not Mark was a good Gospel writer. Even oral stories have prose and poetry, and they can use elevated or rough style. DBH says that the style is often rough but translations transform it into higher registers for reading in our Bibles. Such observations don't reflect a commitment to understanding the Gospel in terms of modern "literature." I also agree with Edward that there is a consistent enough style that the idea that he is just archiving oral stories encountered in the (presumably diverse) styles in which they were told doesn't hold up very well. But that also doesn't mean Mark is "literature" in a modern sense.